Richard Harris

Richard James Dunbar "Harry" Harris , PBh (GCT) (born 1964) is an Australian cave diver and retired anaesthetist who has served as the lieutenant governor of South Australia since 2024. Harris is best known for having played a crucial role in the Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand in 2018. He has dived to 284m (932 ft) and is the first person known to have breathed hydrogen as a diluent gas on a rebreather. Harris was awarded 2019 Australian of the Year along with his dive partner Craig Challen.

Education and medical career

After completing school at St Peter's College in Adelaide, South Australia, Harris completed a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery at Flinders University in 1988. He subsequently completed anaesthetics training in the United Kingdom and New Zealand as well as aeromedical retrieval certification at James Cook University.

Cave diving

Harris began scuba diving in 1979 when he was 15 years old and began cave diving around 1985. whilst searching for the source of New Zealand's Pearse River: this mission was filmed for National Geographic. In 2023, Harris conducted a dive to while using hydrogen as a diluent breathing gas on a rebreather. While hydrogen had previously been tested as a breathing gas, this was the first known case of it being used on a rebreather. In 2024, Harris dived to at Boesmansgat, South Africa while again utilizing hydrogen. Harris suffered decompression sickness on a subsequent dive to .

Harris serves as the search-and-rescue officer for the Cave Divers Association of Australia (CDAA) and the Australian coordinator for International Underwater Cave Rescue and Recovery (IUCRR). He developed and taught sump rescue courses. In 2011, he recovered the body of his friend Agnes Milowka who had died whilst exploring Tank Cave near Tantanoola, South Australia. In 2025, he led the recovery of a 65-year-old man at the same cave.

Tham Luang cave rescue

In June 2018 Harris was about to depart on a cave diving holiday to the Nullarbor Plain when he and dive partner Craig Challen were requested by the Thai government, on the advice of British cave diver Rick Stanton who was part of a team working to rescue twelve Thai children and their soccer coach who were trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave system, to provide assistance with the rescue efforts.

Harris's efforts throughout the rescue have been described as essential. He conducted a medical assessment of all of the trapped boys and developed and executed a plan to keep the boys anaesthetised with ketamine while spontaneously breathing through full face masks. This was to ensure they did not panic during the long extrication through underwater caves, which would have endangered both the rescue scuba divers and the boys. While one source states that Harris was the last rescuer to leave the cave, this is not correct according to Harris's own detailed account of the rescue.

On 5 November 2019 Harris and Challen released the book Against All Odds chronicling their participation in the rescue of the boys from the Tham Luang Cave. In the book they corrected some of the inaccuracies in the media regarding the rescue. Harris stated that he did not pick the order that the boys would leave the cave, and that the boys decided that amongst themselves based on the distance each boy lived from the cave, as they thought they had to cycle back home. He also said the boys were fully unconscious as they were carried through the flooded cave, as he had given each boy two intramuscular injections in the thigh: ketamine to sedate them, and atropine to suppress saliva production to stop choking. He was sworn in on 9 February 2024 by Governor Frances Adamson. Harris engages in public speaking and film making since his retirement from medicine.

On 24 July 2018 Harris, along with Challen, was awarded the Star of Courage (SC) and Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) by the Governor-General of Australia. On 7 September 2018 the King of Thailand appointed Harris as a Knight Grand Cross (First Class) of the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn.

On Australia Day 2019, Harris was announced as the joint 2019 Australian of the Year with Challen.

In 2022, the Explorers Club presented Harris with the Presidential Award.

In film An Australian doctor is played by Ross W. Clarkson in the 2019 film The Cave.

Harris is portrayed by Joel Edgerton in Thirteen Lives, a 2022 film about the Thai cave rescue.

Harris stars in Jennifer Peedom's documentary Deeper which was released in October 2025.

Publications

Harris has published two children's picture books, based on his family's pet dog:

Harris published a book on risk taking based on his podcast Real Risk: Richard Harris (2023). The Art of Risk. Simon & Schuster. . Harris, Challen, and Simon Mitchell of the Wetmules dive team published an article regarding Harris's deep dive using hydrogen: