Miracle In The Desert

Featuring Don Hany – 2010 Silver Logie winner for most outstanding actor – Miracle In The Desert is the second of three incredible drama-documentaries about miraculous feats of survival against deadly odds in extreme circumstances. Alaskan fireman Robert Bogucki (Don Hany) went missing in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert in July, 1999. Bogucki survived 43 days and was eventually found some 400km from his departure point by an Australian television news helicopter. He’d lost 30 kilograms, endured six weeks without food and 12 days without water but miraculously survived one of the world’s most inhospitable wildernesses. Bogucki is not a typical adventurer. He is not interested in being the first or the fastest. Nor is he interested in fame or notoriety. He decided to cross the Australian Great Sandy Desert in an attempt to find solitude in one of the world’s last untamed wildernesses. Bogucki was a troubled 15-year-old when he decided that one day he would, like Jesus, fast in the wilderness, test his faith and have some questions answered. As the years passed, this quest became more of a focus – almost an obsession. His moment arrived in 1999. While on a cycling trip around Australia, he saw a map of country’s vast interior, and the Great Sandy Desert caught his eye. When tourists happened upon Bogucki’s abandoned bicycle and supplies on a remote desert track, one of the largest manhunts in Australian history was launched. Australian police and local Aboriginal trackers struggled to follow Bogucki’s tracks through almost impenetrable bush. After 15 days, the search was called off. Refusing to believe their son had perished in the desert, Bogucki’s parents hired a volunteer American search and rescue team to travel to Broome, in what many believed would be a body retrieval exercise...