54 ‘Boat People’ Survive Ordeal in Aussie Outback : Rescue: After their vessel runs aground, Chinese refugees wander across desolate terrain in searing heat.

In a dramatic story of survival and endurance, 54 Chinese “boat people” have been found wandering in some of Australia’s most forbidding terrain after surviving the Outback’s searing heat and a diet of crocodiles, snakes and weeds.

Police and coast guard planes and helicopters stepped up their search today for two other people still missing three weeks after their small fishing boat ran aground in a crocodile-infested mangrove swamp in Montague Sound on the remote northwest coast.

Wearing rubber sandals or rags on their swollen feet, and braving daytime temperatures reaching 113 degrees, the first 35 men and women stumbled onto a cattle ranch last Thursday after trudging 90 miles across the harsh Kimberley desert.

The others have been rescued in groups over the last five days amid the desolate expanse of rocky gorges and rugged bush. Five men and a woman were found Monday after night-flying planes spotted their campfire on a beach. They apparently had hiked 150 miles in a circle. Another man was rescued Monday evening.

“They’re shuffling and using sticks to walk with,” said Inspector Con Calameri, head of police operations.

Two of the immigrants have been hospitalized in Darwin for malaria, but the others--mostly men, ages 16 to 50--apparently survived the grueling ordeal with only blistered feet, sunburn and dehydration. They carried rice and noodles, sugar and cooking pots and supplemented their meager diet with what’s known as “bush tucker”--native fauna and flora.

Calameri said the Chinese used twine and a bent nail to catch rock cod, roasted goannas and other large lizards and clubbed a salt-water crocodile, which they skinned with a spoon sharpened on a rock. One man was still carrying a half-eaten 6-foot brown snake when rescued.

Water was not a problem since heavy thunderstorms drenched the area. The group also apparently ate “pigweed,” a grass shoot eaten by local Aborigines.

The captain of the 52-foot wooden fishing boat told police that he had split his 56 Chinese passengers into two groups after they were shipwrecked on New Year’s Eve. He gave them a compass, a crude map copied from an atlas and rough southeast bearings to follow. Several stragglers were left behind as the groups hiked across the treacherous Mitchell Plateau.

“It’s an up and down bit of hell, full of crocodiles and snakes,” said Wyndham police Sgt. Michael Harper. “It’s certainly the worst bit of country up this way.”

Immigration officials said the Chinese will be detained and charged as illegal immigrants and will begin appearing before a magistrate in Darwin today. They are expected to seek asylum in Australia, joining 23,000 others--including 363 previously detained boat people--who have applied to qualify as refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution” under U.N. guidelines.

The case has renewed the emotional debate here over immigration. Last year, for the first time, half the nation’s legal immigrants came from Asia, rather than from traditional European sources. With Australia’s economy suffering its worst recession in decades and unemployment at a postwar high, the government has cut its immigration allowance from 126,000 to 111,000 this year.

“A recurring theme throughout the history of European settlement has been the supposed threat from the north, an irrational fear that a tide of Asians was waiting to descend upon us and overthrow all we hold near and dear,” said an editorial in the Sunday Age in Melbourne. “For some Australians, unfortunately, the boat people represent the first wave of this bogey.”

The Australian Customs Service said it will conduct an inquiry into how the boat, which came ashore about 180 miles north of Broome, the nearest major town, escaped the country’s $13.6-million coastal surveillance system. Aircraft have intercepted more than 200 boats since 1988, said Coast Watch spokesman Geoff Easton.

He said aircraft will continue to search overnight for the two still missing. “The real concern is that they are restricted in their movement, or have fallen ill and are unable to light a fire or signal to us in some way,” he said.

The Chinese told immigration officials they were from Guangxi and Guangdong provinces in southern China. Officials said the group apparently stopped for supplies in Jakarta, Indonesia, last July, then docked for repairs a month later at Sumba Island, near Timor.

Although initial reports said the Chinese were teachers and students from Beijing, officials said Monday that the group was made up mostly of deck hands on coastal vessels, market workers and shop assistants. Interviews have been conducted in Cantonese, since none apparently speaks English.

Officials said they are still trying to confirm the refugees’ remarkable saga of survival. “Experience has shown us never to take anything at face value,” said Gordon Benjamin, an immigration spokesman.