Grasping Pom Jamie Neale Pockets Rescue Money

Jamie Neale the British backpacker who cost rescue services $100,000.

The British backpacker Jamie Neale, who spent 12 days surviving in the Australian bush after getting lost on a walk, has reportedly donated just 1.5% of the $200,000 he has subsequently earned, to the State Emergency Services who rescued him.

Grasping Pom Jamie, 19, was on a backpacking holiday in the Blue Mountains area of New South Wales, Australia in July of this year when he went for a stroll in the bush, without his mobile phone, near the town of Katoomba. He was missing for 12 days and his parents had given him up for dead, when he stumbled out of the bush 13 miles from the tourist town where he had set off.

The State Emergency Services spent an estimated $100,000 of tax payers money, in the week long rescue effort to try and locate him.

At the time there was scepticism about how he had survived 12 days in the bush, suffering no more than a few cuts to his upper body. Night temperatures in the bush plunged to freezing, yet Jamie Neale was not found to be suffering from hypothermia. He says he survived by eating seeds and weeds.

Jamie Neale subsequently signed a deal with a celebrity agent who was to tout his story to the highest bidder.

Jamie made $200,000 by recounting his story on the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program, and he is reported to make even more money with further television deals and possibly even a book deal called Jamie’s 12 Day Diet.

At the time Jamie was said to have stated that part of the deal with Channel Nine was that $100,000 of that money would go into reimbursing the State Emergency Services for the huge rescue operation they launched to find him. Jamie’s father Richard Cass, also stated that he would give any money made from publicity deals to the rescue team or the hospital where Jamie was treated. But today it was revealed that Jamie had donated the measly sum of $1500 to the Blue Mountain SES. That’s just 1.5% of the total it cost Australian taxpayers to rescue him.

In Katoomba from where he vanished, many locals were unimpressed. One resident, Marty Delaney, stated: “If I was overseas and got caught through my own stupidity and the government of that country had to pay for me to be rescued, I would reimburse them.�

Jamie Neale has certainly given the sceptics ammunition for their theories that he faked his disappearance for the publicity and money. This is one grasping Pom that should never have left Britain.

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