Australia Holds Its Breath As Two Heroes of the Deep Near Rescue

The church bells of Beaconsfield, a small town in north Tasmania, have not rung since the end of the Second World War. But last night the bellringers were preparing to go to work again as two mates who have been buried alive for 12 days half a mile deep after the collapse of the town's goldmine on 25 April were being dug free of their nightmare.

The plight of Brant Webb, 37, and Todd Russell, 34, has held a nation in thrall to the exclusion of even sport and politics. Last night workmates lying on their backs and using shovels and picks hacked away at the last three feet of rock as the nation's media hovered above.

Waiting for the two, who had been given up for dead, beside the cameras were paramedics ready to ferry them to nearby Launceston Hospital. Their lives have been dissected and Australians are now happy to proclaim Webb and Russell heroes of storybook proportions.

When contact was finally made five days after the collapse of the mine, their sense of humour cut through their rock prison. Bulletins thereafter teased family and friends. From the moment their voices were picked up, on 1 May, nobody was sure how long it would take to extricate them.

Once found, the men were fed via a 10cm plastic pipe. They were given clothes, food, iPods, torches and a digital camera. All the while, Webb and Russell, without artifice, built on their legend. Russell's reaction when first contacted was: 'It's [expletive] cold and cramped in here. Get us out!' Webb and Russell are miners. From Tasmania. It is unlikely it was 'jolly'. When their boss Matthew Gill spoke to them, they said: 'Don't worry about us, we're in a two-star hotel ... and we're the two stars.' But they knew how close they had come to death. They will be besieged with offers for their story, estimated to be worth £1m. It began after an earth tremor ripped through the mine on Anzac Day, 25 April, killing colleague Larry Knight but dropping a rock over their cage, a protective cap that saved their lives.

The story the media are salivating over is of two men who laughed while incarcerated in a cage 6ft by 6ft, unable to stand upright, amid fears of deep-vein thrombosis setting in.

There was also the political storm above ground. Kim Beazley, the leader of the Labor opposition, invited scorn last week when he was accused of using the story to bash the government's proposed redrafting of industrial relations laws. 'Those two men struggling for life were trained in workplace health and safety techniques,' Beazley told a rally in Brisbane. 'They know that the men coming to them ... have been strengthened by their association over the years with unionbased training programmes and they know if [the Prime Minister] John Howard removes these programmes - as he intends to - all workers are threatened.' Howard refused to be drawn into the row but his Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews, demanded Beazley apologise. Even some of his Labor supporters distanced themselves from the controversy.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions, alarmed at what it says is rampant deregulation of the workplace, supported Beazley, pointing out that 7,000 Australians a year die in work-related accidents or from industrial diseases.

All this swirled half a mile above the heads of the miners as they injected grout in the rocks around them to reduce the risk of further rockfalls and initially drank rainwater from cracks. Rescuers faced a task of unimaginable complexity. A former mine safety officer said the rock was five times harder than concrete, and the drilling machinery that had tunnelled alongside the mineshaft had to be delicately removed to avoid triggering another collapse. As union official Bill Shorten observed last night, the last phase of the job required 'old fashioned muscle'.

Poignantly, the digging has been done by the two men's colleagues - promised a month's pay but not security thereafter. There is no guarantee that the mine will function again. It was flooded in the late 1990s and, when the gold price rose, reopened, the owners claiming they could make around 400,000 dollars a day for it. That future is now much less certain. As is that of Beaconsfield.

As their mates chipped away at the last yard of rock into the early hours, Webb and Russell hunched down for at least another eight hours in their cage. The only certainty about their future is that they will argue long and loud with doctors who have said they will not be able to have a beer for at least a day.