by Lorna Hendry
Within a minute, the shop was full of people asking questions and ordering milkshakes and coffees. A queue had formed down the middle of the store and everyone seemed to be holding an ice-cream in one hand and a $50 note in the other. Just as I started to wonder why the helicopter hadn’t landed, James ran past outside.
‘It’s crashed!’
I abandoned the sale I was ringing up and, for the first time in my life, dialled 000. What service? Ambulance, I guessed. What was my location?
‘It’s three hours’ drive from Derby. The community’s called Imintji. It’s on the Gibb River Road, about 250 kilometres … (west? east?) west of Derby. A helicopter’s just crashed outside.’
Hours later I realised I had placed us in the Indian Ocean, somewhere on the way to Christmas Island.
The operator was calm. ‘How many people are in the helicopter?’
‘Four, including the pilot.’
‘Do you know what injuries they have?’
‘No.’ I heard the start of a wail in my voice.
A truck roared out of the community. Four men were riding on the tray, clinging to the cabin roof as the vehicle charged over the road and into the scrub. Relief weakened my knees.
‘There are men going to help now.’ I pushed past a few people on my way out of the shop. ‘Where are they?’ I shouted to the people standing beside the bus. The driver looked up.
‘Over there’, he said, pointing to the scrub on the other side of the road. ‘Who’s on the chopper?’
‘Stan and Jenny.’
He winced.
‘Are you there?’ James’s voice came from the two-way radio inside the store. I ran back inside.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Everyone’s alive. We’re bringing them back on the truck. Jim’s pretty bad, though.’
‘Okay, I heard that’, said the emergency operator. ‘We’re in contact with the Flying Doctors and we’re trying to get you some help. Give me your number and I’ll call you back.’
My hands were shaking as I called the tourist camp. ‘There’s been an accident. The helicopter’s just crashed. Everyone’s alive and we’re bringing them back to the shop. You need to come up now.’ Next I rang the helicopter company. ‘I’m calling from the Imintji store. Your helicopter has crashed outside with Jim and three passengers on board.’ And then the Aboriginal corporation in Derby. ‘I’m calling from Imintji. The helicopter’s just crashed out the front. Stan and Jenny were on it.’
The truck crawled up the road, with several men running alongside it. James was at the wheel, his face tense and serious. Stan sat in the passenger seat beside him. Stan’s eyes were closed and he was leaning at an odd angle. As the truck turned into the driveway, I saw Jim lying on his back on the tray. Jenny and Jodie were hunched beside him. There was blood on the women’s faces and their eyes were wide and glazed.
When the truck stopped, people began to move in towards Jim. A young man, who had been running with the truck, shouted, ‘Don’t move him. Leave him there.’
James looked exhausted and stern. ‘We had to pull Jim out of the cabin. His legs were trapped. We grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him out through the window.’ He paused. ‘I think his back is broken. He kept saying, “Don’t move me, please don’t move me.” All I could smell was aviation fuel. I can’t believe the whole thing didn’t explode.’
He held out his trembling hands and looked at them curiously, as if they belonged to someone else. ‘The others were already out when we got there. They were sitting in the dirt. I think Stan’s done something to his neck. He’s in lots of pain.’
A young woman came up to us. ‘Water’, she said. ‘We need water. And blankets, I think.’
The inertia had broken. Cars had arrived and everyone was on the move. Jodie’s boyfriend half-carried, half-walked her behind the store to the garden, where there was some shelter from the relentless sun. It was nearly midday.
Kevin, Imintji’s TAFE instructor, leaned out the window of his ute. So far I’d only met him once. ‘Have you called Llane?’
I shook my head, confused.
‘You know. The nurse from Mount Barnett.’
‘No. What’s her number?’
Kevin shook his head. ‘I’ll go home and do it.’ The ute did a screaming U-turn and raced back into the community.
I got bottles of water from the fridge and took them outside. People were gathered around Jim, holding up their clothing to shield him from the sun. His eyes were shut and he was pale and clammy.
Someone got a market umbrella from the garden and positioned it to give Jim shade.
Stan was lying on the grass behind the store. He seemed calm and told me he thought he was okay, except that his neck hurt. Jodie was curled up beside him. The people from the tourist camp were looking after them. Jodie was pale and unable to talk, flinching every time she moved. I found blankets to put underneath them to keep out the damp from the grass, and got pillows to raise Jodie’s legs.
Jenny had made it to her house, but now she was lying flat on her back on the concrete floor. One of the young women from the bus was with her.
‘Please, will you go and tell Stan I love him?’
Back out the front, a young man got out of his car and came towards me. ‘We’re shut’, I said. ‘You have to go to Mount Barnett.’
‘I’m Matt’, he said. ‘I’m supposed to meet Stan and Jenny. I’m from the ABC.’ A vague memory returned. The ABC was covering the annual Gibb River Road bicycle ride from Derby to Kununurra. Matt was here to interview Stan and Jenny about the store. ‘There’s an ambulance travelling with the cyclists. I’ll go back and get them for you.’
The phone rang constantly. Emergency Services said they couldn’t send an ambulance from Derby, but the Flying Doctors would be coming as soon as they could. Then the owner of Broome Helicopters called to tell us he was trying to release one of their large choppers from a fire-bombing job and get it to us.
‘But the Flying Doctors are coming.’
‘No’, he said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I’ve been talking to the guys here in Broome and they aren’t coming. They don’t have a plane in the Kimberley today.’
Journalists started ringing. I explained that we only had one phone and that I needed to keep the line free, but they wouldn’t stop. I gave the phone to James and sat with Jim.
He opened his eyes and croaked, ‘My passengers? How are they?’ ‘They’re fine, Jim. You’re the only one we’re worried about. Your boss says to tell you he doesn’t give a shit about the chopper, and he’s going to get you out of here as soon as he can.’
His eyes fluttered and closed. For a long and terrible moment I thought he was going to die on the back of the truck, holding my hand.
Llane, the nurse, arrived in what seemed a very short time. Kevin told me later that she was notorious for driving like a mad woman on these roads. The first thing she did was give Jim a dose of morphine and we all felt huge relief until he said it wasn’t doing anything for his pain. I remember thinking that if he was hurting, it must mean his back wasn’t broken after all. I was wrong. Jim would never walk again.
Cherylene touched me gently on my arm. ‘I think we should lock the shop.’
I padlocked the shop door and walked over to an elderly couple who were sitting patiently beside their hire car. ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t serve you right now. Do you have enough fuel to get to Mount Barnett?’ ‘Yes, dear’, the lady said. ‘We’re fine just sitting here. Can we do anything?’
I looked around. There was an air of calm now. Everyone was waiting for help to arrive. I felt like I was the only one who knew it wasn’t coming soon. ‘I think we’re okay.’
At one point, someone shouted, ‘The Flying Doctors are here!’ and we all looked up at a small plane glinting in the clear blue sky. I knew that wasn’t right. Although the community had been asking for an airstrip for more than twenty years, there was still no landing strip anywh
ere near Imintji. Funding for the project had been approved years ago, but the plan had been halted by a dispute with the cattle station about land ownership. Ironically, the proposed location of the airstrip was pretty much exactly where the helicopter now lay.
Matt and I watched the plane circle above us. ‘I think it’s ours’, he said, embarrassed. The ABC was shooting aerial footage of the mangled helicopter for that night’s news bulletin.
We opened the shop to give everyone lunch. We emptied the pie drawer and handed them out with cold drinks.
It was after two o’clock and James was now meant to be driving back to Mount Barnett to pick up the kids. I rang the school. ‘There’s been an accident …’
‘It’s okay, we’ve heard. The kids know that none of their parents have been hurt. Gary will drive them back.’
I hadn’t even thought about the kids finding out. Oscar and Dylan had already been in the helicopter twice. What if … I refused to think about that, I just stopped that thought, told it to get right out of my head and never come back.
The day got hotter and quieter. Cars pulled in occasionally, slowing down as the drivers realised that something wasn’t right. I moved them along, not letting them get out of their vehicles. I didn’t notice the elderly couple leave, but they returned the next day and told us their son had been badly hurt in a car accident in a remote area a few years ago. They had been thinking of him as they sat and watched us bustling around our friends.
The school’s dusty troop carrier arrived at three o’clock. Normally the kids exploded out of the bus, all legs and arms and bare feet pounding the red dirt as they scattered and ran for home. Today they climbed out slowly, checking out the scene with wide eyes. Their parents were there to meet them and walk them quickly into the community, away from the chaos. We grabbed our boys and hugged them and tried to explain. ‘Jim and Stan and Jenny are going to be all right. There’s a big helicopter coming to take them to hospital very soon. We don’t want you to worry. It’s all going to be fine.’
And, being kids, they believed us. Minutes later, my heart jumped as I saw them kicking a football in the garden, just metres from where Stan and Jodie were lying on the grass in neck braces. I bundled them into the caravan, turned on the air conditioning and the tiny portable television, and told them to stay put.
Finally, just before five o’clock, the biggest helicopter I had ever seen flew in from Derby. The sound of the giant rotors beating the air was deafening. As it landed beside the store, the noise and swirling red dust were exhilarating and wonderful. The cavalry had finally arrived.
The doctor checked out Jim first, and then helped six men to lift him onto a stretcher and manoeuvre him into the back of the helicopter. When I said, ‘The others are out the back’, she smiled at me.
‘I’m afraid we’ve only got room for one. The Flying Doctor is coming for the others.’
Jim took all the adrenalin with him when he left. I saw the exhaustion in James’s grey face and realised how tired I was too. The ambulance went back to the bike ride. The bus driver said he should get his tour group going. We thanked them for their help and I opened the store to give them food and drink, but they all insisted on paying. Within minutes of opening up, the store was full. The whole community had been waiting patiently for me to open up so they could shop for dinner.
Llane came in to say the Flying Doctors would be landing at the airstrip at Mount Barnett later that night. She had to drive Stan, Jenny and Jodie there in her troop carrier. ‘We’ll have to get going before it gets dark. I don’t want to hit a bloody bull on the way back.’
As we helped Stan climb into the troopie, he looked old and tired and scared. Jenny was angry now. She was furious that they had to undergo a two-hour drive on a corrugated dirt road at dusk. Jodie was distraught, unable to do anything but sob quietly and moan when she had to move. They were all terrified at the prospect of flying in a light plane in the dark over some of the remotest areas in the country. I felt awful for them.
The police left too. Because there were no fatalities, the helicopter company could investigate the crash itself. We wondered about the wisdom of that decision a few weeks later when another Robinson R44 helicopter crashed in similar circumstances in Queensland. And again later that year, when the one we had gone in fell out of the sky over the Bungle Bungles, killing everyone on board.
In the days ahead, the community tried to stop sightseers driving off the road into the scrub to photograph the crash site and souvenir pieces of the wreckage. The carcass of the helicopter lay in the scrub, next to a small tree it had sliced in two on its way down. Its black skids pointed up in the air, like the legs of a dead bug. Glass from the broken cockpit window glinted in the long dry grass. A couple of weeks after the crash, the wreck was hoisted clumsily onto the back of a flatbed truck, tied down with orange straps, and driven off down the Gibb. In an ugly moment, it sailed past Stan and Jenny as they were travelling from Broome back to Derby.
But that night, when everyone had finally gone, and we were the only ones left, the Kimberley turned on a sunset that made my heart soar. We sat on the grass outside our van, eating microwaved pizza and drinking Coke from the bottle. As the first stars popped out of the darkening sky, something in my chest loosened and I felt giddy.
‘I guess we have to run the shop now.’
Chapter Seventeen
After that dramatic start, the next few months of our lives fell into an easy routine. We woke early and had a quick breakfast in the tiny caravan. The boys would crawl out of their beds in the striped canvas annexe, all yawns and morning hair, and slump on the floral-covered foam cushions surrounding the laminex table waiting for their juice and cereal. After his cup of tea James would go and start up the new orange bus that had arrived from Derby. Our boys were the first ones on board and then the bus cruised slowly through the community, stopping outside the houses where school-aged kids live. Sometimes, by the time James had done a full circuit of Imintji and turned north onto the Gibb River Road, the bus would be nearly full of sleepy children. They would stumble out of their houses, wrapped in blankets or carrying still-sleeping younger siblings. Other days, Oscar and Dylan were his only passengers.
The road had straight sections of smooth red dirt, stretches covered in uneven white rocks that made the bus shudder and shake, thousands of corrugations and steep creek crossings. It passed the turn-off to the station where we thought we would be working, wound up the ancient hills of the Phillips Range, down a sealed section to Adcock Gorge, went past Galvans Gorge where we had seen our first Wandjina, through one final river crossing and turned right into the community of Kupungarri at Mount Barnett. Sometimes there were cattle on the road – ghostly pale Brahmans, with their distinctive humps, that would amble slowly off to the side, and their skittish, gangly calves, which couldn’t be trusted not to get spooked and run towards the bus. James knew every pothole, every sharp turn and every place where the smoothest ride could be found by steering the bus over to the far side of the road.
School started at eight o’clock and the drive took nearly an hour. James liked to get there early so that he could use the school’s kitchen to heat up baked beans or throw together a big bowl of cereal for the kids who hadn’t had a chance to eat breakfast. When the bell went and everyone disappeared into one of the three classrooms, he spent the rest of the day cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming the rooms and gardening. The schoolyard was blessed with huge trees that gave plenty of welcome shade, but they constantly dropped their leaves. He’d rake and sweep, gather up the debris into a wheelbarrow, transfer load after load to the 44-gallon steel drum behind the school and then set it alight.
My day at Imintji started at seven o’clock in the shop, where I was back to being an assistant. Stan and Jenny had returned to work just ten days after the accident. I cleaned the toilets, helped Stan restock the shelves and fridge and freezer, loaded up the pie warmer and made rolls and sandwiches to sell during the day.
At half past seven every morning, Nev, the mechanic who ran the workshop next to the store, would ride past. Nev had been away when we arrived.
‘Guess I’ll meet him soon then’, I’d said, the day that Kevin told me he was back.
At that exact moment, a quad bike rumbled past the store. A man who looked about James’s age was riding it, and an old yellow dog sat majestically in a milk crate attached at the back. Nev was dressed in fading dusty shorts that came about halfway up his sturdy freckled thighs and an ancient blue singlet that hung off him like a butcher’s apron. He waved a roll of toilet paper at me and grinned happily.
‘Yeeeee-harrrrr!’ he cried as he sailed past, on the way to the toilet block I had just cleaned and hosed out. Kevin was bent over beside me, giggling like a girl.
‘Yep, that’s Nev’, he wheezed. ‘Mornin’ routine. Drives Jenny nuts.’ He lost the power of speech, flapped a hand at me, got in his ute and drove off, still shaking his head and wiping his eyes.
Sometimes, as I waited for the first tourists to arrive, I’d make a cup of tea and sit on the wide wooden verandah of the store to enjoy the gentle warm air and the view. If a phone order came in from one of the outstations, I’d pack it up and get it ready to hand over to whoever was driving through to deliver it. I was taken aback the first time Stan showed me the envelopes that contained the keycards and PINs that we used to get payment for these orders, but we were careful to keep copies of all the orders and receipts and, although it relied on a huge amount of trust, the system seemed to work.
Most mornings, Jenny would cook up huge batches of homemade pies – kangaroo was the biggest seller – and bake cakes and slices in the kitchen of her house. Stan spent a lot of time organising the stock and working the diesel pump whenever a vehicle drove in. As the day warmed up, I served customers, chatted to the tourists about their trips, answered questions about the best places to visit, and made endless rounds of toasted sandwiches, coffees and milkshakes.