FOUR years ago this month, British teen backpacker Jamie Neale was given up for dead in the Blue Mountains. Missing for 12 days, and with limited supplies, he was last seen near Ruined Castle south of Katoomba.
His dad, Richard Cass, who had flown over to help with the rescue effort, had said his goodbyes and was at Sydney Airport when he received the message from police to say his son had been found by bushwalkers, weak but alive.
What happened over the following few weeks was an extraordinarily sad tale. It made headlines all around the world as media outlets fought to tell Jamie Neale’s survival story and as the tone turned nasty over Jamie’s monetary windfall after an interview on TV’s 60 Minutes.
For many Richard “backpacker dad” Cass was seen by the Australian public as a greedy, exploitative and ungrateful father cashing in on his son’s new-found fame. He went from being touted by The Guardian as the “world’s coolest dad” for berating his son for his bush wandering — “the only teenager in the world who goes out on a 10-mile hike and leaves his mobile phone behind” — to soon after being portrayed as the world’s worst.
So what does one do when, at the mercy of Google, you are branded forever in hyper negative terms? Self-publish.
During various email exchanges with Blue Mountains Gazette Review while in the process of reading the book for review, Richard Cass said the estrangement from his children was “the most painful consequence of the dispute that followed from Jamie’s misadventure”.
He went on to say: “I am, of course, very grateful that he came through alive and regret enormously that we could not find a way to resolve the problems that arose at a time when we should both have been turning cartwheels. Bizarrely enough, I was diagnosed with ‘anniversary grief’ in July 2010 and offered counselling. It was the therapist’s first experience of a patient whose loved one had, so to speak, risen from the grave!”
Cass’s book, Ruined Castle The Search for Jamie Neale and its Aftermath, will appeal to those who knew about the incident and want to take a closer look at the thought processes from the backpacker dad whose life, and whose son’s life, changed forever because of the experience.
In literary terms the book does labour the point and could have done with a professional sub-editor. A spell check on suburbs like Parramatta and Sydney and the name of backpacker killer Ivan Milat for starters. But it reads as an honest, searing account. You are with the author and are hoping for a resolution somewhere along the line, even when the money aspects are brought up, an event that Cass himself admits he might have handled differently had he not been so emotionally spent.
At times it’s also incredibly funny including when, for example, Cass describes his son’s lack of orienteering skills — “that boy could get lost on a croquet lawn”.
It’s clear the Cass family are still dealing with the wash-up from the event four years on. Cass admits he has not spoken to his boy in four years. Like most caught up in the media headlights they never expected the force of the whirlwind.
As Cass writes in the book “I recognise that I did things [that] July that, in the calm of this beautiful autumnal October afternoon, I now recognise as crazy. Teenagers go missing every day. Some turn up —dead or alive. Some don’t. Most don’t even make their local paper. I am still not sure what it was that turned this particular disappearance into worldwide news.”
Cass tells the Review he hopes to return to the Blue Mountains one day, “without having to offer long explanations of what really went wrong to anyone who, if they remember me at all, remembers the ‘Cass wants half the cash’ nonsense. I hope this book can promote the rehabilitation of my reputation.”
He said the book was an “attempt to explore the strivings of two well-meaning, well-educated but somewhat unworldly people to do the right thing under the glare of a media firestorm”.
“We screwed up and ended up portrayed as money-grubbing pommy scoundrels. Our bungling media-agent stayed in the shadows. In my view, our poor choice of agent was the reason why this warm-hearted story of grit and redemption turned into such a PR disaster.”
The Australian media gets a good serve in the book as does that agent who brokered the famous deal locking Dad Cass out of the money for his son’s survival story, money which he wanted to give to rescue volunteers.
Cass tells the Gazette it's a media that still needs to take a good hard look at itself, bringing up the recent case where Australian radio journalists played an ill-fated prank on a British nurse who let through their call to a certain Royal hospital.
“The genuine tragedy of that nurse who took her life following an Aussie radio prank shows that things can go very wrong when journos play around with little people's lives in this way."
Cass also hopes the book will restore something of the love he lost from his son after the incident and still dreams of a happy, “Scooby Doo” cartoon-style ending with him, his son and brother (who lives in Australia and was part of the search) sharing a drink at the Gearins in Katoomba while Skippy passes by.
Judging by comments from his son to the Gazette when approached about this matter, comments we have been asked not to print, that seems unlikely.
Ruined Castle: The Search for Jamie Neale and its Aftermath is available on Amazon and at http://ruinedcastle.com/
