The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  As it turned out, after the mayday call, Jan had shut the left engine down in case it was contributing to the problem. But unbeknown to him at the time, the fuel tank had ruptured in the left wing and the wiring loom had set fire to it. So not only was the wing on fire but by that stage it’d burnt the flap controls out, leaving him with full flap condition on one side and none on the other. It’s called an asymmetric flap condition.

  Then after he shut the engine down, he dropped the landing gear in case the fire raged through into the undercarriage as well. By that time things were starting to get pretty interesting from a flying point of view. But Jan being Jan, he somehow managed to wrestle the burning aeroplane onto the ground at Lansdowne Station. When it rolled to a stop he got everybody outside to safety. With that done he went back and grabbed the fire extinguisher from inside and managed to put the fire out.

  So, my premonition had been right, after all. Jan had, um, saved the, um, day, thankfully.

  Missing

  During 1955 to ’56 I was working on Troughton Island which is just off the far north coast of Western Australia, out in the Timor Sea. The island itself was quite small, only about three-quarters of a mile long and half a mile wide. A year and a bit I was there, employed at a government high-frequency direction-finding station, keeping track of shipping movements in the area.

  In early February ’56, I got a toothache; pretty bad it was, so we flagged down a passing ship which took me to the mainland, to Wyndham in fact. There I went to see the local doctor in the hopes that he’d be able to extract the tooth.

  ‘Not my cup o’ tea,’ he reckoned.

  This doctor was an Australian Rugby Union international. As strong as a bull, he was. But when it came to pulling teeth, especially without the aid of anaesthetic, he went to water.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to have a go,’ I said. ‘The pain’s killing me.’

  So he did.

  But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remove the tooth. As a last resort, he suggested that we go down to the local drinking establishment and have a few whiskies. The object there was to induce an anaesthetic effect on me and for him to gain some much needed Dutch courage. So we did that, and when we came back he had another go at the tooth. That didn’t work either so we headed off down to the local watering hole again for a top-up.

  We did this a few times, back and forward, back and forward, but still the tooth wouldn’t budge. By this time neither of us could walk a straight line.

  ‘Best I can do is to get yer to Darwin,’ he slurred, and added that there was a plane passing through in a couple of days.

  So I cadged a lift on that plane. Bugger of a trip it was, with the thing landing at every station and halfway house between Wyndham and Darwin, dropping off grog and supplies. Mostly grog, I might add. It was pretty wild out there in those days. And on every landing, the station people were sympathetic to my problem and plied me with a top-up of ‘anaesthetic’.

  By the time we landed at Darwin airport I was anaesthetised to every inch of my body, except where it mattered — to the aching tooth. My cheek had puffed up like a balloon. When I finally saw the dentist he took one look, put his hand in my mouth, gave the tooth the gentlest of tweaks and…out it came, just like magic.

  It was while I was in Darwin that the Flying Doctor Service over in Derby got a call from an outlying property. The station manager’s baby was very sick so they flew out there. The weather was atrocious. Anyway, they arrived safely at the station, picked up the sick child and the mother, and took off again to return to base.

  On their way back, they went missing.

  A search was mounted and a plane with direction-finding equipment on board was flown from Perth up to Darwin. Somehow the news had spread that I was in town so they contacted me to go out in a search aircraft. My job was to pick up the automatic distress signal which the pilot would’ve set off the moment that he knew he was in strife. If we heard the signal then we could pinpoint where the plane was and go in and get the survivors. To help us in our mission all transmitting stations throughout Australia which ran on that particular frequency were shut down for an hour or so.

  So we set off and flew over the search area. Extremely rugged country it was. Up and down we went, this way and that. But I never heard a sound.

  Then later that month, the wreckage of the plane was discovered in the King Leopold Ranges, out from Derby. They’d flown straight into a cliff face. All five people on board had been killed.

  Mission Impossible

  They say that you can’t do the impossible. And I’d have to go along with that. If something’s impossible to do, then it’s impossible to do it. You can’t do it. It’s impossible. Full stop. But I’ll give you a tongue twister. I reckon that the Flying Doctor Service has gone as close to doing the impossible as it’s possible to do, and on quite a few occasions, too, I might add.

  Why, just a year or so ago there was this young geophysicist chap. He and his survey crew were correcting boundaries by satellite, out in the Tirara Desert, beyond the Simpson Desert, in probably one of the most isolated parts of Australia.

  One morning, around 8 o’clock, this young chap left the camp to go out and do some survey work. There he was in his Land Rover, driving through the bush, when he came upon a desert taipan. Now these things are the most venomous snakes in Australia, even more so than the Cape York taipan, and they’re pretty deadly. So what he did was he ran over this blinking five-foot-long snake. The trouble was that he made a slight error of judgment and ran over the tail section of the snake and not the body as he’d intended.

  He must have had his elbow resting out the window at the time because this snake bounded up like lightning… Zap…and latched onto him. There he was driving along with the fangs of this desert taipan embedded in his arm. The more he tried to shake the thing off the tighter it latched on, and the tighter it latched on the more poison it pumped into him. Eventually, he shook the snake off and he got on his Traeger radio and called up his camp.

  ‘I’ve just been bitten by a hell of a snake,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well, you’d better get back here quick and we’ll start to get things happening at this end,’ his mate replied.

  So his mate called the Flying Doctor Service in Broken Hill.

  ‘What sort of snake’s he been bitten by?’ the doctor asked.

  Now that was something no one knew at the time, not even the lad, but to be on the safe side the doctor said that they’d fly up there immediately and bring along as many vials of antivenene as he could find. So, after they sorted out where the nearest airstrip was, the mate got on to Santos in the Moomba gasfields who said they’d send up a helicopter, post haste, to transport the lad from the camp to the airstrip.

  So the Flying Doctor plane, a Super King Air, arrived at the designated outback airstrip, a map reference of about 30 miles from where the boys were camped. Not long after, the helicopter arrived with the young chap aboard. By this stage the lad was almost unconscious. It was touch and go so the doctor pumped some antivenene into him. Then they whipped him into the aircraft where the doctor gave him another shot which he apparently had a severe reaction to.

  They took off from this dirt airstrip which was, as I said, out in one of the most remote parts of Australia, and in just under an hour they had the young feller in intensive care in the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

  Now that’s as close to achieving the impossible as you can get, I reckon. What’s more, the lad lived and is now back on the job. He should have died but he didn’t. It was just one of those miracles of survival, one that even surprised the young chap. When he woke up two days later, the first thing he said was, ‘Tell Mum I’m still alive!’

  Mud Happens

  Just the day to go out wearing my new Rossi boots instead of my normal old nurse’s shoes. Just the day to wear a good pair of pants instead of shorts. But it was cold, and we were heading out to a cattle station just north of Alice Springs where I knew that i
t’d be much colder.

  An old station owner had been driving along in the manner that old farmers do when his ute hit a bump. Up he went, and when he came down again, he smashed his chest on the steering wheel.

  ‘He might’a cracked some ribs, I reckon,’ a young jackaroo had told us over the radio.

  It’d been raining so we asked the jackaroo if he knew what condition the airstrip was in. ‘Just hang on a tick,’ he said. There was some shouting in the background before the jackaroo came back on. ‘The old bloke says yer won’t have any trouble at all,’ he said. ‘Reckons it’s as good as gold, as good as gold.’

  Still, the pilot waited for a strip report to confirm that it was okay and then off we went, out to pick up this old man, just the pilot and myself. There wasn’t a doctor on that trip. There was no real need, really. It was a simple evacuation. In and out, and back to Alice Springs.

  The clouds were quite heavy so we stayed low. Then when we arrived, the pilot flew over the runway just to double-check its condition. Everything seemed okay, just like the old bloke had said, ‘as good as gold’. The young jackaroo was down there waiting with the man. A young jillaroo was also there. So we landed and loaded the old boy onto the plane. About eighty he was. As deaf as a post. A cantankerous old bugger to boot.

  ‘What’re yer doin’?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m checking your blood pressure,’ I said.

  ‘Me what?’

  ‘Your blood pressure,’ I shouted.

  Everything was ‘What’s that?’ or ‘What’re yer doing?’ Then I’d have to repeat myself before he understood. It was just that he didn’t hear properly.

  Anyway, it was about 10.30 in the morning when we got the old bugger settled in the plane. We said goodbye to the young jackaroo and the jillaroo, who turned out to be brother and sister. Over from Queensland they were. One had been there a week, the other for about three months.

  So the pilot taxied to the end of the strip to prepare for take-off, which was the end from where we’d landed. As he was sweeping the plane around in a wide arc, we came to an abrupt halt. There was this sinking feeling, and down we went into a well-disguised, grassy bog.

  Now, bogging an aeroplane is one of the worst things that can happen to a pilot. It’s something they’re never likely to live down, a stigma that stays with them for the remainder of their days. And our pilot was well aware of the fact. But what made it all the more painful in this case was that he’d been given a strip report that assured him everything was okay. So, there he was, up the front, slapping the dashboard and swearing to the heavens.

  So I let the pilot be. When he’d settled down we got out and inspected the situation. It didn’t look good. We were in deep. Mud was halfway up the front wheel and also the right-hand side wheel.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the old farmer called from inside the plane.

  ‘We’re bogged,’ I shouted.

  ‘We’re what?’

  ‘We’re bogged!’

  ‘Could’ve told you it were soft up this end.’

  The pilot and I raised our eyebrows to the heavens and, without saying a word, we agreed to leave the old chap inside while we had a go at lifting the plane out of the bog. So, with the two young kids helping us, we pushed. We pulled. We shoved. We dragged. But the plane wouldn’t budge. So I opened the door of the aircraft to see how the old bloke was going.

  ‘What’s goin’ on out there?’ came a familiar voice.

  ‘We’re still bogged,’ I called back.

  While the brother and sister went back to the homestead to get another four-wheel-drive vehicle, the pilot called our mechanics in Alice Springs to find out where to tie the towropes so that the undercarriage wouldn’t get damaged as we were pulling the plane out. Then the kids arrived back, loaded to the hilt with more towropes, bog-mesh, shovels, fence posts and chains. So we dug around the wheels, hooked up the towropes to the four-wheel drives and we pulled. Snap went the towropes.

  ‘Bugger,’ I said, then looked down at my mud-soaked Rossi boots and long pants. ‘Double bugger.’

  But we didn’t give up. We dug out more mud, retied the towropes, laid down the bog-mesh, hooked up the vehicles and pulled again. This time — Whoosh — the wheels went straight through the bog-mesh and deeper into the mud. So we dug some more, then tried putting chains under the wheels for traction. That didn’t work either. It seemed like nothing was going to work.

  For a fleeting moment we even considered sitting the old bugger outside on a chair and getting him to help out with a few directions and suggestions. But that was for only a fleeting moment.

  ‘Used ta be a swamp down this end, it did,’ he shouted, ‘but we filled it in ta make the airstrip.’

  ‘I thought you said it was as good as gold,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he called.

  ‘I said, I thought that you told us that the strip was as good as gold!’

  So we dug some more and we tried packing timber around the wheels, and still the plane wouldn’t budge. By this stage the pilot was about ready to give up.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘just a little bit longer, just keep trying.’

  The other option was to borrow the front-end loader from Utopia, an Aboriginal community about 30 kilometres away. Utopia, by the way, is the place where Aboriginal dot painting first began. But, from where we were, Utopia was a good hour or so’s drive, over and back, which would’ve meant that we’d have to stay the night out there in the company of you-know-who.

  So, desperate measures had to be taken. And they were. I straddled the cockpit and opened the window so that I could hear, then I tried to steer with my feet in an attempt to keep the nose wheel straight. But that didn’t work either. So we grabbed some metal fence posts, ‘star-droppers’ they’re called, and we laid them sideways under the wheels in the hope they might act like a little ramp. And it worked, and we finally managed to pull the plane out. Over four hours it’d taken. But we’d done it. We were out.

  ‘What’s goin’ on now?’

  ‘We’re out of the bog.’

  ‘We’re what?’

  ‘We’re out of the bog!’

  ‘Let’s have a cup o’ tea and some biscuits, then,’ he said.

  So we did. Apart from my wrecked Rossis and pants, things could’ve been worse. We were just lucky that the cranky old bugger’s injuries weren’t more serious than they were. But the person who I really felt sorry for was the pilot. He knew he was going to be in for a hell of a ribbing when we got back to Alice Springs. And he was.

  The moment we arrived, the engineers appeared on the scene. ‘We weren’t worried, Penny,’ they said. ‘We knew a country girl like you would get him out o’ trouble.’

  Night Eyes

  One day we got a call from this chap who was up in the Flinders Ranges, in the north of South Australia. He said that he’d been following a car along a dirt road when it’d overturned, leaving two ladies stuck inside with bad injuries. A third woman, who was also hurt, had been able to free herself from the vehicle. When we asked the bloke his whereabouts, he gave his location as being near a certain airstrip in the national park.

  ‘We’ll meet you there, then,’ we said.

  ‘No worries,’ he replied. ‘I’ll stay with the ladies until I see your plane coming in then I’ll drive straight out and pick you up.’

  ‘Okay,’ we said, ‘we’ll be there ASAP.’

  Now, attempting to land a plane in the Flinders Ranges is a difficult task at the best of times, especially in the national park. Firstly, it’s quite mountainous in places and, secondly, the airstrips are extremely short. But the pilot was willing to give it a go just as long as we could get out of there before dark. Getting out before dark was the least of our problems. We had plenty of daylight hours up our sleeve. What’s more, with the accident occurring near the airstrip as the bloke had said, things were set for a speedy evacuation.

  So we flew to the airstrip that the chap had mentioned but when we landed n
o one came out to meet us. We waited for a while. Then we waited for a little while longer, and still he hadn’t turned up. Eventually, we radioed through and found out that the chap had mistakenly given us the name of the wrong airstrip and the accident had occurred about 30 or 40 kilometres down the road.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the doctor, ‘stuck in the middle of nowhere with no visible means of road transport and the accident victims are stuck in their car down the track’ — which just about summed the situation up, really.

  We were scratching our heads, considering our minimal options, when a cloud of dust came around the corner. And out of that cloud of dust appeared a small tourist bus. At the sight of the bus we ran over and blocked the road to make sure that it’d stop.

  Now when the bus driver pulled up you’d swear that a couple of those tourists thought it was a hold-up because video recorders and cameras disappeared from view and their eyes glazed over with fear. I don’t know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought that we were the Kelly gang in disguise or something and I was Ned Kelly in drag, all dressed up in a nurse’s uniform for the occasion. I don’t know. What’s more, we didn’t take the time to check. We were too busy telling our tale of woe to the driver and asking if he could drive us down to pick up the injured people.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Anything to be of help.’

  Then he told the tourists that they had to get out of the bus, which was something that a few of them didn’t look too keen on doing, I might add.

  ‘No, no. No robbery,’ he said, trying to allay their fears. ‘No, no. No hijack. Everything fine-and-dandy.’

  When the last of the tourists was evicted, we loaded our medical gear into the small bus and jumped aboard. Then the driver took off, leaving the pilot behind to attempt to explain to the tourists why they’d been dumped in the middle of the uninhabitable wilds of Australia, as they saw it.