Lived On Sponge Cake While Lost In Desert

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30480, 30 June 1964, Page 11

Lived On Sponge Cake While Lost In Desert

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyrightt

BRISBANE, June 28. A young English couple yesterday told how they survived for five days in the trackless Australian outback on one sponge cake and three-quar-ters of a gallon of water. On the sixth day, with their hope of rescue almost gone, they met a lone aboriginal at a water-hole. He gave them food and brought rescue. The couple are John Arnfield, aged 20, and Carol Hole, aged 18. Mr Arnfield, a bakery employee who came to Australia 15 years ago, and Miss Hole, a former nurse who has been in Australia for several years, both work at Mount Isa, in far western Queensland. They took a wrong turning on the way to a race meeting and their car became bogged

down in desert in the eastern part of the Northern Territory.

They divided up the sponge cake and sipped their small store of water, huddled in the shade of the car. By the fifth day the last crumbs of cake and the last of the water had gone and they decided to strike out to try to find help. On the sixth day they walked for 10 miles and lay down exhausted. After several hours’ rest they pressed on and in the evening stumbled onto a water-hole, where an aboriginal was camped. He boiled them tea and gave them bread and fish, then guided them back to a remote cattle station.

Yesterday they arrived back by car at Mount Isa.