by Bill Marsh
In the meantime, the nurse had been on the radio and explained my situation to the doctor. She was told to treat it like shock and keep a watch for any symptoms. Now what you’ve got to realise here is that, when anyone’s talking over the radio, anyone else can listen in. And they do, quite a lot. So unbeknown to me, my being bitten on the neck by the wretched spider was broadcast throughout the Northern Territory.
Then a couple of months later I went up to this race meeting at Borroloola, which is on the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the McArthur River. That was a hoot. It’s also quite an extraordinary place, mind you. My education continued non-stop while I was up there. Anyway, there was this guy from Mallapunyah Station. A sort of a legend around the area, he was. Well, he came up to me.
‘Oh, gee,’ he said, in his real droll bush voice, ‘so you’re the teacher from Brunette Downs, are yer? The one that got bit on the neck b’ the redback spider?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that was me. Why?’
And he just stood there, ogling at me, eyeing me up and down from tip to toe. Then finally he shook his head from side to side.
‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘I would ’a liked to ’a been that redback spider.’
Touch Wood
I was a band master at the time and had been sent down to Esperance to get the local brass band started. Anyway there was this vacant brick residence out on a farm, a lovely place it was, and the owners wanted someone living in it, to keep it tidy and so forth. I needed some accommodation so I moved in.
Then I had a heart attack. So they drove me into Esperance Hospital where they got in touch with the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre in Perth. And the people in Perth said, ‘Look, we haven’t got any beds just at the moment. You’d better try and keep him alive down there until we can sort something out.’
So I stayed in Esperance Hospital for half a day with the doctors pumping things into me and so forth. Then the message finally came through that there was a bed available in Perth, which was a great relief, I can tell you. But of course, the problem then arose as to how to get me to the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre post haste. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the hospital got in touch with the Flying Doctor Service out at Kalgoorlie who were at that very moment getting ready to fly to Perth with a couple of chaps who’d almost killed each other in a pub brawl.
Now the idea of travelling in the confines of a small aeroplane along with two blokes who’d tried to murder each other didn’t fill me with too much excitement, I can tell you. So I expressed my concerns.
‘Don’t worry,’ I was told, ‘these blokes are so well sedated that they wouldn’t harm a fly.’
‘Okay then,’ I said. ‘Count me in.’
So the plane came down to Esperance to pick me up and when it arrived there were these two blokes laid out on the floor, on stretchers. And they were sedated all right, sedated to the eyeballs with alcohol. The plane stank like a brewery. It almost made me crook. Just how on earth they could have inflicted the injuries on each other that they did was beyond the realms of comprehension. But there they lay, completely out to it, both of them severely cut about with glass, ‘sedated’ to the eyeballs.
Anyway, with the plane being diverted to Esperance at such short notice, the nurse had only enough time to make some quick preparations to accommodate me after they’d taken off. As I said, these two blokes were as full as boots and there was no way that she could get them to budge off the floor. So the next best thing she could do was to set up a little box at the back of the plane, way down the tail end where the fuselage came down in a slope. And that’s where I sat, hunched over with my chest almost on my lap, my stomach turning cartwheels from the smell of alcohol, while being hooked up to all sorts of drips and things.
If you think that particular situation sounded uncomfortable, worse was to follow.
‘Look,’ said the nurse when we were halfway to Perth. ‘Look at all that lovely lightning out there. Isn’t it exciting!’
‘It might look exciting to you,’ I replied, swallowing deep.
The next thing, there we were in the middle of a violent thunderstorm and, of course, being down at the rear of the plane was the worst position to be. We were being thrown all about the place. The nurse was stumbling around, struggling to keep all my drips and stuff in. By this stage, not only was my stomach turning over ten to the dozen but a pain started to rise in my chest — not a violent pain, mind you. Still it was just enough to start me thinking, ‘You could be in big trouble here, mate.’ And throughout this calamitous event, there were these two blokes stretched out on the floor, completely oblivious to the thunderstorm, if not to life itself.
‘The only way to travel,’ the nurse said at one point, with a nod in the direction of the drunks and, by the way I was feeling, she might have been right, too.
Thanks to both the pilot and the nurse we worked our way through the storms and arrived safely in Perth. When we landed there was an ambulance waiting which whipped me into the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre, where I was placed straight on some machinery.
They did the open-heart surgery a day or two later. That was a while back now and I’m still here today and, touch wood, I still will be tomorrow and for a good while to come yet.
Train Hit by Man
Now Barton’s an interesting place. Ever heard of it? Not many have. It’s a small railway siding out in the Nullarbor, at the start of the world’s longest straight stretch of track, leading from there to eternity, then further on to Kalgoorlie. There’s bugger-all there these days apart from millions of flies and a fluctuating population of between one and six, and that’s counting the stray horses and camels. Even for the most imaginative of real estate agents, the best that could be said about Barton is that it’s ‘nestled comfortably among endlessly rolling red sandhills’. Beyond that you’d be scratching for compliments.
Back a few years ago when the railways scaled down, there was an old German bloke by the name of Ziggie, a railway worker of some sort, a fettler maybe. Anyway, with all the kerfuffle Ziggie decided to retire after thirty years on the job. But instead of retiring to the Big Smoke of Port Augusta like the rest of the workers out that way did, he thought, ‘Vell, bugger it. I’ve no family, novere to go. Zo as-t long as-t zee Tea and Sugar Train still delivers vater and supplies, I’ll stay in zee Barton.’
The trouble was that he’d been left with no place to live. So for the next couple of years he wandered up and down the track with a wheelbarrow picking up the sleepers which had been cast aside during track maintenance. And out of those he built a huge three-roomed bunker, complete with a patio where he could sit and sip on his Milo and watch the sun set over the endlessly rolling red sandhills.
Now you may think that the mention of him sipping on Milo, instead of a gin and tonic or a cold beer or something of a more refreshing nature, was a slip of the tongue. But it wasn’t. Old Ziggie drank nothing but Milo. In actual fact, his staple diet was Milo, oranges, potatoes and, as the strong rumour had it, canned dog food. Yep, you heard it right…canned dog food. Canned dog food, Milo, oranges and potatoes for breakfast, dinner and tea, and a good brand too, mind you.
So Ziggie settled down to life at Barton along with his seven dogs. And he’s had a good many more than seven dogs in his time because he keeps a collection of their skulls. If you go to Ziggie’s place, the one made out of discarded railway sleepers, there they are, all these dog skulls lined up, along with the empty cans of dog food and the empty Milo tins which he uses as an antenna for his short-wave radio.
But other than being the collector of dog skulls and a connoisseur of fine dog food, oranges, potatoes and Milo, old Ziggie just happens to be one of the best informed individuals that you’re ever likely to meet. As you might imagine, there’s not too much for him to do out at Barton except to listen to his short-wave radio, which he does day in, day out. Ziggie knows more about the goings-on of the world than anyone I know. What’s more, he has an opinion on any subject and if he doesn’t h
e’ll soon make one up.
So life’s a pretty solitary affair out at Barton which, in turn, causes the Bartonites to get mighty suspicious when a blow-in lobs into town. Not that many do, mind you. Maybe one or two each decade or so. But just enough for the locals, including Ziggie, to have formed the solid impression that the rest of the world is inhabited by…weirdos.
And so it was that one of the locals wandered out at the crack of dawn one day and discovered that some bloke, a blow-in type, had appeared from God-knows-where in the middle of the night and had been bowled over by the Tea and Sugar Train as it was pulling into the siding. The evidence was right there for all to see. There was this complete stranger, sprawled under the front of the train, out to the world, comatose in fact, with his head split open, stinking of grog and looking on death’s door.
‘Typical of these blow-ins, aye,’ someone muttered, to which there was total agreement.
Of course, the train driver was upset. But as he said, ‘How the hell could I have bowled someone over when the train only travels at snail’s pace?’ And there were those that saw his point of view. See, it’s been rumoured that the driver of the Tea and Sugar Train wasn’t given a timetable upon departure from Port Augusta. Instead, he was handed a calendar because it really didn’t matter when he arrived in Kalgoorlie, just as long as he did, at some stage of the year.
Naturally, not long after Ziggie had appeared on the scene he’d come up with a theory about the accident. He reckoned that the train hadn’t hit the blow-in, but that the reverse had occurred. In fact, upon closer inspection, Ziggie deduced that the bloke had been so pissed when he’d staggered out of the sandhills and into Barton at some ungodly hour of the night that he’d walked headlong into the stationary train. Crack! Split his head open and down he’d gone like a sack of spuds, right under the front wheels, and hadn’t moved a muscle since.
After much discussion the Flying Doctor from over in Port Augusta was called. And while the blow-in lay prostrate under the train, the discussion raged as to whatever reason the bloke might have had to be wandering around the desert in the middle of the night. And so the discussion continued right up until the locals saw the plane land. Then they put a hold on things while a ute was sent out to pick up the doctor and the nurse.
It was during the brief respite that Ziggie organised the making of a bush stretcher. The reasoning behind that was to save precious time so the blow-in could be placed into the back of the ute as soon as the doctor had checked him over. So they slung a bit of canvas around a couple of bits of gidgee then rolled the unconscious bloke onto the stretcher.
When the doctor arrived he went through the full medical procedure. ‘This bloke’s in an extremely critical condition,’ he concluded. ‘So, fellers, when you pick up the stretcher take it nice and easy.’
Now, constructing a house out of railway sleepers may have been one of old Ziggie’s fortes but making a stretcher out of a strip of canvas and a couple of bits of gidgee apparently wasn’t. Because, when they lifted the stretcher, the canvas gave way and the blow-in went straight through and hit his head on the railway track with an almighty thud.
‘Holy Jesus,’ someone said, ‘we’ve killed him fer sure.’
But almost before those words had been spoken, the blow-in miraculously snapped back into consciousness. What’s more, to everyone’s surprise, particularly the doctor’s, the bloke sat bolt upright. He took one look at the menagerie of faces gawking down at him, then a quick glance out at the endlessly rolling red sandhills.
‘Where the bloody hell am I?’ he squawked.
‘Barton,’ came the reply, to which the blow-in got up, shook his head and staggered off down the track, leaving the doctor mystified and locals only more reassured at the weirdness of humankind in the outside world. This, of course, included Ziggie, who wandered back home to tuck into a nice hearty breakfast.
We Built an Airport
It all started when the old airstrip out at Pete May’s place was forced to close over winter. For those who don’t know, and I guess that there’d be many, Pete May’s place is near Elliston which is on the Eyre Peninsula, in the Great Australian Bight. So, anyway, with the airstrip being out of action, it meant that the Flying Doctor couldn’t fly in if there were any medical emergencies or if there’d been a serious accident.
We reckoned that it just wasn’t good enough. So some people went to Council and complained. They reckoned, and quite rightly too, that either the old airstrip should be upgraded or an all-weather strip be built on a new location. Council agreed in principle but they said that everything was in limbo just at the moment because they were awaiting the outcome of current grant applications to the state and Commonwealth governments. So, when the various governments reckoned they didn’t have any money for airstrips and the like, the ratepayers made such a big song and dance about it that a public meeting was called.
An engineer chap came to the meeting with the recommendation that the new airstrip should be placed over the Elliston Swamp which was within half a kilometre from the front door of the hospital. But, without funding, Council said they couldn’t afford to go ahead. It was then that the people offered to volunteer their services, vehicles and equipment, on the proviso that Council was prepared to foot the bill for the fuel and maintenance on the vehicles and equipment plus lend us some Council labour.
With Council agreeing to that proposal, the first step was to remove the hills. Blasting started around the end of October. That was a mammoth task in itself, one which caused Council to snaffle every stick of explosive held by all the other councils throughout the Eyre Peninsula.
When the majority of the blasting had been completed we got an expert to come down from Coober Pedy to remove what was left. But because we didn’t have the money to pay the bloke, the owners of the motel offered him free accommodation while the pub provided his meals. Another chap came in after that with a stone picker and broke up the rubble.
Then nothing much happened over Christmas, with the harvest in full swing. But straight after harvest the Airport Committee approached various people and community groups in the area seeking their help and support.
Now Elliston’s only got a population of just under 300, with around 800 in the district, but within two weeks vehicles and machinery appeared on site. There were about six double-axle tipper-trucks and several smaller single-axles. There were bulldozers, graders, tractors, the whole works. Some started digging out the quarry while others were working on the sandhill. The sandhill itself ran virtually halfway along the proposed airstrip. But when the job was finished it’d been flattened into the runway and was mixed in with over 100 000 tons of fill from the quarry.
All the community got involved: farmers, townspeople, storekeepers, even the surfers. We worked rosters and shifts. Those that had to stay in their shops or businesses donated food or helped with morning tea. Anyone who hadn’t brought any lunch along could get a free one at the local cafe.
Luckily there was no need for the Flying Doctor during the four weeks that the bulk of the work was done. Still and all, babies were born during that time. I’m not sure now if it was one or two. But something’s for certain — with everyone working flat out I don’t reckon that many would’ve been conceived.
Then after the job was completed there were two openings. The first was a political affair after some money had miraculously appeared out of government coffers to pay for the lighting and sealing of the airstrip. Not that we didn’t appreciate it, mind you, but that opening was a fizzer in comparison to the second one.
The second opening was the real one. It was the one for the people. There was a true carnival atmosphere. Aircraft came from all over. There were fly-bys, lolly drops, parachutists, games and free gifts. We were just so proud of what we’d done that we had a special car sticker made up which read: WE BUILT AN AIRPORT.
Welcome to Kiwirrkurra
We’ve got a lot of Aboriginal people up here. They’re great, the kids espe
cially. They’re so friendly and inquisitive. You get a lot of pleasure out of working with them. I love it.
Why just the other day I went over the Western Australian border to a place called Kiwirrkurra. We were picking up a woman who’d actually had a baby that morning and the baby was a little bit small so we were going to transport them both back to Alice Springs where we could keep a closer eye on things.
Anyway, we arrived a bit early.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been out that way but the airstrips are just red dirt with spinifex growing along the side and a few sandhills around the place. And usually they have a little lean-to which is the ‘airport terminal’, so to speak, and this one had a little corrugated-iron lean-to. A real classic it is, all done up in the Aboriginal colours, with a sign which read:
WELCOME TO KIWIRRKURRA AIRPORT
900 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
360 NAUTICAL MILES TO ALICE SPRINGS
I’d always wanted to get a photograph of the Kiwirrkurra ‘airport terminal’, so on this occasion I’d brought my camera along. So I took the photo. The next thing, the four-wheel-drive police vehicle turns up and there’s about twenty kids in the back, on the top, all over the place, and they jump off and run over with their huge welcoming smiles.
‘Hullo, hullo, hullo,’ they’re all saying.
‘Oh, I’ve got my camera here,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I take some photos of you all?’
Then they all push in front of the camera, and there’s these twenty kids calling out, ‘Just one of me only. Just one of me only.’
I didn’t have that much film but I took a few photos anyway. Then I saw that one of the kids has a tattoo on his arm, you know, one of those lick-on tattoos.
‘What’ve you got there?’ I asked.