by Sue Williams
These days, there’s been a dramatic increase in the amount of grass around the homestead, too. Before, nothing grew, with the rainwater tanks providing only enough water for the house. But with a pipeline now installed from the dam to bring much more water to where it’s needed, there’s plenty of good grass, including Mitchell grass and a flurry of native shrubs, and an increase in the number of birds and wild animals. The horses are benefitting too. ‘This wide, open-range landscape and good grass seems to grow strong horses here,’ says Lyn. ‘It’s a great climate for them and they’re good jumpers and strong. They don’t seem to break down.’
While life can be difficult, Lyn says the Outback is also full of miracles. One time, she was driving Sarah, who was about 10, her friend Tammy and baby Ellen the 350 kilometres from Roxby Downs, in the dead of night, when a terrible storm blew up, the sluicing rain making the clay road treacherously slippery. To this day, she doesn’t know why she did it, but she stopped the car and told the children to come and sit up front with her, and to take Ellen out of the baby seat and bring her with them, so they could all sit together and singsongs as they pushed on through the squall. A few minutes after they’d moved, she lost control of the vehicle and it flipped into a complete 360-degree roll, landing back on its wheels. The girls were thrown out, Sarah crawling from under the car unharmed – and Tammy unhurt close by – worried only about the others, but the baby was nowhere to be seen. After a frenzied search, they finally found her under the glove box. She was untouched, too.
Sarah remembers it vividly. ‘In spite of the damage and every window, including the windscreen, being smashed, Mum got the car started and we kept driving, looking for help,’ she says. ‘At one point she spotted lights in the distance and we drove to an electrical substation. To scale the 10-foot wire fence and seek assistance, Mum parked the front of the car against the fence and climbed over from the bonnet. Unfortunately, no one was there. I don’t even remember how she got back over that fence to return to the car and keep driving! Four hours later she finally got us to a highway camp to get warm and dry, packed us off to the clinic in Marree and then to Leigh Creek for X-rays and treatment. She was quite incredible!’
Lyn has never quite been able to believe it either. ‘When we got home the next morning, I looked in the car and there was a broken pyrex dish and the big jack and toolbox all on the back seat,’ Lyn says. ‘So taking them out of their seats and putting them in the front saved their lives. I hate to think what would have happened if they’d stayed where they’d been. I think that was another one for the Outback miracle file!’
Mostly, Lyn just feels lucky to live where she does, among such wide-open spaces, with her dogs and horses and the people who matter the most to her in the world. ‘I just feel so fortunate to be here,’ she says. ‘Yes, we don’t have much growing, and there’s lots of gibber stone, but we’ve had three rains now in three years, and flooding creeks. We have no bushfires, no earthquakes, no terrorism. It’s the safest place in the world, and one of the most beautiful!
‘I take such inspiration from nature; you find beauty in the Outback where often you least expect it. I’ve seen little bluebell flowers, bluey-purple in colour, totally gorgeous, in the middle of the drought, growing along the cattle pad on the way into the dusty yard where they can only ever have been watered by cattle urine! That’s so inspirational.
I try to think, Well, even when times are hard, and people are doing it tough, you don’t have to be dragged down. You too can be the little bluebell in the Outback, flowering in the drought! It’s up to all of us to bloom where we are planted.’
7
DUST AND SNOW
Ann Ward, Mirima, Western Australia
On the first day of Dr Ann Ward’s new job as a Flying Doctor, looking after patients across a mind-boggling 390 000-square-kilometre area – three times the size of England – she had to tend to a man having a heart attack, and then treat a pregnant woman whose amniotic fluid had become infected.
A few weeks later, a 17-year-old shot himself in the face in a lonely little roadhouse out back of beyond . . . and survived. It was a heart-rending call. The young man had desperately wanted to finish his life but now he felt as if he’d failed even at that and, as a result, was having to contemplate living the rest of his days permanently disfigured.
It was 1989, and it wasn’t long before Ann wondered what the hell she’d let herself in for. Signing up for a position with the Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS) in Meekatharra in Western Australia’s isolated mid-west Murchison region, 760 kilometres north-east of Perth, had seemed like a perfectly fine idea at the time. Now she wasn’t quite so sure.
‘It was both agony and ecstasy,’ she says. ‘It was very stressful, with so little sleep and no support. I discovered you did everything yourself in the bush and had to be completely self-reliant. I was flying by the seat of my pants. You couldn’t assume you have blood tests or an X-ray ever available. You just have to be a true rural doctor and rely on your own resources. And then, on top of that, when you’re flying to an emergency at night, some of the landings could be very scary. The pilots were so brave, occasionally even attempting to land on little airstrips, lit only by local people’s car headlights.
But in between the nail-biting moments, the battles to save lives with limited equipment in some of the most remote spots of Australia, there were always the lighter times.
Once, a young man came racing to the door of the hospital at Meekatharra, sobbing broken-heartedly. ‘My mum, she’s dead!’ he gasped. ‘She’s died! She’s dead!’ Ann did her best to calm him down, then drove him back to his darkened house.
‘I’d better go in and check,’ she told him. He looked afraid. ‘I can’t go there,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s too sad. I can’t do it.’ Ann put a comforting hand on his arm. ‘No, you wait here,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go and see.’
She stepped gingerly onto the veranda where the woman lay, lighting her way with a torch. On the dark floor she could see two legs sticking out from under the sheet. She walked slowly up to the woman, bent down, and carefully prised open her eyelids to shine the torch into her eyes to confirm she was dead.
At that, the woman screamed. ‘It frightened the life out of me!’ recalls Ann. ‘It made me jump. I went back to the man, told him his mother was very much alive and asked how come he’d told me she was dead. He looked shame-faced and said, “Well, she didn’t answer when I spoke to her!”’
But quite apart from wanting to do her bit working for the Flying Doctors in Australia’s vast Outback, there was an additional reason Ann had chosen to base herself in Meekatharra in 1989. And it was all about training for what was set to be another great challenge of her life, and on a different continent entirely.
A year after starting work in the endless red dust of Meekatharra, Ann was standing on the white sands of the Indian island of Ganga Sagar, on the Bay of Bengal, one of the most famous Hindu pilgrimage sites in the world. By her side was celebrated mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape, whom she’d married just the year before.
In 1984, Tim and his friend Greg Mortimer had been the first Australians to reach the summit of Mount Everest. This time, however, in February 1990, his plan was even more ambitious: to become the first person ever to climb Everest from the sea to the summit – since its 8874-metre height is measured from sea level – with Ann by his side for most of the way as both his partner and his doctor on the gruelling Australian Geographic-sponsored expedition.
‘It was an extraordinary experience,’ says Ann today. ‘I took six months off to do it, and it was pretty tough-going.’ It meant an almighty trek of 1200 kilometres from the sea at the Bay of Bengal, where the first slope of the mountain really begins, through north-east India to the Nepalese border, and then up the Himalayan foothills to the Everest base camp. Ann would be base camp doctor and Tim would continue on to the summit alone, carrying a pack with a tent, food, fuel and a movie camera to record his ascent, and
without any supplemental oxygen.
Yet even the first part of the couple’s journey became an ordeal. It meant swimming across the River Ganges at the Bay of Bengal, then running or walking alongside the heaving traffic of Calcutta, and forcing their way through swarming crowds at every point. ‘I didn’t want to swim freestyle in the Ganges as I didn’t want to put my face in the water,’ says Ann. ‘I really didn’t want to swallow any, either. The swim took ages. And even though I was so careful, I was still sick that night!’
The pair then had to cope with various bouts of illness along the way, blisters, running in 32-degree-Celsius heat, robbery and exhaustion. But on the Nepalese border, another huge blow awaited. The border had closed and they were diverted to the only other crossing where foreigners were allowed through – an extra 300 kilometres away. With Tim running and Ann cycling the last stretch to keep up, it became a desperate race against time to reach the base camp before the monsoons swept in along the way and, higher up, temperatures plunged and snow thickened on the summit, bringing with it the added threat of avalanches.
As soon as they finally arrived at the Everest base camp, Tim set off up the side of the mountain to make the final ascent alone. Yet Ann was still with him mentally. She spoke to him constantly over a radiophone to monitor his health and see how he was faring. And that was, quite possibly, the very worst part.
Tim suffered bouts of diarrhoea, was dehydrated, often light-headed and weak with nausea and battled with the minus-30-degree temperatures. At one point, he nearly fell to his death when he stopped to readjust the camera he was carrying. Ann, fearing he’d die up there alone, urged him to give up and come down. A film made of the expedition, Everest: Sea to Summit, became an internationally awarded adventure documentary, and makes heart-wrenching viewing with Ann’s pleas to Tim.
Afterwards, however, that became a bone of contention between the two, with Tim accusing her of not having had enough faith in him. Entrepreneur Dick Smith, of Australian Geographic, who accompanied the couple part of the way, became a huge supporter of Ann’s. ‘I saw that in a completely positive way,’ he says. ‘To have your husband up there on the verge of death on the highest mountain of the world . . . I thought she handled it really well. If I’d been in Tim’s place, I would have thought it wonderful to have such a caring wife. She was always so adventurous herself, and so capable, clever and also very beautiful.’
Ann grew up a smart, adventurous kid. Born in Malaysia in 1959, the daughter of a Chinese mother, Shirley, and English father, Grimshaw, who came to the country after serving as a naval engineer in the war, she spent her first years in Alor Setar, 45 kilometres south of the Thai border, and in the bustling city of Johor Bahru, across the water from Singapore. Her parents had eloped in the UK as her mother’s father, distraught his daughter hadn’t chosen a Chinese husband, had threatened to shoot her British suitor. ‘But they then made their peace and went back to Malaysia to live and all was forgiven,’ says Ann.
Ann’s father had a job with the public works department but, with recent independence and the country’s growing nationalism, as well as the prospect of sending Ann and her older brother Michael off to school overseas, the family decided to leave in 1965 and travel around the world in the hope of finding a new home. They went via the US – dropping in at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair – New Zealand and Australia, finally ending up in Perth, where they decided to stay.
It was a culture shock for everyone. Ann’s mother, having had servants all her life, only knew how to cook an egg and their first Christmas dinner in Australia turned into a disaster when she hadn’t realised she actually had to stuff a turkey, and that it would need more than an hour in the oven to roast. For Ann, too, it was tough.
‘I remember all the kids singing “Puff, The Magic Dragon”, and having to mouth along and pretend I knew what was going on,’ she says. ‘It was pretty hard. Then there weren’t many Asian kids around in Australia in those days and towards the end of primary school, I was targeted by bullies. I think that shaped me a bit in terms of developing determination.’ It would also lead to a lifelong empathy for the underdog – any person, or people, who might be similarly struggling.
Ann was a reasonably good student, and her dogged determination to succeed stood her in good stead. When she confided to a boyfriend at school that she was thinking of going on to university to study medicine and he casually commented that she probably wouldn’t get in, the die was cast. She did extremely well in her final exams, and attended the medical school at the University of Western Australia, graduating in 1983.
From there, she worked around Perth in various hospitals in all disciplines, including paediatrics, anaesthetics, intensive care, cardiology, endocrinology, accident & emergency, and general surgery. A boyfriend provided a turning point in her life there too. In 1984, she’d been planning to go trekking in Nepal with him but they cancelled when his father committed suicide a few weeks before they were due to leave. They later broke up, and in 1985 she flew to Kathmandu alone, joining a group to go trekking.
‘I decided to go by myself to bury the ghost, in a sense,’ she says. ‘I found it an amazing experience. Walking with everything you need in your backpack . . . It felt very healing. There’s something about the rhythm of walking, it’s very therapeutic. You spend a lot of time in your own head, and you can just savour letting your mind go where it wants. There are no phones and you’re in a beautiful environment and life is very simple. It’s very basic, and I found I loved it. It was a very significant, very important trip for me.’
On the plane on the way home, her eye was caught by a tall, thin, sinewy man, showing people some black and white photos he’d taken. They spoke briefly, and she discovered he had a company, Wilderness Expeditions, that led treks. She’d already decided she wanted to return to Nepal, so thought she might as well do it with his company. He took her address and said he’d send her a brochure.
Three months after returning home, she was watching a documentary on the first Australian expedition to Everest, and was taken aback to see the man she’d spoken to was one of the first two Australians to reach the summit. His name was Tim Macartney-Snape.
Ann took three months off the next year to go trekking, once with friends and another time with Tim’s company. She loved it and was later asked if she’d like to lead treks. Her medical qualifications, as well as her natural aptitude for trekking and easy sociability, made her a perfect candidate. So, at the end of 1987, she took a year off and co-led a trek, then started leading them alone and, in between treks, she sometimes stayed in Sherpa villages with the friends she made.
Her time in Nepal was never uneventful. One day in March 1988, she was visiting the zoo in Kathmandu with her Dutch boyfriend, fellow trek leader Gert Esselink, when a massive storm burst on the city, with lightning, high winds and huge hailstones lashing down. As the pair raced for cover, a tree was struck by lightning and fell. Ann was hit by the smaller branches but her boyfriend took the full force and was slammed hard on the head and landed facedown in a shallow pool of water, unconscious. As Ann tried to lift him, he started vomiting bright red blood and fitting. She shouted for help but everyone else was too busy rushing for safety themselves, so she held him, then performed mouth-to-mouth to restart his breathing. A zookeeper eventually helped the couple by opening the gates to the zoo and finding a taxi driver prepared to drive in the storm. The three of them carried Ann’s boyfriend into the taxi to ferry him to the local hospital.
They were lucky to arrive when they did. A few minutes later, it was pandemonium. Thirty thousand people had been at the national stadium watching a football match between Nepal and Bangladesh when the storm hit, and thousands stampeded for the locked exits, with 93 killed in the crush, and over a hundred more badly injured. People were being brought en masse to the hospital, with doctors and nurses trying to resuscitate the injured, but moving quickly to the next person if there were no obvious signs of life.
‘The dead bodies were being lined up on the floor. There were 17 bodies just in front of me where I was bagging [giving artificial ventilation with a respirator bag] my boyfriend,’ says Ann. ‘It seemed so unreal.
‘The king and queen visited the hospital and two days of national mourning were declared. Hospital conditions were very basic and we had to buy our own medications and needles. I slept on the floor beside his bed, and the trekking company that my boyfriend worked for brought in food for us. He was badly head injured. When his condition started to decline we made the decision to arrange to fly him out to Bangkok, and I would escort him.’ Within an hour of his arrival, a CAT scan revealed Gert had suffered a potentially deadly extradural haematoma and had to undergo seven hours of emergency neurosurgery. ‘He survived, but his recovery took a few months,’ says Ann.
She met up again with Tim back in Sydney and the pair went rock-climbing together, and came back as partners. ‘I saved Gert’s life, but I broke his heart,’ says Ann. She and Tim then returned together to Nepal, this time with his friends Dick and Pip Smith, for a trek. ‘She was certainly the best of any of the girlfriends he’d had,’ says Dick. ‘I liked her right from the start.’ Pip felt the same. ‘She was absolutely delightful!’ she says. ‘I found her a very bright person who’d done some amazing things.’
Ann finally returned from Nepal at the end of 1988 and commenced a post with the Western Australian section of the RFDS, based in Meekatharra. Tim was all for it. He felt he’d be able to learn to fly there, he wanted to do some writing, and he also felt the hot, dry landscape, with its rocky mountains and boulders, would make the perfect training ground for his next climbing adventure. Ann started work there in January 1989 and the couple married that March. In any time off, she explored the country with her new husband while he turned his sights to his next assault on Everest, this time from the sea to the summit.