The Beaconsfield miner reveals a 20-year secret about his ‘complicated’ relationship with his fellow survivor.
“I feel a weight has lifted, a 20 years of keeping a secret for a bloke that didn’t respect me”.
That’s the text message Brant Webb sent the McKnight Tonight production team after an extraordinary interview on Wednesday night. That message is published with permission.
Todd Russell died this week, aged 54, from an undisclosed illness. When approached by the media Webb has been very careful with his words, saying things like:
“He did so much for the community”.
But the truth is the men were not friends.
“We didn’t have anything in common at all, really. The only thing we had in common was we stayed in the hole for two weeks together,” Webb told me on McKnight Tonight.
You can watch the full interview in the YouTube player below:
“(He) and I didn’t sort of see eye to eye on a lot of things, but, you know, that’s life,
“You can’t like everybody, not everyone likes you,
“Even when we did the book, his mother said he was the most arrogant person she ever met”.
The brutally honest statement is at odds with the public perception of the pair, who appeared in many interviews together in the years after the Beaconsfield mine disaster.
“We didn’t hate each other, we just didn’t sort of see eye to eye and, and we had different views of life” explains Webb.
In fact, the two barely knew each other before the events of Anzac Day 2006 – the day that would change both their lives when a minor earthquake triggered a rockfall at the Beaconsfield Gold mine in Tasmania.
Webb was with his usual crew while Russell was doing overtime. They just happened to be together when the mine collapsed, leaving them trapped for 14 days.
In another shocking twist, Webb reveals they were trapped three days longer than they should have been due to issues with the explosives expert, because he locked himself in a caravan to work out a plan.
Webb is also renewing The Russell-Webb Legacy Foundation, a charity he set up with Russell. It supports young people experiencing homelessness, and local charities in Beaconsfield and across Tasmania.
“We used to give away the interest, but the interest rates were so low in the last eight and a half years that we didn’t have any interest to give away, so we gave away the principal”.
To build up cash again, Webb has partnered with Shane Williams from the Miners Gold Brewery in Beaconsfield. On December 6 they will launch a new beer called ‘The Great Escape’.
A perfect name and a great cause.
