by Leigh Sales
The famous chocolate in his backpack was plain Cadbury Dairy Milk, not a Mars Bar. He ate it early in his ordeal and it had no bearing on his survival. In his book about his misadventure, Lost in the Himalayas, James writes in great detail of his suffering, recalling that he would occasionally tear at his hair or pinch his skin to remind himself that the pain he felt could be worse. The first night was such misery, it is hard to conceive that he endured weeks afterwards: ‘My hands were blue and my teeth chattered incessantly and this would be the first of many nights that I would feel the cold more than I could ever have imagined. It was not the superficial cold that most people can relate to, but a deep chilling cold that feels as if it’s killing the very life within. The cold was like pain. Just as it seemed as bad as it could possibly get, it got worse and the suffering increased. I was sure it would be impossible to be as cold as I was and still survive the night.’
James was furious at himself and also devastated by the anguish he knew his disappearance would be causing at home. He feared his body would never be found, exacerbating his family’s grief.
The amount of time James survived on the mountain was undoubtedly miraculous, but there are explanations for some aspects of it. His medical studies furnished him with vital knowledge – for example, he didn’t eat snow without first melting it and he paced his intake so as to not reduce his core body temperature. He knew he would lose most of his body heat through his head so he wrapped it in towels and clothes. He was helped too by his personal qualities, especially his physical fitness but also his mental resilience. He occupied himself in ways that kept his hope of rescue alive. James had close relationships with his family, friends and fiancée, and until his pen ran out of ink he wrote to tell them how much he loved them. He replayed in his mind happy experiences from his life in as much detail as he could. He sniffed a stick of Old Spice deodorant when his spirits were low as it reminded him of home. As a Christian, he prayed for hours. And he credits in particular the discipline of karate (in which he had a black belt) with helping save his life. James spent hours mentally performing kata, sequences of techniques that flow one into the other. These are detailed and intricate and James could calmly occupy himself for long stretches of time, meticulously recreating them in his mind.
Yet even with that formidable arsenal of coping tools, by his final days on the mountain, James was suicidal and weighing up various options. Ultimately, as for Walter Mikac, it was thoughts of his family that stopped him.
On 2 February 1992, the Scott family paid for one final rescue helicopter to do a sweep across the mountains. So much time had elapsed that almost everybody thought it was futile, or that at best the mission would recover a body. Incredibly, the helicopter spotted the emaciated James. But instead of being the end of his ordeal, it marked the beginning of a different one.
By the day of the rescue, the media had long moved on to more fruitful stories, giving up James Scott for dead. When he was found alive, it prompted one of the most intense media frenzies of my years in journalism. A live broadcast of the cricket was interrupted with the news that the young student had been found alive. The race to land the first interview with James began, and that was when media from all over the world dubbed him ‘The Ice Man’. Reporters besieged his family. James was being treated at the Patan Hospital in Lalitpur, the city next to Kathmandu, and it was very quickly overrun. A Third World facility, it struggled to function at the best of times and now it crawled with journalists and photographers. Attempts were made to steal James’s medical records and photographers tried to climb through a window into his room. One reporter pretended to be from a travel insurance company to talk his way inside, unsuccessfully.
This chaos unfolded as James lay close to death. His temperature was so low that it didn’t even register on a thermometer, and severe malnutrition had taken him close to organ failure and also damaged his vision, causing scenes in front of his eyes to shake violently and making it hard for him to recognise faces. He was highly unstable emotionally, vacillating from euphoria at being alive to weeping in despair and begging to be put back under the rock on the mountain.
James’s sister Joanne went to Nepal to be with him and she tried to shield him as much as possible. It was only when he was medically transferred from Nepal to the Royal Brisbane Hospital that he realised something strange was happening.
‘When we flew into Singapore, I remember there was a lot of banging on the ambulance, and photographs. Then we came to Brisbane; there it was again. I had a very good friend come to visit and I said, “What’s news?” and he said, “You are,” ’ James recalls.
‘Was the level of interest problematic for you in terms of your recovery?’ I ask.
‘I think enormously. When any of us get hurt or traumatised, all you want is to be with people you can trust. And the media and the whole general, public interest meant I had to be talking to a whole lot of people I didn’t know. It was kind of not what was best for me at the time.’
‘Did you or anyone in your family know anyone in the media, or did you have any experience with journalists?’
When James shakes his head I ask, ‘So how did you figure out what to do?’
‘The family was just getting bombarded with phone calls. They tried to address it but the more interviews they did, the more requests they got. Dad then went and appealed to the media and said, “Can you back off a bit?” He got broadly criticised – “How dare you tell us to try and do that.” My father was with the University of Queensland at the time, so he went to the media relations people and said, “Can you please help us?” I think at this stage, offers were flying in: if I did this interview or that one, I’d get X amount of dollars.’
Money was definitely an issue for James. His family had spent tens of thousands of dollars on the rescue effort in Nepal. James was also extremely anxious about whether he would be able to return to medical school, or indeed make any sort of living in the future, given that his vision was now so compromised. He had no idea how his health would pan out in the long term.
Desperate for help, and on the recommendation of his university colleagues, James’s father rang an agent named Harry M. Miller. Miller was then the biggest name in celebrity management in Australia. He also handled people who had become accidentally famous and landed in the centre of gigantic media bidding wars, such as Lindy Chamberlain. Once Miller stepped in, the relief for the Scott family was immediate. The media harassment stopped overnight because now everything went through Miller’s office. Very quickly, the agent tied up a deal with the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes for an exclusive, paid interview with James.
The Scott family’s relief quickly turned to alarm and concern as they watched what happened next. In the media, James’s story started to morph into something they didn’t recognise, shifting away from his miraculous survival to a more sceptical bent: how could such a fantastic story be true? Did The Ice Man fake his ordeal? Was he a charlatan looking for a way to make a buck?
Three factors arguably drove this new angle. First, the public was still obsessed by the story but there was an information vacuum, because James was not yet well enough to talk. Journalists were therefore desperately casting around for ways to keep the story going. Second, Channel Nine’s competitors were annoyed that it had stitched up an exclusive and so they started looking for ways to lessen the appeal of the ‘product’ Nine had bought – that is to say, James Scott. In the business, this is known as a ‘spoiler’. (Frontline, the brilliant satire of TV current affairs shows, parodied the Scott story not long after the real-life events: when the team misses out on an interview with a woman dubbed ‘The Desert Angel’, who survived weeks lost in the desert, they promote a spoiler with the tagline, ‘Desert Angel – or Desert Devil?’) The third factor was a major hoax that had occurred just weeks before James’s rescue, when a Gold Coast woman named Fairlie Arrow staged her own abduction. This had been a huge story in Australia, and it meant that the possibility of a scam was buzzin
g loudly in the hive mind.
In the midst of all this, the chocolate bar started to become a problem. The early reporting of James’s survival mentioned that the only food he’d had was a chocolate bar, and the public was dying to know what sort. Rumours took hold that it was a Mars Bar. It was one of those irrelevant but colourful details with which everybody became irrationally obsessed.
‘I think this is where Harry didn’t give good advice,’ James says. ‘I think Harry was counting the dollars and thinking, We can probably get a contract with a chocolate bar company, and all this stuff. I think Harry had gone to every chocolate bar company saying, “We can get James Scott to endorse your product.” Harry was pushing a lot. His instructions to me were, “For fuck’s sake, don’t tell anyone about the chocolate bar, whatever you fucking do.” ’
When James eventually recorded his 60 Minutes interview, it ended up delivering one of the most famous and tense exchanges in the program’s history. The reporter Richard Carleton, known for his take-no-prisoners approach, began to grill James about what kind of chocolate bar it was.
‘I was really stuck in the middle of Harry ordering me, “Don’t say what brand of chocolate bar,” and Richard asking, “What is the brand of the chocolate bar?” That got him [Richard] really inflamed: “Is this guy really for real?” ’
‘In hindsight, do you think you were well enough to do that interview?’ I ask.
‘No. Not at all,’ James says. ‘I think Richard Carleton was the wrong person to do it as well. I don’t think that’s how you treat someone who’s been very traumatised. Once you start with that really interrogative interview style, I think anyone who’s been traumatised goes into fight-or-flight mode. I completely lost it, I was distressed that what should have been such a positive story ended up in such a difficult altercation. It was hard for me to understand how it happened. We didn’t go into the interview with ill will. I was just trying to tell my story. I can see it from Richard’s perspective too. We didn’t handle it well from our end either.’
The reluctance to simply name the chocolate bar gave the whole thing way more significance than it ever deserved and somehow, the false information that it was a Mars Bar took firm root in the mind of the public.
‘Would you do things differently if you had the time again?’ I ask.
‘I think I’d still engage somebody to manage it. You just cannot manage it. That was the right way to go. I think identifying the right journalist to tell the story is important. I think there are journalists who can do that sort of inquisitive approach, being empathetically curious about what happened,’ he says.
James doesn’t regret selling the story either, even though it caused him so much grief.
‘If there’s money to be made, you may as well make it, because you’re going to cop it either way. That’s kind of driven my views,’ James says.
‘To be honest, that’s my view too, even though I work for the ABC,’ I tell him. ‘Other people are making money from it.’
‘Of course they are. It’s a capitalist society. You’ve got a product, that product’s got value,’ James says.
‘Some of these lessons you only know because you went through it.’
‘Yeah. You’re really at your most vulnerable if you’re not media-savvy and such.’
James eventually made a full emotional recovery from his trauma, but nearly twenty-five years later he still carries physical scars. He has permanent double vision and balance problems, meaning he had to give up the karate that helped keep him alive on the mountain. His injuries also prevented him from pursuing the career he had hoped to have in surgery, although he is content in psychiatry.
‘Not many people in their lives are ever tested like you were, on every level simultaneously,’ I say. ‘Emotionally, mentally, physically, every way you could imagine. How about the challenges in your life since then? Has the fact that you survived that situation given you confidence to cope with other challenges?’
‘I think it probably has but I don’t consciously relate it back. Like, I was seeing a group of friends the other day and we were talking about something and one of my very good friends said, “It’s like James, he’s unflappable.” I never think of myself that way. But maybe having been through that, I don’t get so excited about things. I don’t think, This has happened, but it’s not as bad as Nepal; it’s not that sort of conscious link.’
‘Do you feel there was a lasting psychological legacy from it?’ I ask.
‘I think my Christian faith is the lasting legacy from it. I suppose the nature of having faith, you have a lot of doubts, especially being a scientist. But then I kind of go back and think, It’s just an extraordinary thing to happen. That’s my explanation for it,’ James says.
Like Louisa, James might have faith but he doesn’t hold any ‘ratbag delusion’ that God has singled him out. When I ask him whether he thinks it was God’s plan for him to survive that experience for some higher purpose, he laughs.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Was it just luck?’
‘I can’t explain it,’ James replies, looking almost apologetic for not offering me some profound wisdom about the mysteries of fate.
Once James Scott found himself in the middle of such an incredible survival tale, it was always going to turn into a media circus. It’s unsettling to hear how troubling it was to him because here’s the thing: I would have conducted that 60 Minutes interview much the same way. I definitely would have been one of those reporters badgering the Scott family after the rescue and if I hadn’t been able to get an interview with them, I almost certainly would have chased the angle of whether the survival tale was credible. There’s no doubt I would have asked about the chocolate bar.
I’ve always thought I’m a decent human being but what does it say about me and about the practice of journalism that even with everything James has told me, my instinct is that what happened to him was not only understandable, it was mostly justifiable? I have intellectually understood for a long time that journalists have a duty to think more deeply about these questions because we owe something to the people on whom we report. We are using survivors and victims to help the community understand its thoughts and feelings about how the world works, and so, at the very least, we should do as little harm as possible in pursuit of the story.
Meeting James makes me think about these things in a less abstract way. Where is the balance between the cost to the individual and the public’s desire to know the story? As James points out, it’s the media that profits the most from high-profile stories, not the person at the centre of them. The Nine Network would have made far more in advertising dollars from The Ice Man exclusive than it paid James. That’s why everybody was in a bidding war in the first place – it was a story the public wanted to hear, and that translates into eyeballs on the product, and in turn profit.
There is of course a question about whether there was a legitimate public interest in James Scott’s story or whether it was simply that the public was curious. These are two different things. Take the case of one of Louisa Hope’s fellow Lindt Café survivors, Julie Taylor. She has never told her story in the media. Julie was pregnant during the siege, which must have added a huge layer of complexity to the terror. She fled the café not long before the siege ended in the death of her best friend, Katrina Dawson. I would be very interested to hear her story, but do I believe it’s in the public interest for Julie Taylor to tell it? I do not. There has already been an extensive examination of the events of that day, and the coronial inquiry turned over every last shred of evidence. Julie Taylor was a witness in those hearings. It is a sound assumption that there’s nothing she can share further that will change what we already know, or that would have fresh implications for the law, policing or public safety. There is no valid public interest argument for her story, regardless of how intriguing it may be.
I also accept that there was no real public interest implication in what happened to James Scott. There ar
en’t hundreds of Australians getting constantly lost on snowy mountains. Nonetheless, it was one of the most miraculous survival feats in recorded history, something that spoke to our human drive to live. It was worth having on the record for that reason alone, and nobody could tell that story except James himself. Unlike the Lindt Café, there weren’t seventeen other people there. The public was desperate to hear details and I would have felt as a journalist that it was my job to try to deliver them.
Journalism has a culture that values and rewards breaking news, fresh angles that keep stories on the front page and juicy details that make people talk. From day one in journalism school, you’re taught that while you must behave ethically towards the people on whom you report, ultimately you serve the public above all else. That means I would justify most of the media behaviour towards James Scott and his family – excluding diabolical things like lying to get into his hospital room – on the grounds that it was a story for which the public had an insatiable hunger. Rightly or wrongly, the cost to James would have been a secondary consideration, particularly once he agreed to take money in exchange for telling the story.
The decisions journalists make are driven not only by the industry’s culture or by competitive pressure; there are also personal considerations that come into play, as for any human being doing a job. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a plane, assigned to cover some big event, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach: what if I can’t find something to file? What if another reporter gets something massive that I don’t? I’ve never failed to file a story in twenty-five years but I certainly know the humiliation of being scooped. Breaking stories is the core task of a journalist, and missing something that somebody else reports is failure. As bad as it feels to approach people like the Scotts when they’ve been through such an ordeal, it feels worse to not make that phone call and then watch a competitor interview them on another network while your boss stands alongside you, silently watching too. Like any employee, you fear for your job security, your reputation and your future prospects.
