A woman survived for nearly a week in the Australian Outback after getting stuck in a bog by drinking her own urine and windscreen wiper fluid.

Brooke Phillips, 40, was with her cat and dog when she took a wrong turn and her 4×4 became bogged down miles away from civilisation.

Not realising how long she was going to be stuck on her own she drank all the water she had on her first night – just half a litre.

Brooke Phillips, 40, took a wrong turn and got stuck in the Australian Outback (Picture: Blackstone Police)

With temperatures rising to 35°C – even hotter in the car – she realised that desperate times called for desperate measures.


She said: ‘I then got my t-shirt, ripped it in half and I drained the water out of the windscreen wiper container and just started drinking that.

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‘I won’t lie, I drank my own urine on the last day because I was thinking I’m getting to desperate measures and no-one is coming out here. I suppose that saved me.’



Incredibly her daughter, 16, was the one who found her while taking part in a large-scale search and rescue more than 1,500 miles out of Perth.

She covered her car with towels to try and keep the temperature down and used her air-conditioning until the fuel ran out.

She ripped up her T-shirt and soaked up her car’s washer fluid to drink (Picture: WA Police)

She was stuck, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere

There was a little bit of rain, but not enough to sustain her. All she had in the car were pasta sauce, coconut cream, a tin of tomatoes, lemon juice and pure red cordial.

She said: ‘I was trying to eat a Cruskit [a dry biscuit-like food], and if you don’t have anything to drink with it then it’s just sticking to your mouth, it’s not going down.’

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Inspector Craig Davis said she was fortunate to have survived as she hadn’t taken steps to prepare. However, staying with her car was the right thing to do.

He said: ‘She was very lucky [to survive] bogged on a track in the middle of nowhere. It was just unfortunate that not one person drove past her during the whole time.’

Brooke admits she thought it was the end and that she’d be dead within a day.

These are the Cruskits she tried to eat during her ordeal

She was around 18 miles away from Blackstone where she eventually got treated (Picture: MailOnline)

She said: ‘I started to think “no-one is going to find me, no-one loves me, why hasn’t anyone found me yet?”.’

She added that the moment her daughter turned up was ‘awesome’ and she was in shock.

A nurse said that Brooke was in a better state than they were expecting when she arrived at Blackstone, around 18 miles away from where she got stuck.

The cat and dog also survived and Brooke now carries 20litres of water in her car.

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