One of the Beaconsfield miners has died. Here’s how his story hooked the nation for 20 years

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Beaconsfield miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb became national heroes after spending 14 days stuck in a mine. Then the media turned their ordeal into a commodity.

Todd Russell, one of two Beaconsfield miners trapped underground for 14 nights in 2006, has died age 54 after a long illness. It was a quiet end for a man whose ordeal once captivated the entire country.

At 9.23pm on April 25, 2006, a rockfall at the Beaconsfield gold mine killed miner Larry Knight, with two others presumed dead.

But on April 30, Russell and Brant Webb were discovered to still be alive one kilometre underground. There they would remain for the next ten days, until rescuers finally broke through on May 9.

Russell and Webb walked out of the mine with their fists raised – a scene that became the most-watched weekday television event of 2006.

But as inspiring and cautionary as their survival was, the real story of Beaconsfield is less about the mine, and more about the space it continues to occupy in our cultural memory.

Twenty years later, the name of that small Tasmanian town evokes one of the most pivotal moments in modern Australian history.

As two decades of news coverage since has made clear, when entertainment values collide with the duty to inform, entertainment tends to win.

A constellation of television network stars orbited Beaconsfield, eager to claim the story for their network. None was bigger than then-Channel Nine chief executive Eddie McGuire, with star power, real economic muscle and the nickname “Eddie Everywhere”.

Eddie personally secured the miners’ first public appearance on Nine’s The Footy Show, during which Russell told Eddie:

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