Richard Fidler

Mick Dolman has been married to his wife Joni for more than 50 years now, but there was a moment back in 1973, when they first got together, that Joni thought she'd lost him.

Mick was the youngest member of the crew of a freighter ship called the Blythe Star that had disappeared from the face of the earth.

somewhere off the south coast of Tasmania.

More than a week had passed and Joni had been advised that the crew had been given up for dead and the authorities were calling off the search.

But Mick and six other crew members were still alive.

They'd survived the capsizing of their ship and they'd been afloat for days on the cold and wild waters of the Southern Ocean...

But due to institutional ineptitude and indifference, the search for them was badly mismanaged and the men found it impossible to be rescued.

The crew of the Blythe Star witnessed terrifying scenes as they banded together as best they could to survive this extraordinary ordeal.

The story is told in a new book put together by Mick and journalist Pia Wersu based on the ABC podcast series.

The book is called Back From The Dead.

Hello and welcome, Mick.

Hello.

You grew up in Doveton in outer Melbourne near Dandenong in a housing commission house in the 1960s.

Your dad was a seafaring man before you.

What kind of values did your dad instill in you as a young fella?

You say you were drawn to the sea...

at a young age, what was the appeal of that for you?

So at 16, you got trained at the Maritime Industry Deckboy School in Newcastle.

It's amazing to think there was such an institution, the Maritime Industry Deckboy School.

Yeah.