When author and journalist Sue Williams heard about a little family who had hidden out in one of the wildest, most remote areas of Australia to evade a group of Russians hunting them down, she simply didn’t believe it.
“It sounded so far-fetched, I thought it couldn’t possibly be true,” she says. “And how had this possibly happened, and no one had heard about it? It must be some kind of elaborate hoax.”
When she finally met the family in New Zealand, however, dad Nick Stride, now 56, and his children Michael, now 24, and Anya, 23 – their mother Luda has since become estranged from them – she realised that truth really could be stranger than fiction.
Nick, originally from the UK, had gone to work in Russia, met and married a Russian and had two children, and then things started to go wrong. His boss, Igor Shuvalov, was one of the richest, most powerful men in the country, and then Vladimir Putin’s deputy prime minister, and soon Nick realised the Russians were controlling every aspect of his life: where he could go, when he could return to Britain for visa renewals and whether or not his wife and children could go with him.
He discovered he was being bugged and his every move watched. As the Russian oligarchy grew more paranoid about how much he knew about them, Nick decided he had to get out. So the family fled to Australia, but with continuing death threats from the Russians and Australia’s refusal to give his family political asylum, he decided they had to get completely lost.
“They went to Australia’s last frontier, the Dampier Peninsula in the far northwest,” says Williams, who worked as a journalist and TV producer in Auckland before moving to Sydney. “There’s nothing there except sand, sea, crocodiles, spiders, sharks, snakes and a few isolated Aboriginal communities.
“Their day-to-day battle for survival completely captivated me, and I really wanted to write their story. But it did give me so many nightmares …It’s like a cross between Survivor, Alone and The Mosquito Coast, with a little The Swiss Family Robinson thrown in. But it’s so remarkable in that it’s all true.”
Williams’ book Run For Your Life is out now. Here, she shares three top takes from the book.
Family
The Strides did what they did because they were desperate to stay together as a family. The Australian immigration authorities at one point said they would deport Nick, Michael and Anya to Britain and Luda back to Russia. If that happened, they felt the children would never see their mother again. So they made the decision together to go on the run in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth to stay together. They shared good times and terrible times, but they supported and helped each other, and worked as a team all the way through. The importance of family, and the strength of those bonds, is absolutely inspiring.
Resilience
There were many times when the Strides felt like giving up, but their family motto – “we always find a way” – kept them all going. Nick said throughout the ordeal that, as long as you maintain a positive mindset, you can contribute to something positive happening. If you’re negative, then there’s only one outcome, and that’s guaranteed to be negative. That attitude got them out of many tight spots, like when their only vehicle fell apart, and Michael (who was only 14 when they went into hiding) scavenged abandoned cars for spare parts, or when the family ran out of food and Anya, 13, had to butcher one of the adored pigs she’d been raising.
Peace
Nick, Michael and Anya have finally found peace in New Zealand, where they’ve been granted protection and refugee status by the government. They’re still careful of never revealing exactly where they are in the country because of fears that the Russians might still want to find them, especially after Nick blew the whistle on some of his boss’s financial dealings. But peace is something so many of us never really appreciate until it’s not there one day. It’s something the Strides really cherish, and are immensely grateful to New Zealand for.
One insight I gained while writing: Australian immigration sucks!
The Australian immigration system admitted that the Stride family were in danger but they still refused to give them political asylum. They said that their persecution wasn’t on the basis of any of the five narrow grounds recognised in the 1951 Refugee Convention: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Their case fell outside those restricted definitions, and the minister refused to make any concessions. I found it astonishing that a government department could have so little humanity, but Bravo New Zealand for showing that governments can have compassion.
Run For Your Life: The remarkable true story of a family forced into hiding after leaking Russian secrets by Sue Williams (Simon & Schuster, $39.99) is out now.
