Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  We picked up speed, bounced along the runway then kicked into the air, an alarmingly sudden steep climb that saw us soaring over the streets of Broken Hill in moments. As we banked hard left, Shane’s window filled with dark smudges, shadows pooling in the early morning light. A line of darker red earth, with a margin of wispy trees and bushes, indicated a creek bed where once there would have been water. Now it was a parched empty landscape, locked into the middle of Australia’s worst drought for years.

  As we climbed higher the scenery faded into blotchy spots and wavy lines, an Aboriginal dot painting if ever there was one. How would they have known what it looked like from up here?

  ‘QF7 clear to climb to flight level 350.’

  ‘Malaysian 862, clear track direct Sydney.’

  ‘Echo Bravo Charlie, report your position please.’

  I glanced at Shane.

  ‘Air traffic control in Melbourne,’ he said, and flicked a switch to patch us through, waiting for a break in the chatter before he joined in. ‘This is Mike Victor Whisky, airborne Broken Hill, runway two-one, turning left to track one-four-five degrees climbing to flight level two-one-zero,’ he declared, sounding like a proper grown-up pilot. The illusion was shattered moments later when a broad Aussie accent sounded in my headphones.

  ‘Hey Shane, how you doing, mate?’

  I smiled and looked out of the window, remembering an interview I’d conducted with Nancy Bird Walton before I’d left Sydney. She was the first female pilot to work commercially in Australia and a lifelong supporter of the RFDS.

  ‘When I learnt to fly we navigated by following train lines or riverbeds,’ she’d said. ‘If I had to make an emergency landing I would try and break a telegraph line, that way someone would be forced to come out and repair the line, discover the ditched plane and rescue me at the same time.’

  She’d tilted her head back and smiled. ‘And I always kept a pair of shoes and a little black dress in the back of the plane. I never knew when I might need them.’ At ninety-two and living in a retirement home, Nancy Bird Walton was an immaculate picture of grace, sitting upright in a wing chair, lipstick the exact shade of her polished nails. She gave me the impression she could slip into her LBD and dance a tango any time she liked. I watched the sparse red desert unfurl beneath us and made a mental note to wear jeans less often.

  *

  If Broken Hill was remote, Ivanhoe may as well have been on the moon. The town felt like a threadbare pair of trousers, darned too often and ready to be turned into rags.

  As we drove into town from the landing strip, I forced myself to forget the march of green fields I was used to – the towns and villages with churches, village greens and bus stops, thriving post offices, well-stocked greengrocers and busy fish and chip shops – and remember this was remote Australia, not rural England. Turning off the wide main street, bordered by sparse gum trees, we drove through an opening in a chain-link fence to park outside a small brick hospital. It was single storey, with two or three beds at most. Twice a week the Flying Doctor held a GP surgery there; local nurses staffed it the rest of the time.

  I was there to find stories, and it wasn’t hard. A guard from Ivanhoe prison came in for a check-up after a nasty accident with an iron bar weeks before. He’d been repairing the perimeter fence, tensioning steel wire, when the bar slipped, spun back and slammed into his face. Inmates who could have escaped stayed with him and called for help, a nurse radioed the Flying Doctor and Captain Magnus Badger, who was passing overhead on his way back from flying an emergency patient to Orange, did some fast recalculations. He diverted the flight and was on the ground within eight minutes.

  Then there was Nicole, a quietly spoken mum from Sydney, anxiously cradling her son, Lachlan. She and her husband had been camping with four-year-old Lachlan and six-year-old Ben in Willandra National Park the night before.

  ‘We were roasting marshmallows over the fire,’ she told me. ‘The boys were fooling around, just having fun, then Lachlan started crying. Ben had accidentally poked him in the eye with a stick. He didn’t mean to,’ she added quickly, reassuring the tearful Ben who pressed against his mum. Lachlan sat quietly on her lap, his eyes closed. The family had driven eighty kilometres that morning in search of a doctor and, within an hour of seeing the RFDS, they were on an emergency flight to Adelaide, their holiday cut short as Lachlan was rushed to theatre for an operation to save his sight.

  An elderly Aboriginal man came in, took a seat in a corner of the waiting room, and smiled and nodded. I pulled out my notebook; I was here to work after all.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked, which was a stupid question to ask someone sitting in a doctor’s surgery, I know.

  ‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘Yep, I’m good.’

  ‘And what do you think of the Flying Doctor?’ Great, another lame question that didn’t deserve an answer. What happened to ‘Hello, my name’s Deb, what’s yours?’ This was the first Aboriginal person I’d ever met and I was unaccountably nervous. I’d spent too much time in the privileged enclave of Sydney’s inner west, where Aboriginal people and white people don’t generally meet.

  ‘They’re good,’ he said. ‘They treat me right. Can’t complain. Yep, I’m good.’

  Before I could ask any more dimwitted questions the man was called in to see the doctor. He stood up, and his slim body was so twisted and bent out of shape that he almost fell over with the effort of putting one foot in front of the other.

  ‘Nice talking to you,’ he said, giving me a gap-toothed grin as he shuffled away.

  I loosened my grip on the pen I’d been clutching, not a word written in my notebook, and looked up to see a nurse standing beside me.

  ‘I called in to see him last week,’ she said. ‘All he had at home was a bed, a wooden chair and a fridge, which was largely empty. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do, anything I could get him. He said he was fine, said he didn’t need anything.’

  I’ve been so attached to possessions that I’ve dragged them halfway across the world and back. I’ve had furniture and boxes stored in Sydney, and in numerous attics and sheds in England, and I couldn’t truthfully tell you what was in any of them. I had a healthy body, money in the bank and food in the fridge . . . and I could still feel sorry for myself at the drop of a hat.

  Even if you never meet the man of your dreams (or in your case, meet him and then mess up) you’ve got nothing to worry about. Get over yourself.

  Thanks, PK. Sound advice.

  *

  Back in Broken Hill, with an hour of daylight left after the flight to the clinic in Ivanhoe, I jumped in the car and drove out to Silverton, foot hard down as the sun slipped lower in the sky. ‘They reckon you can see the curvature of the earth from Mundi Mundi,’ the cheery young man in Broken Hill Tourist Office had told me earlier in the week. ‘Worth watching the sunset from there,’ he added.

  Three campervans were already parked on top of the escarpment, a clutch of couples in deckchairs snuggled under blankets, thermos flasks of something hot and steaming on the ground beside them. I parked a polite distance away and we smiled but didn’t speak, honouring the silence of that surprisingly lonely place.

  I stood outside the car, listening to couples shuffle closer together as the sun sank lower in the sky and the temperature dropped sharply. The frenetic activity of the last few weeks fell away and suddenly there was no escaping my own loneliness. I was fortunate in so many ways and blessed with good health, yet still I felt as empty as the landscape, sad for all the silly mistakes I’d made. Sunset was disappointing and I left the campers to it.

  Driving back, the sky soot black, I stopped the car and got out to stare at the stars, so densely packed and close-fitting I felt I could almost bump my head on them. The thought of what might be out there with me, lurking in the darkness on either side of the road, soon had me scuttling back to the safety of
the car.

  Monday morning, tarmac shimmering with heat haze, I resolved to concentrate on work. I was waiting at the airport to meet Adam, a freelance photographer and documentary filmmaker who lived in Sydney. Adam was a creative type, just the sort I’d be likely to fall for, and he sounded lovely on the phone, which wasn’t good news.

  I once asked a man out on the strength of talking to him on the phone. Listening to Craig talk was like sipping a mug of Belgian hot chocolate, a rich, sweet experience you never wanted to end, only better, heaps better, because there were no calories. Needless to say it didn’t work out.

  As I waited for Adam’s plane to land I sent up a silent wish. Please don’t let this be A4. Please let me just get on with the job I’m being paid to do and stop chasing men.

  I needn’t have worried about Adam; he had long hair. Maybe it’s my age but long hair on a man makes me queasy. I may be a crystal-gazing, Tarot-reading, left-wing vegetarian but when it comes to men I prefer old-fashioned types, with short back and sides.

  Adam strolled over and shook my hand politely, and I looked at his obviously clean hair, held back in a neat ponytail, and I was convinced it smelt like an extractor fan in a Glaswegian chippy. See? I can’t help it.

  We spent the morning taking photographs at the base, Adam operating with methodical care while I flapped around taking notes and, I suspect, generally getting in the way.

  ‘Hey Mike, that incubator’s got a patient.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Picked up last night on the road to Mutawintji.’

  I spun around in disbelief. ‘Are you saying someone found a baby on the side of the road?’

  The flight nurse laughed. ‘No, we were clearing out equipment from the medical campus last week. They found an old incubator that still worked and donated it to the local wildlife rescue group. It’s got a baby kangaroo in it now.’

  I dragged Adam to a house in South Broken Hill, where the incubator had ended up, thinking we might get some shots for a cute news story. The house was filthy and I had to press my cardigan to my nose to block the smell of pee and wet dogs. Nestled in an incubator near the closely drawn curtains of the front room was a baby kangaroo, so small as to be completely hairless, with the gangly limbs of a young colt and scared black eyes.

  ‘His mum was run over,’ said a man with bushy eyebrows and grubby shorts, frown lines etched on his forehead. ‘Road kill. They found this joey in the pouch.’

  We soon gave up on the idea of taking photos; the tiny kangaroo was too distressed, knocking its head on the side of the incubator.

  ‘Do you want to hold it?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, despite my fears of being peed on or getting fleas.

  ‘Have a seat.’

  He gestured to a nearby sofa, sagging under the weight of two large dogs. The dogs made room for me and I settled into a still-warm spot on the baggy lounge, ignoring the cushions beside me that were covered in dog hair, and I opened my arms to a furry, three-month-old joey. He nestled in my arms, tucked inside an old cardigan, and sucked with force from a full bottle, no different to a child.

  I cradled that little joey and forgot all about the smell of pee and wet dogs. This was a warm inviting home, and it was full of love.

  *

  On my last night in Broken Hill the CEO invited me to join him for dinner, a solo invite excluding Adam, which seemed odd. For a second I wondered if it was a date, then I thought maybe he didn’t like long hair on men either.

  It was work, of course – why would it be anything else? – and we were joined by Anne Wakatama, an experienced RFDS doctor who was leaving Broken Hill for a nine-month stint in Canada, to explore spiritual direction. She was slated to be the next Chief Medical Officer on her return.

  We ate in the restaurant on top of the slagheap, choosing from a menu that offered chargrilled crocodile, smoked wallaby, emu sausage and grilled kangaroo.

  ‘Stuffed mushroom, thank you.’

  The town was laid out beneath us in a carpet of light, nothing but black space beyond, and I did my best to keep pace with the flow of medical conversation that frequently left me baffled. I tried to give the impression I was a competent, eager communications professional, instead of the lost-in-space heartbroken spinster who didn’t know what she was doing half the time.

  The CEO dropped me off in his comfortable old Ford and I was home by nine o’clock. I fell into bed exhausted.

  chapter eight

  ‘We’re getting into some tricky driving conditions now. This is going to test the skill of our driver. Woah, this car is sliding all over the place! Hold tight . . .’

  I was on a satellite phone, midway through a live radio interview, in the front passenger seat of a Nissan Patrol that was struggling through a dense, glistening soup of mud somewhere north of Byrock. Imagine driving across parallel bars soaked in treacle, or an ice rink smeared in grease. Add rain. Add darkness. Add a windscreen covered in mud.

  ‘I don’t know if you can hear it, pounding the roof of the vehicle, but the rain is pouring down here, visibility is terrible! There’s mud everywhere and we’re caught in a torrent of it, it’s like we’re surfing a tidal wave of mud!’

  Until that morning, rural New South Wales hadn’t seen a single drop of rain for seven months. Now it was thundering down. The innocuous dirt road we’d been following from Byrock to Cunnamulla had turned into a treacherous swamp. Every dip in the road threw a shock of orange mud across an already opaque windscreen and the wheels refused to grip the squelching, slippery ooze. A steep camber on either side of the slim dirt track encouraged water to run off and left no room for error; the slightest mistake and we’d have been spun off the road and dumped in a ditch.

  I was blithely ignorant of any danger. I assumed Gary, the driver, was saying nothing so I could concentrate on the thrilling radio interview I’d managed to set up. I carried on jabbering, live on air, trying to conjure up a picture of conditions on the RFDS Outback Car Trek for the listeners in Dubbo.

  ‘My goodness the road surface is appalling out here! I can see cars stuck in the ditch up ahead and – woah! – here we go, it looks like we could be in trouble now!’

  The car started to slide and I turned to Gary. His face was a frozen scowl, his eyes were fixed on the road ahead and his bloodless knuckles gripped the steering wheel. Fantastic stuff, I thought. Maybe I should ask him to comment? I pointed the microphone in his direction but before I could ask him one of my killer interview questions, he opened his mouth and spoke, loud enough for listeners in Dubbo to hear. ‘SHUT UP,’ he said, never once taking his eyes off the road.

  In the silence that followed, all I could hear was rain drumming on the roof of the car and the furious swish of windscreen wipers at maximum speed.

  ‘I think I’m losing the signal, I might have to –’ I cut the connection and shrivelled in my seat.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Gary battled to keep us upright, the Nissan squirming and splashing its way through a darkening storm, and I thought back to the start of this peculiar adventure.

  Three days after I got back from Broken Hill I had dragged myself out of bed at 5 am to catch a Saturday morning flight to Dubbo, eyeballs gritty with lack of sleep. My face looked like it had been moulded from a piece of play dough that had been stored too long in the back of a cupboard where it had picked up traces of breakfast cereal, flour, salt and the odd weevil.

  The day before, I’d finally moved into the skinny house on Rowntree Street (gratefully inheriting second-hand white goods from the previous owners, furniture from Anny and a desk from Kate), then it was off to Dubbo for the start of the RFDS Outback Car Trek.

  I was revved up and running at a million miles an hour, dragging press lists and press releases with me, wondering what kind of lists A3 was drawing up for his impending wedding. There would be guest lists and a gift registry,
hymns, flowers, wine lists, menus, hotel rooms . . . I slammed the lid on my wayward thoughts and concentrated on work. How was I going to make it through the next six days? I’d forgotten anything I ever knew about PR long ago (and let’s face it, that wasn’t much in the first place) and this event was the Flying Doctor’s biggest annual fundraiser. I was expected to generate publicity for it and the only way to do that was to join it.

  There was no mistaking the Trek support vehicle parked outside Dubbo airport: a Nissan Patrol bristling with orange lights, satellite dishes and roof-mounted aerials, with a sturdy roo bar at the front and a roof rack groaning with gear. The back was full of telecommunications equipment and serious emergency medical gear – stretchers, evacuation mats and defibrillators. IT manager Gary Oldman was a man on a mission. A stocky bundle of cropped hair with a bristling grey moustache, he was the self-appointed driver of the car and keeper of the kit. Gary grudgingly found space for my bag, one of the few that disappointingly for him contained nothing to plug in or switch on, and over a breakfast of bacon and eggs in a local café I met the rest of the Flying Doctor support team: Canadian doctor Bill from Broken Hill, and Aussie flight nurse Di from Dubbo. I smiled politely and picked up the menu.

  Who’s that big hairy biker?

  Miss PK had her sights trained on the final person at the table. He looked like Dennis the Menace’s grandfather, with straggly grey hair spilling down his back and a beard as long as it was wide, sprawling over his ample chest and crawling across his shoulders. He had so much hair I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It might have been the weight of his beard trapping the sound in but I could have sworn he said he was one of the crew. Miss Prissy Knickers came over all English and polite.

  ‘I’ll have a pot of tea, thank you.’