The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  ‘Sniff… Sniff… Yeah… Sniff… I guess so.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’

  ‘Sniff… Sniff…’ Then he bursts out crying, ‘Wahhhh… Wahhhh… Mum’s just hit me!’

  Of course, all this is going out over the airwaves. Then another time his mother had obviously gone off to do something else and he was stuck with his school work and he got upset, so the teacher asked, ‘Are you alright, Donald?’

  And then you hear this little whimper, ‘I need my mum.’

  Oh, he was a real little character, he was. But she was too, you know. Like, the teacher would say, ‘Okay, Donald, you’ve finished your painting now. Put it down and maybe you should put a rock on it to hold it there until it dries.’

  Then you’d hear the mother shouting in the background, ‘Bloody hell. Nick off down the bloody creek and get a bloody rock to hold this bloody painting down.’

  And the creek’s like 200 yards away or something. So you could imagine everyone who’s listening in is rolling around with laughter while all this stuff’s going on.

  Then — and this happened quite a few times — you’d hear this great big bang coming out over the radio and the teacher would come on air and ask some kid or other, ‘What’s going on there?’

  ‘Oh, it’s alright Miss, we just shot a snake in the corridor.’

  And all those wonderful bits and pieces would be broadcast out over the Kimberley. There was another little boy. One day he’s dreaming away. You know, boys can be terrible that way, and the teacher couldn’t get his attention so she said, ‘Are you alright, Andrew? What’s going on there?’

  ‘Oh, I’m just watchin’ all the boys [Aboriginal stockmen]. They’re outside there, sittin’ ’round, havin’ a beer and a smoko.’

  ‘And is that more interesting than doing your school work?’

  ‘Oh yeah, you bet!’

  So you couldn’t get away with anything. One of the big ones was when one of the kids told the teacher, ‘Dad’s not here today. He’ll be back tomorra.’

  ‘Oh, where’d he go?’

  ‘He’s just gone over to get a killer.’

  A ‘killer’, of course, is an animal you kill for your own meat. And, I mean, it’s a well-known rural joke that if you ever wanted to find out what your own beef tasted like, you just went over to your neighbour’s place and had dinner there. So here’s this kid broadcasting to everyone in the Kimberley that his dad wouldn’t be back until tomorrow because he was on his way over to the cattle station next door to knock off one of his neighbour’s cattle. So the kids were always dobbing you in, in one way or another, and the RFDS provided the radio.

  Another one, and I’ll make this the last little story; it’s about a woman out at one of the stations who really got dobbed in. One time, the teacher wanted to speak to her so she said to the kid, ‘Can I talk to your mum, please?’

  ‘Mum can’t come. She’s busy,’ the kid replied.

  ‘But I need to talk to her. Could you go and get her, please.’

  ‘Mum can’t come.’

  ‘Look,’ the teacher said, starting to get really frustrated with the kid, ‘I really need to talk to your mum.’

  ‘Mum can’t come.’

  ‘And just why can’t she come?’

  Then the kid gathers up enough courage to shout back at the teacher, ‘She can’t come because… SHE’S SITTING ON THE TOILET!’

  Emergency!

  Just a quick story and you may have already heard it. It’s not my story. It was told by a well-known doctor-surgeon who used to be here in Dubbo, in central New South Wales. The doctor’s name was Bob North. I think that’s what his name was, anyway. Anyhow, Bob told this one at his farewell presentation, type of thing, about four years ago, when he was leaving or retiring or whatever he was doing.

  Bob reckoned he was on duty in at Dubbo Hospital, one time, and there was this other doctor, a much younger feller, who’d just arrived from Sydney. I’d say he’d only been in Dubbo for a very short time. As far as I know he was straight out of university. The thing is, he was new at the job so he was pretty inexperienced as far as the more practical matters of doctoring go.

  Anyhow, Bob was working flat out in surgery, performing some extremely delicate operation. It was something very critical so he was very focused and very busy and this young doctor comes racing into the surgery. ‘There’s an emergency,’ he says. ‘We’ve just taken a telephone call from the Flying Doctor base and they want a doctor to fly up to Lightning Ridge with them, immediately.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Bob asked while still focusing on the job at hand.

  ‘Well, they say that there’s a bloke up there who’s fallen down one of the mine shafts.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too good,’ Bob replied.

  ‘No,’ said the young doctor, ‘apparently he’s been stuck down the mine shaft for about a week, with nothing to eat, and he’s only been keeping himself alive by drinking his own urine.’

  Anyway, Bob said, ‘Well, son, as you can see, I’m flat out, so you’ll have to go up to Lightning Ridge with the RFDS by yourself and see to the feller.’

  Of course, this really threw the new doctor into a flap. Being just out of university this was something very different than what he’d ever been taught.

  ‘Well,’ the young doctor said, looking to Bob for some wise and worldly advice, ‘what do I do when I get there? How do I go about treating him? What’s the procedure?’

  ‘Well, son,’ Bob said, still concentrating on his patient, ‘the first thing yer gonna have to try and do is to get the feller off the piss.’

  First Drive

  My first flight for the RFDS was as a freelance ‘driver’ out of Cairns. I describe myself as a driver because, basically, that’s all a pilot is. The only difference between us and a bus driver is that we’ve got wings. Anyhow, that was back on 13 November 1982 and because all the aircraft were already busy, we did that flight in a non-RFDS aircraft, but with an RFDS doctor.

  In fact, I’ve just got the old log book out and, before that first flight with the RFDS, already on that day, I’d been from Darwin to Groote Eylandt, Karumba and on to Cairns in a Shrike Commander. But what happened back in those days was that there was an operator out of Cairns called Outback Air, who was owned by Richard Murray-Prior, and Richard used to be the casual pilot for the Flying Doctor Service. So Richard must’ve been unavailable on this occasion because his wife, Ilma, rang around looking for somebody to fly an aeroplane and she got me and asked if I could go out somewhere with a doctor to evacuate someone.

  It was dark by then and, as I said, I’d already been around the place a bit already so I said, ‘Well, Ilma, I’m not long home from Darwin. But if you can’t get anybody else just give me a call back.’

  Of course, by my saying that, she had me then, didn’t she? In actual fact, a few years later, when I was employed full-time with the RFDS, Ilma worked for us as a manager of the RFDS Visitors’ Centre, here in Cairns, and I happened to ask her one day, ‘Ilma,’ I said, ‘away back then, in ’82, did you really ring around and look for anyone else to go out on that evacuation?’

  And her reply was along the lines of, ‘Don’t be silly, of course I didn’t.’

  Anyway, it didn’t take Ilma long to get back in touch with me to say that she’s rung around all over the place — which, of course, she hadn’t — and that she couldn’t find anyone else.

  So I said, ‘Yes, okay, I’ll do the trip.’ And then I was told that the place I had to go out to was a small town called Mount Surprise, which is south-west of Cairns, east of Georgetown.

  It was all quite an odd experience for me really because, for starters, I’d never been to Mount Surprise before and secondly, I’d never flown in the aeroplane I was going out in: a Piper Aztec. I mean, I was endorsed on it, but I’d never been in this particular one before so, as far as that goes, it was a strange aeroplane to me. Then the doctor that came out with me was a feller by the name
of Russell Findlay and along with his medical gear Russell also had a book which gave the details of where the Mount Surprise airstrip was and so forth.

  Then we were on our way out there and when I looked at the book Russell had brought along, it placed the aerodrome — this is from memory because it’s going back a while now — but it placed the aerodrome something like about 20 miles west from Mount Surprise.

  And I said to Russell, ‘Gee, it sounds pretty strange for them to have an airstrip that far out of such a little town like Mount Surprise.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘that’s what the book says.’

  Anyway I was still a bit concerned about it so I checked in with Townsville Flight Service to see if they could verify where the airstrip actually was and they said, ‘No, we can’t tell you, but Phil Darby will probably know where it is.’

  Phil was a very experienced pilot with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He’d been everywhere and knew the area like the back of his hand. Anyhow, Phil was coming back from Weipa and the bloke in Townsville said, ‘We’ll have a talk to Phil.’

  So, when Phil got into range they explained how we were on the way out to Mount Surprise but the information in the Aerodrome Book seemed a bit odd because it positioned the strip as being well west of the town.

  ‘Yeah, that’s where it’d be,’ Phil told them. ‘That’d be right.’

  ‘Oh, okay then,’ I said and that was that.

  But luckily enough, Phil must’ve had a bit of a think about it and decided, ‘Hang on, I don’t know so much about that.’ So he looked it up in his aeroplane and he got back in radio contact and he said, ‘The book you’ve got is wrong. The strip’s actually closer to town.’

  Then he asked if I’d ever been there.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘I didn’t even know that Mount Surprise existed until someone rang me up tonight.’

  And he said, ‘Well there’s a big hill right next to the strip, be wary of that.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ I replied.

  Now, I’d flown a bit at night, of course, but when you’re coming out of Cairns and those sort of bigger towns where there’s plenty of lights around them it’s fine, but, with a little place like Mount Surprise you know it’s going to be quite a black spot. Anyway, they had flares out and so we found the place alright and I remember — and it still happens to this day — next to the hill you get what we call a katabatic wind, which is where the air cools down and rushes down the hill. So you get quite a wind off it and when you’re going in to land there’s quite a bit of drift. Still, we negotiated that and we landed okay and the doctor said, ‘Do you want to come into town with me to see this patient?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I told him, ‘I’d prefer to have a look around here.’

  So the doctor went into town while I stayed out at the airstrip. But when my eyes started to get used to the dark and I got my bearings, I could see this hill right next to the strip. Anyway, I had a bit of a look around for future reference, just in case I came back again. Then before too much longer they returned with the patient. As it turned out it was a female school teacher who’d taken an overdose of drugs, so we loaded her up and tied her into the seat and we prepared to leave.

  Now, you’ve got to take off at a certain speed so that, if you have an engine failure, you can still keep flying. And I remember that I got a little bit slow when we lifted off. And it’s all in the mind, because it’s very hard, you know, to lower the nose when you don’t know the area and you don’t know exactly where the hill is out there. Anyhow we made it. But I can remember still holding onto the aeroplane until we got to about 7000 feet and once we got to 7000 feet I put the auto-pilot on. But gosh, it was as dark as hell. I’d never had that experience before. It was certainly a real eye-opener for me.

  So we arrived back at Cairns without any trouble and, yeah, the teacher would’ve survived okay. But whether she stayed off drugs is another thing. Who knows. I mean, I’ve since discovered that there’s a lot of sad cases out there; people who just don’t look after themselves.

  Anyway, that was my first flight, ‘driving’ for the Flying Doctor Service. I’m now full-time with the RFDS here at the Cairns base and then, sometimes, I’ll relieve drivers out at the RFDS bases in places like Mount Isa and Charleville.

  But I learned a lot from that first flight, because there’s nothing worse than going out to some place where you’ve never been before, especially at night, and you don’t know what obstacles there are, you know, if there’s towers about or there’s hills around the place. So it certainly got me going. And because of that experience, what I try to do now is that, on the days I go out to some of these more remote towns and properties, I take as many digital photographs of the area as I can and I put them on a disk and keep them in the hangar. Then, when a new driver comes along, someone who’s unfamiliar with these areas, I can say, ‘Before you go out there, have a look at these because they’ll give you a bit of an idea as to the lay of the land.’

  Gasping

  Yeah, the RFDS did actually come out for me once. At the time my husband, Pad, and I were working at Mount House Station, up the Gibb River Road, here in the Kimberley. It was during the wet season and the Station Manager was away on holidays so there were only four of us in residence. Anyhow, all of a sudden my lips went blue and I began to really gasp for air. It was smoko time and everyone was sitting in the kitchen and I walked up to Pad and I said, ‘Pad, I can’t breathe.’

  And he took one look at me and went, ‘Oh, you’re not doing too well at all, are you?’

  The Flying Doctor Service radio was down at the Station Manager’s homestead so they took me down there and they did the emergency button thing on the radio to get in contact with Derby. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s when you press the emergency button and a light in at the RFDS base comes on to let them know there’s an emergency.

  Anyhow, by this stage I’m lying on my back. The girl who was with us, she was good. She’d rolled up a towel and put it behind my neck, you know, to support my neck and open up my airways. But even then I was still really gasping because I just couldn’t get any air. Probably a little bit of panic had set in as well, which mightn’t have helped things.

  So, they answered the emergency in at the Derby RFDS base and they ask what’s wrong and Pad gets on the radio and says, ‘My wife can’t breathe!’

  Then they start asking him all these questions. ‘Does she suffer from asthma?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has she done this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has she done that?’

  ‘Do you have any idea why she’s not breathing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is she pregnant?’

  Pad had to think about that one. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not that I know of, anyway.’

  Then he asks me. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I gasped.

  ‘No, she says she’s not pregnant,’ Pad replied. ‘She’s just lying here, gasping. You know, like, what else can I say?’

  And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God!’ Because I’m getting pretty frightened by now. Like I’d tried very hard to lie there and relax and just think of something else but when your husband’s on the phone calling out, ‘She’s lying here gasping!’ well, it’s a bit hard to relax.

  Anyway, they said, ‘well, okay, we’d better come out then.’

  And they did have to divert their flight. Apparently they were going to Fitzroy Crossing or somewhere, and it wasn’t an emergency, and Mount House Station wasn’t all that far out of their way, which was fortunate. So it was a relief to hear them say that they were actually going to come out.

  Still and all, they weren’t able to arrive for about an hour so I just laid there on the floor trying to relax. Then about half an hour after we’d made the call to the Flying Doctor my breathing started to come good again, and my lips weren’t quite as blue. But then I came out in this most hideous rash, m
ainly around my collar, round my socks, around the tops of my jeans. It was burning unbelievably and I started getting these great big welts.

  When that happened we immediately figured out what was wrong. See, I must’ve walked under an itchy caterpillar nest and all the dust had fallen out onto my clothing. You know the little hairy caterpillars? It’s their defence mechanism, you know, so that things won’t touch them. Well, all their hair creates a dust that accumulates in their nest and if you get it on your clothes it rubs into your skin and you get this godawful rash. So that’s what happened. It was the itchy caterpillar.

  Anyhow, once the rash came out, Pad was fine then. He started to relax when he realised what had happened. But, of course, the rash didn’t come out until after I’d almost drawn my last breath, did it? Well, it certainly felt that way. I honestly thought I was going to stop breathing.

  So then Pad stuck me under a nice cold shower and that got rid of most of the itchiness. But I was still having a bit of trouble breathing so, with the Flying Doctor already on his way, we went out to meet him. And that was a fair drive because the RFDS registered airstrip was about a 30-kilometre drive around the other side of the mountain. It’s a big long, wide strip. So then I had to endure being bounced around in the front of the car.

  Anyway, when we got there, we waited for another half an hour until they arrived and we were able to tell them that it was probably the itchy caterpillar that’d caused the reaction.

  ‘That’s unusual,’ the doctor said, ‘because normally it’s the rash that hits you straight away and not the struggling for breath.’

  He likened it to me having an enormous asthma attack and, had they known, they would’ve been able to tell Pad to give me a spoonful of liquid Ventolin that was in the RFDS medical kit in the homestead. And that would’ve reduced the reaction. Anyhow, they gave me some antihistamine shots to get rid of the welts and that and then they were off again. But they were really good about it. You know, they were glad to see I was alive. But, oh gee, it knocked me around for a few days, and I certainly did appreciate them coming out.