by Leigh Sales
The water kept rising until it was lapping at the bottom of Stuart’s chin. He was pressed into a tiny air pocket near the collapsed roof. Just as he thought he was about to drown, the water began to recede. During the many hours until his rescue, the same thing kept happening: water would fill the cavity until Stuart thought it would engulf him, then at the last moment it would flow away. At times he was suicidal and contemplated letting go, sliding into the water and ending his physical and emotional pain.
Outside, a massive recovery effort involving more than a thousand people was under way, but the focus was on body retrieval, not rescue. Nobody expected to find any survivors. Stuart could hear the noise of workers above ground but they couldn’t hear him. A little after 5.30 am on 2 August, two and a half days into his ordeal, rescue specialists with monitoring equipment detected movement under a concrete slab.
‘Rescue team working overhead, can anyone hear me?’ one of the men yelled.
‘I can hear you!’ Stuart called out.
The rescue expert asked if Stuart had any injuries and he shouted back, ‘No, but my feet are bloody cold!’
It was another eleven hours before Stuart was carried out of the debris. A close-up image of his dazed face, eyes adjusting to the light, hair caked with plaster dust, is one of the most famous news photographs in Australian history.
The rescue of Stuart Diver is imprinted on the national consciousness in almost the same way as Australia winning the America’s Cup in 1983 or Cathy Freeman winning a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. It was as if the whole nation was collectively holding its breath and then exhaled as one when he was pulled out. An exhilarating moment of human triumph against impossible odds, and millions of Australians shared it through their television sets. Children sent their teddy bears to Stuart in hospital, grandmothers knitted socks for his cold feet, and the letters he received numbered in the thousands. He couldn’t go anywhere without somebody slapping him on the back to say, ‘Good on you.’
‘Everyone who’s ever come up to me has always had great, positive things to say,’ Stuart tells me. ‘But that also makes it harder to deal with the pain and the anguish and grieving.’
‘To lose not only my wife, but the sixteen other people I knew, it was a massive tragedy. That was a lot of grieving to do. In everything I did after, I had this feeling that anything I did was going to affect not just my family but their families as well – if I was on TV and bringing up the memories, all that stuff. So that’s a huge amount of pressure for a 27-year-old.’
The media interest was biblical in its intensity. Like James Scott, Stuart Diver was one person at the centre of a gigantic story. Everybody clamoured for the first interview, and as did the Scott family, the Divers hired celebrity agent Harry M. Miller to take charge. Unlike James, though, Stuart was pleased with how it worked out.
‘Harry treated me like a son. He was the most ruthless negotiator in the history of the world but he protected us from absolutely everything. He just wanted to maintain the integrity of the “Stuart Diver brand”. If you look at me now, twenty years on, unless I haven’t read it, there’s not been a negative article written about me. I’ve put all that down to having Harry. I have recommended a professional media manager to people going through tragedy on multiple occasions. It’s the only way to go.’
But even with a skilled agent, a friendly media and a supportive public, Stuart was still damaged by the process.
‘The attention of the media was very much in that positive vein but then I also made a conscious choice to go overtly over the top and make it even more positive, because I wanted to portray that image that you can get through anything; the community of Thredbo will survive, I’ll go on, it’ll all be good. I didn’t want to be the 60 Minutes clown, sitting there bawling my eyes out on TV. I cried before the interviews or after. I wanted to portray this confident, positive “you can get through anything in your life” idea. But that was hugely detrimental to me in the long-term.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Firstly, some people looked at me and thought, Wow, he’s cold and callous and hard. But two, it also made it harder to deal with the pain and the grief. I think it took me a long time to really, truly grieve Sally’s death, because of that.’
I can’t fathom the way Stuart lost Sally. It feels like the kind of fever nightmare from which you wake sweaty with terror; the type that makes you turn on the light and climb out of bed, get a glass of water and reassure yourself that it didn’t actually happen. It’s hard to think that an equivalent horror really did happen to the person sitting opposite me.
When I ask Stuart how he came to terms with losing his wife in that way, he says, ‘You have to look at it and say, I’ve only got two choices. One is to sit there and to be miserable, which you’re allowed to do. I’m allowed to feel sorry for myself, some shit things have happened. I do that. But I’m not allowed to do that all the time. Then you’ll just go insane. If you look at Sally dying in that landslide, at the end of the day, there’s nothing I could have done to save her. And you look at that circumstance and think, What did I do right in those seconds when the building was coming down? I tried to get out myself, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Then I tried to do what I could to save her life. In the most stressful situation of my life, I tried to look after myself – human instinct – and then I tried to stop her from drowning. If you look at that, it’s pretty tragic. But it’s also not, because one of my fundamental beliefs is that you care for your fellow human beings. It’s looking after each other. So in the most stressful part of my life, I did that.’
Stuart has had years of extensive professional counselling to retrain his brain so that he can replace the thought of how helpless he was when Sally died with the truth that he tried everything he could to save her, showing how much he cared. He has learned to substitute memories of Sally’s last moments with thoughts of wonderful times from their lives together – a great trip, a fun birthday, some other special occasion. In the corner of his living room is a bicycle that he rides every night, and he likens keeping his mental health on track to keeping physically fit. It’s hard. It requires practice and it takes discipline.
Stuart calls the replacement of sad and negative thoughts with positive ones ‘locking away memories’. Having that tool meant that when his second wife was diagnosed with cancer and they knew she was going to die, he already had some ideas about how to ready himself. He hadn’t had the chance to prepare for losing Sally, but he drew on the recovery work he did after her death to help him brace for life without Rosanna. He and Rosanna knew that she was terminally ill for a long time, and they worked together to start the grieving process, including locking away memories.
‘There’s millions of ways of doing it,’ he says of this process, ‘but the best photographs are a great way. There are little things, like if you go out and have a great dinner one night, you keep the cork. So you have a bottle of Grange, you keep the cork. You leave the cork sitting on the mantelpiece. Then every time you look at that cork, rather than thinking how the person’s not here, how devastating it is that the person died, it instantly brings out what an unbelievable dinner that was or what an amazing time we had.
‘You’re doing all the stuff,’ he goes on, ‘so that the moment she actually dies, you’ve pretty well grieved, it’s done. People are going to say that’s hardcore, like that sounds very cut and dried and clinical. But for me, it was unbelievable. We did the same with Alessia. Alessia was only four, but the whole time leading into when Rosanna died was all about this locking away of these memories, talking about love, talking about families always looking after each other, talking about how everyone always lives in your heart.’
Stuart points to a huge chest in the centre of the living room. ‘This whole chest here, it’s full of clothes and presents. Rosanna wrote birthday cards for Alessia until she’s eighteen. She put together a whole recipe book of her favourite recipes. It was the hardest thing I e
ver did, hard for Rosanna too. It’s amazing – as humans, even when we’ve got the opportunity to prepare for someone’s death, 95 per cent of people won’t do it because it’s too hard. Then the person dies and they freak out and it goes bananas. “I wish I’d discussed that with them, I wish I’d done that.” It’s because it’s such a hard thing to do.’
‘You can only do that if you let go of all the language around cancer, like “You have to keep fighting,” ’ I suggest.
‘That’s right.’
‘You have to stop having any level of denial about it.’
‘Absolutely. You know, when it ends, when the person in front of you stops breathing and they’re dead – I thought I’d prepared a huge amount, but nothing prepares you for that. You look at them and you think it’s going to fuck up your brain for a long time. But with Rosanna, it didn’t. Even walking out of that hospital room an hour later, I felt this amazing sense of calmness, purely because she was no longer in pain. She was no longer suffering. I had Alessia with me and I had this feeling that everything was going to be okay. You know,’ he says, ‘I can compare because I’ve lost two wives in very different circumstances. One I could prepare for and one I was totally unprepared for. There’s only one way to do it, if you can, and that’s the way I did it with Rosanna.’
‘If I had said to you when you were twenty-five, “Here’s what’s going to happen to you over the next twenty years,” would you have thought you’d have the resilience?’ I ask.
‘Not at all, I would have had a heart attack. I would have gone, There’s absolutely no way, and I definitely wouldn’t have thought I’d come out of it at the end like I am, happy, enjoying life,’ Stuart says. ‘I’ve always said it’s much easier to be me than to be someone observing me, wondering how I got through stuff. I just did. It just happened.’
When I first contemplated approaching Stuart for this book, I was reluctant because I knew he had endured twenty years of unsought fame and that he had recently lost Rosanna. I made contact through a mutual friend and left it to Stuart to email me if he was interested. When he got in touch and we talked, he reassured me that there was nothing I could ask him that would cause him any further grief, that he had done a huge amount of work to come to terms with what had happened to him.
Sitting across from Stuart in person, I can see that this is true. I might almost think that he is too together, except that some of his answers reveal real vulnerability, like his fear that nobody will be able to handle being the third Mrs Diver. He comes back to that a few times, so it clearly weighs on him. I’m surprised at how unguarded he is, because people who’ve dealt with a lifetime of journalists are often cagey. I’m also struck by his very methodical and practical way of thinking. I can only assume that he must have always been resilient and emotionally resourceful and that the tragedies have amplified those qualities rather than instilled them. Stuart himself insists that at his core, he is the same person he was before both events.
Even with his reassurance that I should ask whatever I want, there’s one question I’m nervous to put. It’s about his daughter.
‘You know more than anyone that life can deliver horrible blindsides,’ I start with trepidation. ‘Do you worry, What if something bad happens to Alessia?’
Stuart doesn’t seem at all offended or rattled by the question. In hindsight, I guess it’s obvious that when a person has faced as much tragedy as he has, he would of course have already contemplated the very worst thing that could ever happen to him.
‘I prepare myself for that too. It sounds a bit macabre, but I prepare in my mind for if, say, Alessia drowned in a swimming pool. It would just be devastatingly terrible. But then I do that thing where I look at the six years of her life. I mean, the first four of them she spent every day with Rosanna. That for her was an unbelievable upbringing. She’s had three amazing overseas trips. She’s been surrounded by love, everyone in Thredbo just loves her. She’s had the most amazing life ever. So if it had to happen, I’ve already set up in my mind, “What an incredible life.” We just had the best five weeks ever together in the US. It was amazing. We skied every single day together for five hours. We had our routine of five runs and a hot chocolate. We went to a whole lot of different places. So no matter how tragic it would be for me afterwards, that’s what I’ve locked away.’
‘Most people live their lives not really thinking about stuff like this,’ I say. ‘Most people don’t walk down the street every day thinking, I’m vulnerable. We have this sense of invincibility. Do you think your experiences have caused you to reassess your values in life?’
‘I never had to look at my values or my belief system before the landslide. When I saw my psychologist we worked out, I think, I had something like thirteen or sixteen fundamental beliefs. Like one of them is care for people. You can ask my family and good friends who knew me before: I’m the same person. I think that really came from having a great upbringing from my mum and dad, just a good moral compass.’
‘You’ve had two very big whacks in your life and I’m sure plenty of small ones too. Do you think resilience is a finite pool?’
‘No, I think you bounce back,’ Stuart says. ‘I feel more resilient than I ever have.’
And then, just as I’m starting to wonder again if I’m getting anywhere near the real Stuart Diver – because how can anyone be this together after what he’s been through – his vulnerability surfaces once more and he says, ‘The bit that worries me emotionally, if you look at my life, is how much more love do I have to give? Is that a finite resource?’ Stuart sounds so weary when he says this that I’m in fear of choking up. I see that not even somebody as resilient as he is immune from fear and doubt.
‘Sally was different,’ he continues, ‘but with Rosanna, looking after her, caring for her, that outpouring of emotion every single day of your life, it’s so traumatic and big. I did think maybe I wouldn’t have another relationship because maybe I’m done. But in the last eighteen months, I’ve more been thinking maybe I’ve got that back to front. There are rewards you get from that emotional involvement with someone going through that. And also from my emotional involvement now with Alessia, the love we have for each other. So I actually think the pool, the reserves are endless.’
As if on cue, I hear the front door open and the most adorable six-year-old girl with wavy brown hair comes bounding in with her cousin. It’s Alessia, back to hang out with her dad. I’ve brought her a couple of colourful hair clips and when I hand them over she slides them into her fringe and dashes off for a look in the mirror. She must be pleased because, without a word, she comes back and throws her arms around my waist in a tight hug and then skips off again. Stuart has had to face a lot of death in his years but Alessia is such a powerful life force that I can see how much she must help him keep putting one foot in front of the other. Besides his daughter, Stuart has a lot of reasons to enjoy life in fact: his friends, his job as Resort Operations Manager at Thredbo, his love of skiing and the outdoors. Life has delivered some gigantic blows but it has also delivered some beautiful gifts.
Stuart is acutely aware of this, and just before I close my notebook he displays some of the glass-half-full, resilient thinking that has kept him going. ‘My whole life has been unbelievable experiences, whether they’ve resulted in something fantastic or something tragic. I’ve led the most amazing life ever.’
I have a three-hour drive ahead of me after I leave Stuart and Alessia, through scrubby bush and rolling farmland, back to Canberra and my flight home. I turn the radio off and drive in silence, thinking about Stuart. What an incredible person he is, to go through those devastating events and not become bitter or fearful or crazy. I marvel at the strength and discipline it must have taken to adapt to what life has handed him. Imagine the day he learned he was going to be widowed a second time and would have to raise his little girl alone. And look, I’m not going to lie, my thoughts aren’t all deep and worthy – I also start mentally running through a list o
f my single girlfriends, wondering which of them I could set up with Stuart. I’m pretty sure that contrary to his fear that nobody could handle being the third Mrs Diver, I could hustle together a quality shortlist.
Having covered many tragedies as a journalist, I know that not everybody manages like Stuart Diver. There’s such wide variation in the way people take life’s left hooks. Some find sustenance deep in reserves they never knew they had. Others turn their pain outwards and use it to campaign for change, so that nobody else has to endure the same thing. I think of Rosie Batty, whose son Luke was murdered by his father, and her extraordinary single-mindedness in forcing Australians to confront domestic violence.
But not all of us can be a hero or an inspiration, and nor should that be the expectation. You’d entirely understand if Walter or Rosie or Stuart were never able to leave the house again. Could you or I carry on if we were in their place? I’ve covered stories where people have been so confounded by what’s happened to them that they’ve become stuck. The traumatised brain revs like a car in neutral, expending its energy by frantically spinning its engine higher and higher while it goes nowhere.
Of all the tragedies I’ve covered, one that has stayed with me for many years is the story of Judy Kovco. Her son, Private Jake Kovco, was killed in the Iraq War in 2006, the first Australian casualty. Many Australians would remember his name because of an appalling mix-up with his body after his death. The military accidentally left Kovco’s casket behind in a chaotic Kuwaiti morgue, instead flying home the casket of a Bosnian military contractor, draped with an Australian flag. Somehow, the mistake was realised en route. The Australian Minister for Defence at the time, Brendan Nelson, informed the Kovco family as they waited at the airport for the plane to arrive. It was an unforgivable error, one that caused a suffering family immense further pain.