Ben and Dave
I first heard of David Glasheen when I sailed past his Restoration Island on my way back from Thursday Island in 2005. I have been keeping an eye on him ever since and also wrote several blogs which received quite a number of 'hits' in recent days.
Tracing their origin, I found that British adventurer Ben Fogle had visited Dave on his island for Episode 1 of his TV series LIVES IN THE WILD. (For some strange reason, this video clip and a similar clip on YouTube are VERBOTEN to viewers in Australia, stating, "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Barred from viewing? I smell an infringement of my rights and the sounds of marching and barked orders like "FIRE" and "HALT" and "Who goes there?" and stuff like that.)
Anyway, I would hardly call Dave's existence on Restoration Island a "Life in the Wild": his former girlfriend, Ericka, works just a few kilometres away on the mainland, while Dave enjoys all the benefits of Australia's burgeoning social security system, including free Medicare and evacuation by helicopter to Cairns base hospital should anything serious happen to him, plus a plentiful supply of home-made beer.
Instead of medical evacuation, he may be facing legal eviction after he lost his case in the Supreme Court last August. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald, headlined "The Last Days of Eden", is a good potted history of Dave and his current plight.
According to his Restoration Island blog, Dave now wants to use 'crowd funding' to raise $500,000 to no longer have to brew his own beer and keep his island dream alive. I don't know, Ben, but methinks the only things wild about David Gilronan Glasheen are his methods.
