The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  ‘Okay,’ said the chap, ‘I’ll get a grave ready.’

  Anyway, by the time the Flying Doctor got there the other chap had sobered up and had dug the grave. Stone cold sober he was by that time. So the Flying Doctor verified the death. Then, just as they were about to toss the dead chap into the grave, his mate asked in an embarrassed manner, ‘Do yer mind if I ask yer something?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ replied the doctor, ‘go ahead.’

  ‘Well,’ said the chap, ‘I used ta be a butcher, see, and I know all ’bout the interiors of animals. And fer the life of me I’ve always wondered about the insides o’ people, so I was wondering if there was any chance yer could show me some o’ the parts.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the doctor. He must have been keen to brush up on his surgical skills because he took out a knife and away he went. ‘This bit here is the liver.’ (Plonk, and into the grave it went.) ‘This is the heart.’ (Plonk, into the grave it went.) ‘And this is the stomach.’ (Plonk, into the grave it went.) And so forth and so on until they’d disposed of the body.

  And that’s the story. Now, as I said, I don’t know whether it was exactly true or not, but I can remember that journalist-cum-playwright chap telling us that story to this very day. And each time he said the words ‘Plonk, and into the grave it went’, you could see all the students’ jaws drop that little bit further, mine included.

  Rabbit

  I heard you on the radio, reading some stories about the Flying Doctor Service, and it reminded me of the time that Mum and Dad were coming over to our place for dinner. It was Dad’s birthday and I wanted to cook something special. I’m a pretty good cook, you see, or that’s what most people say. But, apart from that, it’s something that I really enjoy doing, you know, experimenting with this and that, trying different recipes, different tastes and flavours.

  Anyway, I was having a chat to Mum on the phone, discussing plans for the night, and she asked what I was going to cook. I said that I’d planned to start off with some basic nibblies, followed by an antipasto platter, then a seafood soup, and for main course I was going to cook some rabbit.

  ‘Rabbit!’ Mum interrupted. ‘You’re not cooking rabbit, are you?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got a really nice recipe for rabbit that an old Italian chap’s given me.’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ she snorted, and then came one of her deathly silences, the ones that she gives when she’s digging in her heels about anything.

  ‘Why, Mum?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with rabbit?’

  Then she told me that when she was a teenager at boarding school, over in Perth, one of her girlfriends invited her to spend the school holidays out on her family’s station property. I’m not exactly sure where the station was, but it was away out bush somewhere, south-east of Perth, I think. It was quite a remote place, anyway.

  At that stage of her life Mum hadn’t been too far from the city and, for the past couple of years, everything that she’d heard from this girl about her parents’ station property conjured up images of a romantic life in the outback. There was the freedom of living out in the wide open spaces, the fresh air, the beautiful sunsets, the millions of stars at night, of being able to ride horses from dawn to dusk.

  When Mum checked to see if it was okay with Gran and Pop, they were fine about it.

  ‘Go, girl,’ Pop said. ‘It’ll be a great experience.’

  So she did.

  But, unfortunately for Mum, the experience turned out to be anything but romantic. Quite the opposite really — more like a nightmare. After spending three days cooped up in a sooty old train, when they eventually arrived at the station property Mum found the sparseness of the area to be overwhelming, daunting — frightening even. The air was hot and dusty. Instead of looking in wonder at the millions and millions of stars, she spent the nights swatting millions and millions of mosquitoes. Where her friend stood in awe of beautiful sunsets, Mum was only relieved to know that she’d survived yet another day among the flies. Yes, they did ride horses but, after the first morning, Mum reckoned her behind was so sore that she doubted if she’d ever be able to walk again.

  But perhaps what was worst of all was the complete lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. What’s more, there wasn’t a shop or a green-grocer within cooee.

  ‘Oh,’ Mum’s girlfriend said, ‘we get a delivery of fresh food every couple of months.’

  Mum must have looked extremely disappointed at that remark because her friend was quick to add, ‘Don’t worry, Margaret, the next delivery’s due in a couple of days’ time.’

  The mere thought of sinking her teeth into a nice, crisp apple was the only thing that kept Mum going. So she suffered through the lack of fresh vegetables and fruit. She suffered through the desolation. She suffered through the heat and the dust. She suffered through the flies and the mosquitoes. She even attempted to get back on a horse, but she fell off.

  Then, the day before the delivery of fresh food was due, the storm clouds rolled in, the sky opened and down came the rain. Mum reckoned that she’s never seen the likes of it, still to this day. What’s more, the rain didn’t look like stopping. It kept bucketing down. And with the soil out that way being sand and clay, or whatever, the water just built up and up. The creeks burst their banks and they got flooded in so bad not even a horse could get in or out.

  To start with there was still a little food remaining. But, after a week, things were getting pretty desperate. Then the week after that they were in real trouble. That’s where the rabbits came in. They’d been flushed out of their warrens and had scrambled onto the only piece of available land they could find, which was around the station homestead.

  Poor Mum. If one of her major gripes was the inferior quality of the food, by the third week her staple diet consisted of not much more than dried bread, black tea and rabbit, rabbit, rabbit and more rabbit. Mum reckons that they had boiled rabbit, roasted rabbit, minced rabbit, fried rabbit, rabbit portions, fricassee of rabbit, rabbit stew. They had rabbit every-which-way, day in, day out, and still the water didn’t look like receding.

  ‘Without a word of a lie,’ Mum said, ‘there were so many rabbits that you could sit on the back doorstep and just about shoot the blessed things with your eyes shut.’

  So there they were, out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea of water, facing the choice of either starving or eating more rabbit. Mum said that it even reached the stage where starving looked like being the better of the two options.

  Then one morning as Mum and her friend were lying around in bed, thinking about making a move, they heard a plane fly overhead, really low it was.

  ‘It’s the Flying Doctor,’ the girl’s father shouted from the kitchen.

  They were up in a flash and everyone raced out onto the verandah. And it was, too. It was the Flying Doctor plane. Mum thought that it might have been a DC3 or something like that. It was one of those bigger planes, anyway. When the aeroplane did a second fly-over, they threw out a hessian bag stacked full of food.

  Mum reckons that she still remembers the meal they had that day. Though it wasn’t the nice, fresh, crisp apple that she’d longed for, there was still milk, tinned meat, tinned vegetables, fresh bread and jam.

  Everything except rabbit.

  Richmond

  I’m living in a shed these days. That’s where I am now, away out in the bush near Sarina, outside of Mackay. That’s in Queensland if you don’t know. But it wasn’t always like that. I haven’t always lived in a shed. Not on your life. I used to own houses, trucks, the lot, but the Public Trust got stuck into me. Took the lot, they did. That was after a semi-trailer cracked my upper jaw and my lower jaw and many other unidentified bones in my skull, along with my collarbone to boot.

  That all happened a few years back and now I can’t talk properly either, as you might have guessed. It’s not only affected my voice. It’s gotten to my memory as well so my memory’s not quite the same either. Like, I don’t k
now how old I am these days. That’s because I used to work the years out by which truck I had at the time. Just like a calendar those trucks were. I used to be a truckie, see, but a semi-trailer got me so I’m nothing now. Then the Public Trust got to me after that and they took everything I owned, the trucks, my two houses, seven acres of freehold land, family heirlooms, two Rayburn slow combustion stoves, my water tanker, pumps, hoses, two caravans, a mobile workshop, the lot. They got everything. I’ve got all the paperwork here to prove it, if you want to see it.

  What’s more, they were hoping that I’d die too, but I haven’t died yet and I won’t for a long time to come, either. You can tell them that as well. I took them through the Supreme Court in the end, and I got them too. It’s the principle of the matter that counts. The case might’ve cost thousands but I got the $110 they owed me. I’ve got the receipts right here, somewhere. You can have a look at those as well if you like. But that’s the Public Trust for you. That’s why I live right out here in the shed near Sarina. They can’t get me here. You can tell them that too, in your book, if you like.

  Anyway, that’s got nothing to do with the Flying Doctor Service, has it? But I was just telling you how things are and who to watch out for. That’s why I do most of my business by phone, though I write lots of letters about this and that. My mother was born right beside the Combo Waterhole, out past Winton. Winton’s the place that Banjo Paterson made famous with that song ‘Waltzing Matilda’. There were no doctors out there then. I was born out near Richmond, about 307 miles into the sunset from Townsville.

  Anyhow, it might’ve been somewhere between the mid 1940s and the early ’50s, I can’t remember exactly. It could’ve even been before that, maybe. My memory’s not the same since the Public Trust got stuck into me. But back then we owned two stations, Rowena and Rolling Downs.

  Anyway, it was when I was living in Richmond. I was only a kid then and in those days the main street didn’t have 240 volts installed. Some people had their own charging plant but that wasn’t everybody. But, also, Richmond had a real wide street, dirt it was, no one out there knew what bitumen was back then. Anyhow, because there wasn’t 240 volts there were no electricity poles or anything, no obstructions in the street, and more than once the planes used to land in the main street. Goldring Street it was. I remember that.

  I also remember the time that this feller came looking for a woman. He wasn’t with the Flying Doctor Service or anything. The plane was called the ‘Silver City’. Gee, I remember that too. And he landed just out of town and I led him up Goldring Street. Then when he got to the main intersection he got out of his plane and wandered off to use the telephone. He left the engines going and all. So, anyway, there I was looking after the plane for the chap and the police arrived. I tell you what, they weren’t too happy about it either because the propellers were kicking up a mini dust storm.

  ‘Stay away from those propellers, young feller,’ the police warned me. ‘We don’t want to have to collect the pieces of a curious kid who’s got chopped into mince by those blades.’

  Then there was another time, the one that the Flying Doctor was involved in. There was a woman. I can’t remember her name now. My memory’s not the same since the Public Trust got to me. Anyway, this woman was pregnant and it was the wet season and you couldn’t drive anywhere because the roads were all mud. Mud was everywhere.

  So there was this woman who was pregnant, like I said, and it was an emergency, so the Flying Doctor landed and they came down Goldring Street. I don’t know if the police blocked the road or not. Still, there weren’t many people there, anyway, not in Richmond at that time there wasn’t. But the plane landed. It was either a DH 86 or a DH 84. It wouldn’t have been a Goonie Bird, that’s what a DC3 was called. Not many people know that. But I don’t think Goonies were around back then. But I’m not real sure. Not since.

  Anyway, the Flying Doctor came in and he landed in Goldring Street to pick up this lady, the one who was in the family way. I’m not even sure if she was married or not. I can’t remember seeing her wearing a ring. I wasn’t looking at that. The Flying Doctor might’ve had a nurse with him but I’m not sure about that either.

  In those days one end of the street sloped down and the other was on a bit of a hill, an up-slope, like. That was called Bore Hill. Naturally, being called Bore Hill, you could get free showers there too, day and night, anytime you like — right out of the bore. Good water it was, too. Not like some of the stuff you get, real brackish.

  At any rate, I can’t be certain if it actually happened right there on the street or just as they got the woman into the plane but there was a hell of a commotion and I couldn’t see any more. People were running everywhere, so I asked someone what was going on. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what’s going on?’ And the person told me that the woman had produced a baby.

  Then as the plane zoomed up Bore Hill and took off on its way to Cloncurry, apparently she produced another one. So she had twins, like. Anyway, I don’t remember what their names were but I reckon that the woman might’ve called one of them Richmond or something.

  Run and Catch

  You’ve got to remember that at that stage my wife, Penny, and I were in our mid to late twenties. We were totally invincible. Nothing could happen to us. We’d go out and do anything. It really didn’t matter. It was just one of those things. It was a job that you just had to do because people needed you. So you went and did it. And of course with the RFDS pilot and nursing sister living together, as a team we were simply brilliant. The phone would ring and I’d elbow Penny in the side and say, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go.’

  Like the night we went to pick up that guy out of Wyndham. They phoned around midnight. ‘We’ve got a bad one here,’ they said. So I gave Penny a nudge and we were out of bed in a shot and into the plane in about twenty minutes. I fired the monster up, then we went like a bat out of hell for Wyndham.

  What had happened was that there’s this very beautiful little place at Wyndham called The Grotto. It’s a waterhole set in steep granite walls and cliffs rising to about 100 feet high. It’s completely sheltered, and it’s always running with crystal clear water which is gorgeously cool even in the middle of the hottest day. Everybody used to go swimming there.

  Anyway, these people got full of booze and wandered out there at night. Then this guy decided that he’d take the easy way down so he dived off the top of the cliff. The only drawback was that he landed in about two inches of water.

  Honestly, it was like picking up a bag of jelly. It was terrible. Shocking. We never did much of what they call ‘stabilising’ in those days. It was all ‘run and catch’ where we picked the patients up and flew them to a hospital as quick as we could. And this guy had broken everything that it was possible to break.

  Then when we got him on board the aeroplane, they said, ‘Look, you’re going to have to take him to Perth.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said, ‘he’ll never make it to Perth. Call Darwin and tell them we’re coming.’

  ‘No, you can’t go to Darwin,’ they argued. ‘Darwin won’t accept you.’

  ‘Pig’s arse, they won’t,’ I said. ‘Just tell ’em we’re coming.’

  So I took off and headed straight to Darwin and we put down on the airstrip just as dawn was breaking. Thankfully an ambulance was there to meet us. As we unloaded this guy I said to Penny, ‘Well, Pen, we’ll never see him again.’

  Three months later he walked off a Fokker Friendship back in Wyndham. Absolutely, bloody unbelievable.

  Skills and Teamwork

  Being a doctor, a lot of the stories that I have are of a medical or technical nature. They’re not real humorous so I’m not sure that they’ll have much appeal. I’d just like to say that if anything exemplifies what the Royal Flying Doctor Service is about, it’s skills and teamwork. No one along the line of operations is either more or less important than the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, a nurse, pilot, radio technician, engineer-mechanic or
whatever, we’ve all got our own particular skills. We’ve all got to pull our weight. If one link in that chain falters, so does the whole operation.

  I’ll give you an example just to demonstrate what I mean. We had a call one day that there’d been a motor vehicle accident out on the Ivanhoe to Hay road, about 80 plane-kilometres from Ivanhoe. The police who were at the scene informed us that there were two very critically injured people and one who was not so bad.

  The problem was that there weren’t any airstrips nearby so we either had to motor the injured out or we had to get in there somehow and land on the road.

  Now, there’s certain criteria for landing on a road. Firstly, it has to be declared an emergency and has to be approved by the Aviation Safety Authority. Then there must be a straight stretch of road of at least two kilometres. It must be more than amply wide enough. All the guard posts have to be knocked down. No culverts. The camber of the road must be such that it won’t affect the safety of the plane’s landing. The road must be blocked at either end by the police. Also the wind has to be in the right direction, that’s as well as the usual landing conditions.

  Normally, we only take one crew in the plane, along with the pilot. A crew consists of a nurse and a doctor. But in this case the injuries were such that we decided to take two crews. That made a total of five people, including the pilot.

  Then as we were about to land we were informed that one of the victims had just died. This caused us to have a rethink about the situation, taking into account the high risk involved in landing on a road at the best of times. But there was still one patient down there who was in a critical condition so we decided to go ahead.

  When we landed, and very successfully I might add, it struck me just how skilful the pilot was. It was an impressive feat. He’d just taken a King Air plane worth $4 to $5 million, weighing 5 tons or so, with five of us on board, and landed the thing dead square at 180 kilometres per hour on a bush road. What’s more, I noticed later that he had only about 18 inches (that’s 30 centimetres) to spare on each side of the plane’s wheels to the verge of the road.