The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  So he shows me. Then all of the kids lift up their shirts and they’ve got these tattoos stuck all over their stomachs and up their arms. Everywhere they were.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, to one of the kids, ‘can someone take a photo with just me and you mob in it?’

  ‘I’ll take the photo. I’ll take the photo,’ said the oldest one.

  Then he grabs the camera and starts clicking away taking lots of photos. And all the kids want to be in on it. One jumps on one of my hips, another jumps on the other hip, and another kid stands behind me with her hands on my head. And they pack in tight around me. So there I am posing with these kids who are laughing and carrying on and I can feel something moving through my hair.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I’m thinking. ‘No worries, it’s just that the kid behind me’s playing with my hair.’

  So we finished the photograph and I looked around at this kid, the one who’d had her hands on my head, and I noticed that she’s not only got the most beautiful smile that you’re ever likely to see but she’s also got a half-melted Mars Bar dangling from her fingers.

  Where’s Me Hat?

  We were flying out to Tibooburra to do a clinic one day when we received an urgent request to divert to Noocundra, in south-western Queensland. Someone had been severely burnt. The odd thing was, though, the chap who put through the call couldn’t stop laughing. Naturally, we thought that it mustn’t have been too serious, and we said so. But the chap, the one who was laughing, was adamant that the victim was badly burnt and, yes, it was anything but a laughing matter, which he was, if that makes any sense.

  As the story unfolded, it’d been a stifling hot day in Noocundra and a few of the locals were in the pub attempting to escape the heat. The problem was that a large tiger snake was thinking along similar lines. It appeared in the pub and had a look around. But when it saw the accumulated gathering, it decided that it didn’t like the company and headed off to the next best place it could think of, that being the outside toilet, one of those long-drop types. So out of the pub the tiger snake slithered, down the track a bit, into the outside toilet, and disappeared down the long-drop where it was nice and cool.

  Now this chap saw where the snake had gone and he came up with the bright idea of incinerating it. He downed his drink, put on his hat, went and got a gallon of petrol, wandered back through the pub, down the track a bit, into the outside toilet, and tossed the fuel down the long-drop where the snake was. The problem was, after he’d tossed the petrol down the long-drop, he searched through all his pockets and couldn’t find his matches. So he wandered back inside the pub.

  ‘Anyone seen me matches?’ he asked.

  As I said, it was a very hot, still day in Noocundra, stinking hot, in actual fact. So after he found his matches, he thought that he may as well have another drink before he went back outside and sorted out the snake. Meantime the petrol fumes were rising up from out of the long-drop and, with there not being a breath of a breeze to disperse them, the toilet soon became nothing short of a gigantic powder keg.

  After the chap had downed his drink, he grabbed his matches and put his hat back on. ‘I’ll be back in a tick,’ he said. Then he wandered outside, down the track a bit, in the direction of the toilet. Without having a clue as to what he was in for, he walked into the toilet and took out a match.

  ‘Goodbye, snake,’ he said, and struck the match over the long-drop.

  There are those from the outlying districts who go so far as to say that they felt the reverberations of the ensuing explosion. I don’t know about that, but one thing’s for sure, it certainly put the wind up the blokes who were hanging around the bar of the Noocundra pub. Such was the instantaneous impact of the blast that they didn’t even have the time to down their drinks before they hit the floor. Mind you, that’s only a rumour because, knowing some of the chaps out that way, no matter what the emergency they always finish their drinks before taking any action, even if it’s a reflex action.

  Still, you’ve got to feel sorry for the chap who went up in the sheet of flames. Critically burnt he was. Left standing over what had once been the pub’s long-drop toilet with his clothes smouldering away. Stank to high heaven he did. It affected the chap’s hearing too. Deaf as a post he was for a good while. And the shock, poor bloke. Even by the time we got there he was still as dazed as a stunned mullet.

  As for his hat, it’s never been found.

  Whistle Up

  A few years ago there were quite a lot of people moving into the pastoral country, out here near Meekatharra, in the central west of Western Australia. Anyway, being new to the area, they weren’t familiar with the particular system we had if we wanted to activate an emergency call in at the Royal Flying Doctor base. Mind you, this is well before we had the modern transceivers. Back then, the emergency system was activated by a specially designed whistle. To give you some idea of this whistle, it was about three to four inches long and V-shaped, as in a Winston Churchill victory sign, so that you could blow down each side in turns, one long side, the other shorter.

  So say, for example, there was an emergency. What you did was to press the button on the microphone which was attached to the radio then blow one side of the whistle for about ten seconds, then the other side for about six seconds, and that would activate the Flying Doctor emergency call in at Meekatharra.

  Of course, it wasn’t the perfect system. It definitely had its problems — it was rather difficult to activate the call signal in summer when you were competing against thunderstorms, or if you were one of the older folk or maybe a heavy smoker where you easily ran out of puff. And also, believe it or not, you had to develop a certain technique because when you changed from blowing down the long side to blowing down the short side you only had about a one second gap between blows otherwise it wouldn’t work.

  Anyway, the bloke who was the base operator in Meekatharra around this time decided that we should set a Sunday morning aside so that everyone could have a practice at blowing their whistles over the radio. Now this was a great idea because it not only gave a chance for the newcomers to get familiar with the system but it also provided the opportunity for those of us who’d lived in the area for a long time to brush up on our whistle-blowing skills.

  So on this particular Sunday morning the base operator had us all raring to go. He got us on line then went through the rollcall to make sure that everyone was okay and that they had their special whistles nice and handy, which they did. After that was settled he began to go through the people one by one and listen to them blow their whistles, one long, one short. Quite a few people were successful, others had trouble. That was because they hadn’t used the whistles before, or they ran out of wind or, in some cases, the whistles hadn’t been used for so long that wasps or whatever had built little mud nests inside which prevented the whistles from working properly.

  Anyway, the base operator got to this old feller called Harry. Now Harry had been in the bush for quite a long time and the base operator said, ‘Okay, Harry, now blow the long side of your whistle.’ So Harry blew into his whistle and the sound it made came over our radios, nice and clear.

  ‘Well done, Harry,’ the base operator said, ‘now blow the short side.’

  Then Harry blew his whistle again and, oddly enough, it gave off the exact same sound. So the base operator asked Harry if he was sure that he’d blown down the other side of the whistle. Well, I can tell you that Harry sounded more than slightly put out by this remark. ‘I most certainly did,’ he snapped. ‘I blew down one side of the whistle, then I blew down the other side of the whistle.’

  That seemed clear enough, so the base operator then asked Harry just how long ago it’d been since he’d last used his whistle. Harry replied by saying that he couldn’t really recall the exact date but it was definitely the year when a certain bush footy team took out the grand final.

  ‘Well, okay then,’ the base operator said, ‘take your whistle and give it a good wash in some soapy water, then shake
it dry, and I’ll come back to you later and we’ll give it another go.’

  So off went Harry to wash his whistle and the base operator went on to listen to some other station owners blow their whistles, one long, one short. Then finally he returned to Harry. And when Harry blew his whistle, lo and behold, the shrill came across sounding exactly the same again, both the long side and the short side.

  ‘Look, Harry, there’s only the one tone coming through,’ the base operator said. ‘There must be something stuck down your whistle, maybe some mud, or wasps, or something like that. So how’s about you go and get a little bit of wire and have a poke around inside.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Harry.

  So away went Harry and when he got back on the air about five minutes later he tried his whistle again. There was no change. The result was the same. Still only one tone came through on both the long side and the short side.

  The base operator by this stage was getting quite perplexed over the matter so he said to Harry, ‘I can’t understand what’s going on here, Harry. There’s definitely only one tone coming through. Are you dead sure that you’re using the right whistle?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ replied Harry, ‘it’s the very same whistle I used when I was umpiring that grand final I told you about.’

  Willing Hands

  It was a Sunday. I was working an afternoon shift when we were called to a car accident at De Rose Hill, which is a cattle station just over the border into South Australia. Normally, Port Augusta would have taken it but for some reason they didn’t have an aircraft available. That’s why we went. We always help each other out. It’s good like that.

  From the information we received, a young tourist couple had rolled their car a few times and ended up crashing into a fence. The girl wasn’t too bad, she only had a broken ankle, so after the accident she’d dragged the male occupant out of the passenger’s seat and had laid him on the side of the road. Then while she was waiting for someone to come along she shielded the guy from the heat by holding a tarp over him.

  But the guy was the big worry. We were told that he didn’t have any body movement from his shoulders down.

  Now De Rose Hill is a difficult place to land the twin-engine aircraft because the airstrip’s very short and it almost banks out onto the highway. So to gain every metre we could, we had to hit the airstrip as near to the road as possible. That meant while Pete, the pilot, kept his eyes glued on the strip ahead, I had my eyes peeled on the highway.

  ‘Pete,’ I’m saying, ‘watch out for the road train on the left there.’

  Anyway, we missed the road train, landed safely and checked the couple out. There hadn’t been anyone medical there until the ambulance arrived, that’s apart from some volunteers, of course, and they’d done a really good job. They’d put the guy on spinal boards and all.

  Other than having broken her ankle, the girl was extremely distressed, so we gave her some sedatives then attended to the guy. The fifth vertebra in his neck, the C5, had actually gone over and severed his spinal cord. The C5 is above the C4. Christopher Reeves damaged a C4; you know him, don’t you, the bloke who acted as Superman? That’s why he lost his breathing capability and was placed on a life support machine. Luckily, this guy wasn’t quite that bad. At least he could talk.

  So we put drips and different things into the guy to get him as comfortable as possible. Now, he was a very tall man, extremely tall in fact, which made me even more thankful that there were so many willing hands there when it came to getting him onto a spinal mattress and into the aircraft. One old station chap even shaded the injured guy’s face with his big bush hat. It was amazing just how helpful everyone was.

  Now the way that the aircraft’s set up is that there’s a seat on the right-hand side, then room enough for two stretchers to go down the other side. But with the guy being so tall, we had to drag the spinal mattress up to the end of the aircraft and put his head on the seat so that we could fit the stretcher in with the girl on it. Then when she was settled we dragged the guy back down and put pillows and other bedding under his feet.

  So finally we got the couple settled on board. ‘Thanks,’ we said to all the helpers. As I said before, they were fantastic. If it wasn’t for them, we’d have been in big trouble. Anyway, we said cheerio to everyone, got into the aircraft and Pete started making his take-off preparations. Then just as we were about to taxi up the runway, a mob of cows came out of nowhere and wandered onto the airstrip.

  By this time the ambulance people and our willing helpers had jumped into their vehicles and were on their way back to Marla or wherever, leaving no one behind to disperse the cows. So we taxied up and down a couple of times in an attempt to scare the cattle away. The only trouble was that by the time we reached one end of the runway, the cows had already wandered back onto the strip, down the other end.

  We did have a telephone in the plane but that only worked within a certain radius of a few places and De Rose Hill wasn’t within the radius of anywhere. So we had to go about it the long way.

  What we did was we got in touch with the tower in Adelaide, who got in touch with the Adelaide Ambulance Service, who got in touch with the Ambulance Service in Marla, who got in touch with the ambulance that was returning from the accident scene, via a satellite phone, and they turned around and came back to shoo the cows off the airstrip, so that we could take off.

  You Wouldn’t Read About It

  A good while ago they were filming that television show called ‘The Flying Doctors’ up here in Broken Hill. I mean, it’s all over now but at the time they were aiming to shoot twenty episodes. The problem — or so I found out — was that they only had thirteen or so stories written. Now I reckoned that I had a great one to tell so I tried to get in contact with the girl who was involved in this particular incident, in the hopes that we could get together and collaborate on a script. The long and short of it was that I couldn’t find her. Still can’t. So perhaps if she ever gets to read this story she might like to get in touch. You never know.

  Anyway, to go back a step or two, or three, before this particular incident occurred I used to work up at the mines in Broken Hill. That was until the day I received the old DCM. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s short for ‘Don’t Come Monday’. So, with a fair amount of time on my hands and nothing better to do, I hooked up with an operation driving a small tourist bus around the area.

  Then one time we’d just made it into the tiny opal-mining town of White Cliffs before it bucketed down. I’d never seen anything like it. What’s more, it left me with a big problem. See, I had some tourists on board who had to get back to Broken Hill by a certain day and there was no way that the type of bus I was driving could make it through in those sorts of wet and muddy conditions. Anyhow, as luck had it, I managed to organise their return with another carrier and I stayed behind with the bus.

  So there I was the next day, stuck in the White Cliffs pub, waiting for the road to dry out. And with nothing much else to do, I filled in my day sipping on a beer, playing some darts, then having a game of pool, then some more darts, some more beer, a bit more pool, darts, pool, beer, and so on and so forth, until I wandered off to bed with the old wobbly boot.

  It must have been about one in the morning when I was woken by the sounds of people running all around the place. Well, that certainly shook off the wobbly boot, I can tell you. Lights going on and off, cars taking off outside, shouting, the works. ‘Christ,’ I thought, ‘the pub’s on fire.’ So I threw on some clothes and decided to get out of there quick smart.

  The funny thing was though, as I was making my way outside it suddenly struck me that amid this confusion there wasn’t even a whiff of smoke. So I pulled one chap over and asked him what all the kerfuffle was about. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said. And this bloke told me there was a young girl who lived up the track at a station property, well, she’d been on a dialysis machine for a good while and the Flinders Hospital in Adelaide had just rung thro
ugh to say that they’d found her a donor.

  ‘But,’ this chap added with a grim face, ‘we’ve got to get her to Adelaide by 7 am, or else.’

  Mind you, by this time it was just after 1 am in the White Cliffs pub which is way up in the northwest of New South Wales. What’s more, the roads were almost impassable and they had less than six hours to transport the girl from the station property into White Cliffs and then fly her down to Adelaide, a distance of about 700 kilometres.

  But none of that seemed to deter these people, the publican in particular. He was the nerve centre of the whole evacuation. He had all the radios and stuff and he was frantically organising things. The Flying Doctor at Broken Hill had been notified and was on the way up. One group of locals had gone to meet the father as he brought the girl into town through the floods. Another group had gone out to clean up the airstrip after the downpour and to set up the flares and get rid of the kangaroos.

  To my eye they seemed to have a good enough handle on things so I wandered back to bed. Then in the morning I asked how the evacuation had turned out and I was told that they’d met the father out on the track, the plane had landed okay, they’d gotten the girl to Adelaide in time, and it looked like the operation in at Flinders Hospital was a success.

  So that was that.

  Then some time later, down the track a bit, I was taking a group of tourists around the Royal Flying Doctor Service base at Broken Hill. I was telling these people this story, about how they got the girl out of White Cliffs and into Flinders Hospital under some very extreme conditions and time constraints. There I was telling this story and one of the staff from the base pulled me aside.

  ‘Guess what,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I replied.

  ‘I was the pilot who flew that young girl down to Adelaide,’ he said.