The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  ‘You can’t rock up at Government House dressed like you’ve just wandered in off the opal fields,’ we said.

  ‘Why not?’ he reckoned.

  Anyway, Jeff Cole, who was the General Manager of John Martin’s at that stage, as well as being on the South Australian Tourist Board, rushed him off to Johnnies and decked Old Bill out with a suit and tie, shoes and socks, jocks, the lot. He even had his hair cut and his beard was trimmed. I tell you, he looked an absolute picture of sartorial splendour by the time we dropped him off at Government House.

  A few of us had arranged to meet him back at the Grosvener Hotel after the ceremony. Eventually Old Bill arrived looking like a million dollars. We were about to shout him a couple of drinks but when we looked round he’d disappeared. Nobody could find him. Then ten minutes later he appeared with a grin from ear to ear. There he was — he’s got his old T-shirt on, his desert boots, his shorts and he’s as happy as a pig in shit.

  ‘Okay, sonny, your shout,’ he announced.

  That suit never again saw the light of day.

  I tell you, he was a real character was Old Bill. Then later, of course, he got real crook. There were numerous things wrong by that stage, all the results of his free-and-easy lifestyle. I remember the day that we flew him out of Andamooka to bring him down to hospital in Adelaide. The poor old bloke knew that it was his last flight. He knew he was dying. As we were loading him onto the plane, he leaned over and slipped a heap of money to Margo Duke, his great friend from the Andamooka Post Office.

  ‘This is fer me wake, girlie,’ he said.

  And some wake it was too, I can tell you.

  So that’s Old Bill, like I said, a real character. He’s been dead now for near on eight years. But he certainly hasn’t been forgotten because on every Easter Saturday people from all over set off on the 10 kilometres’ walk from Andamooka out to Old Bill’s place at White Dam. On the day, they raise $6000 to $8000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Then when they arrive at the Ettamogah Pub site everyone gathers around and they have a few drinks and a barbecue, all in memory of Old Bill McDougall.

  Once Bitten, Twice Shy

  I reckon it must have been about four, or half-past four, on a Sunday morning. I was still in bed for some unknown reason. Anyway, the telephone rang. It was Big Joe McCraddok, the police sergeant from Birdsville. Mind you, I’ve changed names and locations here to protect the guilty.

  ‘Come quick. Come quick,’ Joe called.

  ‘Why, Joe?’ I replied. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Roota Kozlowski’s been bit b’ a snake,’ he said. ‘Roota Kozlowski’s been bit b’ a snake.’

  Now you’d be able to imagine the sort of character Roota Kozlowski was, just from his nickname, but maybe you haven’t heard about Big Joe McCraddok. He’s quite famous around these parts. A real true-blue bush character. They did an article on him in one of those monthly magazines, a while back. The locals really gave him a stirring about that, especially the way he was posing outside the pub, in his uniform and all. Anyway, that’s the media for you. Because, believe me, Big Joe’s nothing like that. He’s as male as they come; a real man’s man, through and through.

  ‘What symptoms has Roota got?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘He’s still about half an hour out of town but he’s on his way in so, if you come now, you’ll be here just that much quicker.’

  That sent me into a spin. I mean, Joe of all people knows that it takes time to organise the plane and everything, and there he was expecting me to be in Birdsville at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Look, Joe, you’ll have to give Roota first aid yourself,’ I said. ‘I won’t be able to get there within half an hour, you know that.’

  ‘Oh,’ came the disappointed reply. ‘Must I?’

  ‘You’ve done it plenty of times before,’ I said. ‘All you’ve got to do is to apply pressure immobilisation on him the moment he arrives in town.’

  There was dead silence.

  ‘Where’s he been bitten?’ I asked.

  The dead silence continued.

  ‘Joe, are you there?’ I said. ‘Where’s Roota been bitten?’

  ‘Look, Doc, I can’t speak too loud ’cause I’m ringing from the pub. There’s a few of the blokes here and all they know is that Roota’s been bit b’ a snake, but I haven’t told them exactly where.’

  ‘But I’ve got to know exactly where he’s been bitten, Joe,’ I said, avoiding the question as to what he was doing in the pub with ‘a few of the blokes’ at that hour of the morning. ‘Joe, can you hear me?’

  ‘On the penis,’ came the whisper.

  Well, that certainly got me thinking. I mean, Roota’s Roota and the many and varied stories of his sexual exploits were known far and wide, but how in the hell a bloke could’ve got himself bitten in that spot defied imagination.

  ‘On the what?’ I asked.

  ‘You heard me. Roota’s been bit on the penis,’ came the answer, fractionally louder.

  Well, that was clear enough. It also explained Big Joe’s apprehension about having to give first aid. You could just imagine the comments from the blokes in the pub as they watched Joe apply pressure immobilisation to Roota Kozlowski, especially with it being in that particular region. And so soon after the magazine article and all. Joe’d never live it down.

  ‘Look, Joe,’ I said, ‘I know what’s going through your mind, mate, but you’ve got to forget all that rubbish. The point is, if you don’t give the treatment, Roota could well die. Do I make myself very clear, Joe?’

  Silence.

  ‘So, Joe,’ I continued, ‘as soon as Roota arrives, get him to whip down his pants, then apply pressure immobilisation. And what’s more, hold onto it until I get there, right.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you hear me, Joe!’

  ‘Okay,’ came the reluctant reply.

  As the story goes, Roota pulled into town not too much later, very groggy from the snake bite. He blundered into the pub and saw Joe over by the bar with a few of the blokes, all of them looking extremely downcast.

  ‘Have yer spoken to the doctor?’ Roota asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Joe mumbled.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Well, Roota,’ Joe said, ‘doc reckons yer gonna die.’

  One Shot

  This happened in a place called Boulia, which is 140 nautical miles south of Mount Isa, in the Diamantina channel country. And as in many of those places out that way, they’ve got very wide main streets. That’s because, in the olden days, they needed a hell of a lot of room to turn the bullock wagons around. Later, of course, they came in handy if there was some emergency or other and you needed to land your aeroplane in the town.

  Boulia was such a place.

  To paint the scene, it’s big sky country, not many trees, dead flat. You can see forever, and, as evening nears, it takes a long time for the sun to go down. It seems to just hang there, inching its way down to the horizon. Then all of a sudden, poof, and it’s gone. There’s very little twilight under those conditions.

  Anyway, it’s late afternoon in Boulia and there’s this guy and his wife, or de facto, who’d had a few too many drinks in the pub and they have this doozey of an argument, a real donnybrook. ‘F’n this and f’n’ that.’ All the accusations, the incriminations, the whole works. The upshot of all this is that this woman storms out of the pub. ‘I’ll give yer a lesson yer’ll never forget, yer bloody so-and-so,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ the bloke slurs in a smart-arse manner. ‘Yer wouldn’t have the guts.’

  But little did he know that she’s on her way home to get the .22 rifle. So she grabs the gun and comes back and waits on the diagonal corner about 150 yards down-sun from the pub.

  Eventually, the bloke wanders out. And remember how I was saying that it takes a long time for the sun to set? Well, there he is, with the sun at his back, and he can see this woman with the gun as clear as day. Conversely, she can
’t see him too well because the sun’s shining straight into her eyes. But she knows it’s him. She knows it’s the guy. And it’s her full intention to shoot in the general area of the guy, just to put the wind up him, like, to give him the lesson that she said she’d give him.

  So he starts to move towards her, holding his hands up, and she lifts the gun to her shoulder and takes aim. No doubt she’s still a bit pissed, like. So then she pulls the trigger. Bang. One shot. Straight through the guy’s head.

  Soon after, we get the call in Mount Isa. Now the doctor reckons that most gunshots turn out to be fatal. ‘Look,’ he says, as we rush out to the aeroplane, ‘if he dies, it then becomes a police matter and it’s no longer got anything to do with us.’

  But the report comes through from the nurse at Boulia that this guy is still alive. So there we are — I’ve done all the checks. The engines are warming up. Everything’s just right. And I’m just about to open it up and head down the runway when the doctor gets a call through on the HF long-range radio.

  ‘Hang on,’ he says.

  So I stop.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  So I kill the take-off.

  Pass the Hat

  One of the first fundraising appeals for what was then known as the Australian Inland Mission happened back in November 1928. It was on that date that old Jock McNamara passed his hat around the front bar of Mrs Palmer’s pub in McKinlay. And, what’s more, he made a few quid too, or so I heard.

  At the time old Jock owned Squirrel Hills Station which was situated halfway between McKinlay and Boulia, out in the north-west of Queensland. One day he and his son-in-law, Tom Lucas, were out mustering cattle in the Selwyn Ranges. Now, for those who don’t know, the Selwyn Ranges consists of some very rugged and mountainous country, most of which is impassable by vehicle. Anyway, old Jock was climbing through a particularly rough patch on his horse when all of a sudden the rubble gave way. The horse reared. Up it went, it lost its balance, toppled over backwards and thud down it came smack-bang on old Jock, squashing him and breaking his pelvis among other things. Very badly injured he was. Couldn’t move.

  Now this happened before pedal radios existed. Alf Traeger came up with the first of his radios a year later, in 1929, so there was no way that Tom could call for help, not from out in the middle of the Selwyn Ranges, that’s for sure. What’s more, there were no telephones out that way either.

  So Tom dragged old Jock under the shade of a tree. ‘Here, Pop,’ he said, ‘here’s some water and a bit of food. I’ll go and see if I can get some help.’

  And that’s where Tom left old Jock, propped up under a tree, out there in the Selwyn Ranges, with some water and food and a gun to keep the dingoes at bay. Then Tom rode for ten hours straight until he came across a mustering camp. Mind you, that was still out in the middle of nowhere, but when he told the head stockman about old Jock’s accident the bloke offered to drive him into McKinlay, which was where the nearest telephone was.

  When they finally arrived, Tom went straight to the McKinlay Post Office where he rang through to the Australian Inland Mission in at Cloncurry and gave them the details of the accident and the general location of where he’d left old Jock.

  ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can,’ the AIM Flying Doctor said.

  Now the actual plane that was used for the evacuation was imported by Hudson Fysh of the then Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service, later to be known as Qantas. That happened back in 1924. It was a De Havilland DH 50, a single-engined four-seater biplane where the pilot sat in an outside cockpit. John Flynn had leased the DH 50 for two shillings per mile, plus a pilot, a chap called Arthur Affleck, and two engineers. There’s a big model of this very same aeroplane in Cloncurry, if you’re ever up that way.

  Anyway, that aside, having now alerted the Flying Doctor, Tom jumped back into the truck and they drove to a nearby station where they organised an old iron bedstead to be used as a stretcher. Then along with a couple of volunteers they headed back out to old Jock. When they’d driven as far as they could into the Selwyn Ranges, they grabbed the bedstead and set off by foot.

  By this time Arthur Affleck, the pilot, had landed the small plane on an open patch of country, still many miles from the accident scene. But it was as close as he could get with the De Havilland. Now the doctor on that trip was a Kenyan chap by the name of Dr K St Vincent Welch. He was the world’s first Flying Doctor, meaning that he was the first doctor employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Anyway, Dr Welch grabbed his gear and along with Arthur he started to walk in the direction of where old Jock was supposed to be.

  While Dr Welch and Arthur were on their way, Tom and his helpers had reached old Jock. As you might well imagine, after having been stuck out there for almost two days the old feller’s condition had deteriorated somewhat, but he was still alive and that was the main thing. So they laid him out on the bedstead, latched onto an end each and they set off, back out of the Selwyn Ranges.

  Tom Lucas and his crew travelled for what was left of that day and into the night until, as luck would have it, they stumbled across Dr Welch and Arthur. ‘Dr Welch, I presume,’ Tom remarked. Mind you, he didn’t really say that. I just added it in because it sounded appropriate. Anyway, when the doctor saw the agony that poor old Jock was in he gave him an injection of morphine right on the spot. Then, as they headed back to the plane, to save all the time they could Dr Welch kept administering injections as they walked along.

  Finally, they got old Jock into the De Havilland. Now the nearest hospital was at Cloncurry but unfortunately at that particular time there was an epidemic of some sort going through there and so they decided to fly him to the Winton Hospital.

  Anyway, to cut a long story short, old Jock McNamara must have been a terribly tough sort of chap because he made a remarkable recovery and, three months later, in November 1928, he came back home to Squirrel Hills Station. Of course, by this time the news of his accident and his miraculous survival had spread near and far. It’d been written up in all the papers as well.

  But one of the first things that old Jock did on his return was to go into the local pub, Mrs Palmer’s pub it was, right there in McKinlay, and after everyone had welcomed him back he took his hat off and passed it around the front bar.

  ‘Dig deep, fellers, it’s for Flynn’s Inland Mission,’ he said. ‘Saved me life, they did. Who knows, it could be yours next.’

  ‘Payback’

  I was already really, really tired after having just arrived home off night shift from another flight. Then the call came through. ‘We’ve got a Code One emergency out at Nyrippi,’ they said. ‘A guy’s unconscious with a GCS of three.’

  Now a GCS, or Glasgow Coma Score, is the way that head injuries are rated and, among other things, is gauged on your best verbal response, eyes opening, and your best motor response. If there’s nothing wrong then your score is usually fifteen. If it’s under nine you’ve got a serious head injury. Having a three wasn’t a good sign really; more like a life and death situation, with the odds stacked towards death.

  Mark, the doctor, Peter, the pilot, and I flew out on that trip to Nyrippi. A sixteen-year-old guy had been cracked over the back of the head by a person wielding a firestick. Apparently the week before the young kid had caused some sort of trouble. This was his ‘payback’.

  We got out there in about an hour which was pretty good considering that we had to drive out to the airport and pack some special equipment into the plane. Peter also had to do all his flight checks and so forth before take-off. Anyway, when we landed at Nyrippi the community officer was waiting to pick us up. So I grabbed whatever gear I thought we’d need and threw it into the back of his ute on top of his welding gear and bits and pieces of cars and other scrap. Then we headed into the community.

  John was the community nurse on duty that night. I think it was his first week at Nyrippi, if not the first night he’d spent by himself out at the community. And he’d done a fantastic
job. When the young guy had first come in he’d put a plastic stiff-neck collar on him to keep his neck in alignment. He’d put a drip in, got the oxygen on him, checked his blood pressure, and then rang the Flying Doctor Service in Alice Springs.

  By the time he got back from calling us, the young guy had stopped breathing, and that’s when John started bagging him. So he must have been bagging the patient for at least an hour. By ‘bagging’ I mean physically squeezing oxygen into his lungs through a mask, virtually breathing for him.

  It was amazing. In a hospital, you bag someone for ten minutes and your hands are aching beyond belief. Ten minutes and, like I said, John had been at it for at least an hour. It’s heat of the moment stuff. It’s all full-on. And John was the only one bagging. There may have been a health worker somewhere but when it’s their own family they tend not to want to be hands-on.

  What’s more, fifteen or so of the family were in the same room watching every move John made, which must’ve added to the pressure. There were also a few extra police there by that time. They’d driven over from another community because they knew there could be some serious trouble brewing.

  So we got into the clinic and Mark said, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’

  ‘This is the situation,’ John said, then explained the medical details and what’d happened.

  Then Mark took over which gave John the chance to stand back for a while and catch up with things. Of course, the first thing that Mark requested was mannitol, which is a drug that releases the fluid off the brain. Silly me, of all things to leave back in the plane, I’d left the mannitol. But, luckily, just a few weeks beforehand I’d shown Peter, our pilot, where everything was packed, just in case. So he was able to go back out and grab the drug from the bottom of the cupboard. While Peter was doing that I was getting ready for Mark to intubate by checking the patient’s blood pressure and his pupils, and putting up another bag of fluid.