Shipwreck off Australia: Dragged Towards the Rocks

Real Survival Stories

NOISER

History, Society & Culture, Wilderness, Sports, Documentary

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A merchant vessel departs Tasmania. The scheduled journey time is two days. But 18-year-old Mick Doleman and his crewmates will end up at sea for far longer than that. When their ship goes under, the seamen will find themselves stranded in a vulnerable life raft. The hellish experience will involve near starvation, brutal weather, physical turmoil and tragedy, as it becomes apparent that survival won’t be possible for everyone on board… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Lewis Georgeson | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Jacob Booth, Matt Peaty | Assembly edit by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Ralph Tittley. For more on this story, read Back From the Dead by Piia Wirsu with Mick Doleman. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at support@noiser.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Julie Andrews, and it is my great pleasure to bring you Jane Austen Stories,
0:06.4	the new show from the Noiser Podcast Network.
0:10.2	I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice.
0:13.6	We'll walk grand estates and take tea with well-dressed gentlewomen,
0:18.9	but in this tranquil corner of England, not everything is quite as it appears.
0:25.7	Listen to Jane Austen's stories wherever you get your podcasts.
0:33.0	It's October the 19th, 1973. The Dead of Night.
0:39.3	In the Southern Ocean, several kilometers off the south coast of Tasmania,
0:43.3	a circular shape rises and falls atop the churning waves.
0:49.3	The small, undulating object offers a solitary splash of color
0:53.3	in an otherwise pitch black
0:55.5	tableau of freezing cold water.
1:00.0	It's a bright orange life raft, being lifted and lowered, tossed and turned, tested by
1:05.8	the ferocious winds that whip up around this southerly belt of the earth.
1:16.6	Inside the luminous inflatable is 18-year-old Mick Dolman. Bruised, starving, cold.
1:20.6	Mick leans out of the life raft, frantically paddling against the wind and the waves.
1:25.6	He is using what little strength he has left, because after
1:29.5	more than a week at sea, he has finally seen something that offers hope. Land. An enormous, jagged, barren
1:39.6	cliff face looms ahead. Squinting through the darkness, mixed spirits rise.
1:46.0	We've seen or we thought we've seen a road along the side of the cliff that we're heading towards.
1:53.0	So the collective wisdom was, well, let's get over and have a look and then we can determine what our next action is.
1:59.0	Behind him, eight other men in various states of exhaustion take cover under the inflatable's battered canopy.
	...

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