by Bill Marsh
Eventually, we decided to leave the body where it was, just in case. So we departed the airport to fly back to our base. That trip took us about another hour and twenty minutes, and once again we were relieved by the lack of turbulence.
Anyway, we arrived back home quite exhausted from all our travels, only to be confronted by the undertaker. Now the undertaker was a very pedantic man, as most undertakers seem to be. Everything had to be just right. There he was, the coffin at the ready, all organised for the body to be placed in, nice and snug and neat. Apparently, he’d been waiting for a fair while so he wasn’t in the best of moods to start with but worse was to follow. See, the rear luggage locker of the Nomad isn’t heated so the temperature during the flight got down below minus 2°. Not only that but a few hours had gone by since the chap had died.
‘Show me to the body,’ the undertaker said in his dry, formal manner.
So we did. We flung open the rear luggage locker and there was the body in its crouched position, frozen stiff and locked solid with rigor mortis.
The Pedal Radio Man
Alf Traeger’s known as many things — ‘the Pedal Radio Man’ just for starters. He’s also been described as the person who gave a voice to the bush and in doing so connected the more remote areas to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. There’s no doubting that Alf was a bloody magnificent technician, I’ll vouch for that. The only trouble was that he was the type of chap who wouldn’t let anything be. He was always fiddling with the radios, trying to improve them, and that’s what drove us up the wall.
After the 5 watt pedal radio was established in the bush, Alf started working on a couple of modifications. The thing with all those radios — and there were a couple of hundred or so in the network back in 1950 to ’51 — was that someone had to service them, right. Frank Basden, the radio operator at the Broken Hill base, did some, as did Alf himself, which caused us all the headaches.
But those chaps like Alf and Frank weren’t travelling around anywhere near as much as we were. So each time Vic Cover, the RFDS pilot, and I used to do the rounds of the stations we also did a bit of servicing on these radios, when the need arose. Vic knew a lot more about them than I did. But the thing that we came up against very smartly was that if Alf had had his hands on them after they’d been installed, the circuit diagram on the inside of the sets never matched the wiring because he’d gone and changed things about.
Anyway, the ones that we couldn’t fix on the spot we used to cart back to Frank Basden who, as I said, was the radio operator at the Broken Hill base, and Frank would have a go at fixing them. By this stage Frank had been with the Flying Doctor Service for about twenty-five or thirty years and he knew Alf Traeger very well. Frank was an interesting feller too. He’s dead now, unfortunately. A very knowledgeable chap, he was. He had to have been to be able to follow Alf’s so-called ‘modifications’. Anyway, apart from fixing these radios on the base, Frank also gave advice over the air if someone out on a station was having problems.
When Vic and I told Frank about the fun and games that we were having with the radios Alf Traeger had fiddled around with, he just laughed.
‘You reckon that Alf drives you blokes bloody balmy,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a little story. Do you know the bloke who was at Pincally Station, the one with the droll sort of voice?’
‘Yes,’ Vic and I said.
‘Well, he got on the radio about the same sort of problem that you’re having with the circuit diagram. “Ah,” he said, in that voice of his, “are you that bloody Frank Basden bloke?”’
“‘Yes, I’m Frank Basden,”’ I said.
“‘Well, Frank,”’ he said, “I’ve got a bit o’ bloody trouble here with the 44-metre frequency, ’n’ the 78’s not all that bloody good neither.”’
At that time there were three available frequencies, the 44, the 78 and the 148. The 148 didn’t carry very well with those little radio sets and we had to rely upon people relaying the messages which, of course, they did, and everybody within range used to tune in and listen in to the message. That’s why the 148 was ideal for the ‘Galah Sessions’ where all the ladies used to get on and talk to each other. Worked perfectly for that. What’s more, the whole network used to come alive as soon as the doctor got on the air.
‘Then the chap from Pincally says, “Frank, I had a go with the bloody screwdriver last night and I think me radio’s buggered.”
“‘What did you do?” I asked.
“‘Well, I took the bloody guts outa the middle’a the thing to see if there were anything wrong and everything looked like it were hooked up proper.”
“‘What do you mean, Pincally,” I said, “by saying that you took the guts out of the radio?”
“‘Well, I undid that big round piece, you know, the bloody one that’s got all them little contacts on the outsides because it wasn’t turnin’ around, ’n’ I thought that it might’a been the trouble but it wasn’t ’n’ now the whole thing’s in bloody pieces ’n’ I don’t know what to bloody do.”
“‘Oh, God,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done that, Pincally, definitely not without the proper authority and advice.”
“‘Well, I got that, okay,” said the chap. “I rang up that Alf Traeger bloke the other day and he said, ‘Well, have a go at fixing it yerself, ’n’ if you can’t you’d better get in touch with that bloody Frank Basden bloke. He’ll know what to do.”’
The Telegram
After I left school back in 1950 I spent a hell of a lot of time in the pastoral area out in the west of New South Wales. And around that time the Royal Flying Doctor Service incorporated an on-line radio service through its base in Broken Hill.
This particular service was greatly appreciated by the station people because they didn’t get into town much and it gave them the chance to place orders for food or machinery parts or whatever. In actual fact, I reckon that about 90 per cent of station business was carried out that way, back in those days.
Now, aligned to this on-line radio service, the Flying Doctor base also ran what us station hands called ‘Galah Sessions’. And these Galah Sessions were in part set up so that, after the business was concluded, the station women could have a good chat to each other and catch up on all the gossip and stuff. But also, there was some time set aside for urgent telegrams to be read over the air.
Anyway, most of us out on these stations used to listen in on the Galah Sessions whenever we could and then to the telegrams as they came through. Everyone used to do it. It was a bit of a lark. What’s more, it sort of brightened up our day, hearing the gossip from different parts — who’d had a baby, who was crook, who’d died, who was getting married, and so forth. And also, you never knew when an urgent message might come through for yourself from family or whoever.
Anyway, at this particular time I was working out on the White Cliffs road at Koonawarra Station, just doing ordinary stock work and the like. And we were sitting around one morning listening to these telegrams being read out when we heard what I reckoned to be the daddy of the lot.
Apparently things weren’t going too well for one particular family down in Tasmania and there was this telegram which was read over the air to a station hand out at Naryilco Station, in south-west Queensland. I forget the poor chap’s name but, anyway, the message said it all and, what’s more, with the minimum of words.
It read: DEAR (whatever his name was)
FATHER DEAD — TOM IN JAIL —
SEND TEN QUID.
LOVE
MOTHER
The Tooth Fairy
This is one of Fred McKay’s stories. It isn’t mine so you’ll have to check the details with him.
It happened back in the late 1930s, long before John Flynn died and Fred took over. Fred and Meg had recently been married and they were visiting a cattle station out in the Barkly Tablelands, just over the Queensland border, into the Northern Territory. Anyway, the station’s storekeeper-cum-bookkeeper had an abscessed molar, very painf
ul it was.
‘Meg’ll sort it out,’ Fred offered, brimming with confidence in his new wife.
Now, even though she’d completed a two-week crash course in ‘tooth extraction’ at the Brisbane Dental Hospital before they’d set out, Meg didn’t quite share Fred’s enthusiasm in her ability. She was new to this rugged bush lifestyle. As you might imagine, it was a big change for someone who was virtually a city girl and she was still trying to find her feet among the dust, the flies, the heat, the cold, the camping out, the cattle, the bore water, the stockmen. Still, she tentatively agreed to give it a go.
But whatever minimal confidence she had completely vanished when Meg arrived at the store. The storekeeper looked a formidable customer indeed. He was a huge man, a mountain in comparison to the ‘dental-dummy’ that Meg had trained on back in Brisbane. To make matters worse, when the news had spread that a woman was going to have a go at extracting the storekeeper’s molar, a crowd of sceptical stockman had gathered, all eager to watch the event unfold.
Until that point in time, Meg had hardly ever pulled a tooth, let alone done it in front of a crowd as rough and as doubting as this mob was. Still, she couldn’t turn back now. She’d volunteered her services and she’d have to see it through to the end, whatever that end may be. So she sat the chap down on an old box outside the station store. She gave him an injection and then set to with the pliers or whatever.
Now you might be able to imagine some of the remarks coming from the stockmen when it became obvious that the harder Meg pulled on the molar, the more it seemed that it wasn’t going to budge. And the more the molar wouldn’t budge, the more anxious the storekeeper became about allowing a woman to attempt to extract his tooth. But if there was one golden rule that Meg had learned in at the Brisbane Dental Hospital, it was ‘Once you’ve got a good grip, never let go.’
So she didn’t.
She latched onto that molar and she pulled with every ounce of strength she could muster. Even when the storekeeper started to gargle a protest, Meg straddled him and still hung on and pulled. And when he struggled to free himself from off the old box, Meg clambered up on the box and still hung on and pulled. Then, as the storekeeper attempted to walk away, Meg gave an almighty twist and yank and…out came the tooth.
Well, this brought the house down, so to speak. As Meg stood there in complete triumph displaying the molar, the gathering of stockmen exploded into cheers, whistles and applause. But the person that was most stunned was the beefy storekeeper himself. He gazed down upon Meg in complete wonderment and, with the tears pouring down his cheeks and the blood running down his chin, he called out, ‘What a woman!’
There’s a Hole in the… Drum
My father was a pretty tough sort; a roo shooter, on and off, for most of his life, he was.
But back in the days that this incident happened we were living in very isolated conditions, about 60 miles out of Mingah Springs Station, which is about 150 miles north of Meekatharra, in central Western Australia. It was in either the October or November, I’m not sure which, but it was stinking hot and in the middle of a drought, which wasn’t unusual way out there.
Anyway, Dad had spent a trying day out building stockyards and it was late in the afternoon when he finally came in. Then just before tea he remembered that he still had to organise some meat for the dogs, so he grabbed his .22 rifle and headed off to kill a kangaroo.
He must have been awfully tired because after he’d shot a roo and sorted it out for the animals, he came back in, put the gun away, had his tea and went straight to bed. Then, early the next morning when he grabbed the gun again, it went off and the bullet went into his stomach, right through his kidneys, and came out his back.
When my mother saw the mess that my father was in, she went into a real tizz. To make things worse, Mum couldn’t drive and she was afraid that Dad was going to die before she could organise some help. Anyhow, we did have an old two-way radio. It was one of those ones that ran with the aid of a 12-volt battery. The only trouble was, when Mum went to call for help she discovered that the battery on the radio had gone flat.
Now, to recharge the battery you had to go through a bit of a rigmarole. See, my father had set up an alternator to an old push-bike. And the idea was, when you hooked the flat battery to the alternator and peddled flat out, it’d recharge the thing.
So Mum hooked the battery up to the alternator, jumped on the bike and went like a bat out of hell. Mind you, this was all happening while my father was still sprawled out inside. Then, when the battery was finally recharged, mother took it back inside, wired it up to the radio and started calling the Flying Doctor for help. As I said, she was in a real tizz and with the shock of having to cope with my father being shot, then having to recharge the battery in the growing morning heat, it was all too much. In the middle of explaining the situation to the doctor, she fainted.
Down she went, leaving Dad to struggle over to the radio and complete the call.
As I said, Mum couldn’t drive and we lived in a very isolated area. But as luck would have it there was a gentleman, Val Sorenson, who owned Mingah Springs Station as well as Briah Station, and he just happened to be visiting Mingah at the time and overheard the call on his radio. Then Mr Sorenson came on the line and offered to come up to our place and pick up my father, then take him back to Mingah which had the closest airstrip to where we lived.
‘Yes, please,’ my father said.
So Mr Sorenson jumped into his old open-top jeep and drove the 60 miles up to our place. That trip took a fair amount of time because there wasn’t really a proper road between Mingah and our place. In actual fact, it was more like a bush track, and a pretty rough one at that. It wasn’t even graded or anything.
When Mr Sorenson arrived a couple of hours later, he loaded Dad and Mum and my little sister into the jeep and they headed back towards Mingah. As I said, it was a hot October or November day and the journey was over a rugged track so Mr Sorenson had to take it extremely slowly. Yet throughout that whole journey Dad remained conscious and kept reassuring everyone that he’d be okay. Like I said, he was a pretty tough sort, especially keeping in mind that almost ten hours was to pass from the time my father had been shot until the time that Mr Sorenson finally arrived back at Mingah Springs Station.
Anyway, while they were making their way back down the track the pilot from the Flying Doctor Service arrived at Mingah in his Cessna; or it might have been an Auster, I’m not sure which. All I know is that it was a small plane and there wasn’t a doctor on board. But with all the confusion over the radio, with the flat battery and my mother fainting, then my father having to take over in his delirious state, and Mr Sorenson coming in and offering his help, the message hadn’t come across very clear at all. So when the Flying Doctor pilot arrived, he fully expected to find my father there ready to be flown straight off to hospital where a doctor was waiting. But of course he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
The pilot then tried to radio through to clear up the situation but he couldn’t raise an answer. So he waited for a couple more hours and when it looked like no one was going to turn up he decided that the best thing to do was to fly back to Meekatharra and take things from there. The only problem was that he didn’t have enough fuel to get back to the base so he hunted around the place until he found an empty 4-gallon drum. He then took the drum and walked the distance over to where the fuel tank was.
But after the pilot filled the drum he discovered there was a hole in the thing and he had to struggle back to the plane with the filled drum while attempting to cover the leak with his finger. It was those extra crucial minutes of delay that saved my father’s life because, when the pilot finally reached the airstrip, he drained the fuel into the plane, jumped in and was about to take off…and that’s when Mr Sorenson’s jeep came into sight.
There’s a Redback on the…
Back in the early 1970s I went to the Northern Territory as a very young and naive school teacher and took
up a position on Brunette Downs Station which was then owned by King Ranch, Australia. I was teaching Aboriginal kids there, which was a steep learning curve because, coming from where I did, I soon realised that I had a lot to learn about the Aboriginal culture. But I really enjoyed it, and I still think that we could all learn a lot from the Aboriginal people, particularly as far as caring for family goes.
Anyway, I was in the schoolroom one day and I felt this thing on my neck. ‘It must be a fly,’ I thought, so I tried to wave it away, like you do. But still the thing didn’t move so I gave it a slap. Then when I squashed it, it felt like someone had placed some burning tongs on my neck. When I took a look at the thing, I realised that I’d been bitten by a redback spider.
It was almost lunchtime so I said to the kids, ‘Oh look, you can go out for lunch a bit early today.’ When they’d gone I went up to the clinic to see the nursing sister. A funny person she was.
‘I’ve just been bitten on the neck by a redback spider,’ I said, and she gave me a vacant sort of look.
‘Are they poisonous?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, astounded that she didn’t know anything about spider bites.
‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘then I’d better get in touch with the Flying Doctor Service to see what we can do about it.’
‘Thanks for all your help,’ I said, with a hint of sarcasm.
So I went into my room where I had a first-aid book from teachers’ college, ancient as it was, and I had a look in that. It said that if you’re bitten by a spider the first thing to do is to put a tourniquet on. That seemed a bit ridiculous, especially with me having been bitten on the neck. But by that time I was feeling sick and I was starting to get a fever as well, so I went to bed which, as it turned out, was the best thing to do.