Editorial: Mateship conquers the tomb

Miners are a breed apart. Their working life is spent in severely constrained and inhospitable circumstances. Ever present is the realisation that if something goes wrong, there is the prospect of being buried alive or dying slowly from asphyxiation, starvation or dehydration. The general public, particularly those well removed from isolated mining communities, has only a vague notion of the miners' lot. But it knows, even if fleetingly, the fear associated with confinement and entrapment. How else to explain the rush to leave an airliner once it has touched the safety of the tarmac?

All of which helps to explain the huge interest in the fate of Tasmanian goldminers Brant Webb and Todd Russell, and the extreme elation when they were finally rescued early yesterday morning after 14 days trapped underground. Their survival bore testimony to their own bravery and ongoing optimism, and to the determination of the tiny mining community of Beaconsfield. It also said much about the resilience of the human spirit. It shone at its very brightest as two men, reportedly of vastly different personality, endured a fortnight trapped nearly a kilometre underground in a wire cage about the size of a double bed.

Quite appropriately, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, has praised the rescue as a "wonderful demonstration of Australian mateship". He celebrated not only the camaraderie of the two miners but the dedicated way in which their work colleagues from Beaconsfield and mine rescue experts from around the country worked against the odds to save them. Detecting the pair with thermal heat sensors after they had been trapped for five days, surviving on a cereal bar and water licked from rocks, was merely the prelude to the painstakingly slow rescue operation.

Again, people in metropolitan areas can have only a slight acquaintance with the bonds at work in a place like Beaconsfield. But they sense such settlements possess a special sense of community, partly because of the danger facing their men. And they perceive an embrace of uncomplicated values, another feature too often lacking in modern urban living. Such communities are to those desk-bound Sydneysiders and Melburnians who yearn for a less complex past what the West Coast is to similar-minded Aucklanders and Wellingtonians. The sturdy, independent and blunt men and women of these tiny settlements are what many city slickers imagine, or would like, themselves still to be. They embody the ongoing spirit of mateship.

The two miners lived right up to that image when they emerged from their terrifying ordeal. They were fit and confident, and appeared in no need of the psychological counselling and other trappings that a more sophisticated society would seek to throw at them. There could have been nothing more fitting than the miners' first act of removing their identity tags from the clocking-in board, thereby declaring they had finished their shift. And there could be no clearer expression of mateship than their determination to attend the funeral of Larry Knight, the miner killed in the earthquake-induced rock fall on April 25.

Every year, 10,000 miners die. Brant Webb and Todd Russell cheated death in the most extraordinary manner. Their endurance, and the resolve of their community, reminds us, once again, of the power of the human spirit. If we sometimes lose sight of that in an increasingly complex world, the rejoicing at the rescue confirms we never lose our appreciation of it.