The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  I come here the first time in the year of 2001 and I see this country. Spectacular! I was infected. We say in Germany, we are infected with this country. I love, very much, the outback, the nature, the animals, the sunrises and sunsets; it’s fantastic. To dream in the outback and to feel it, that is very great for me. And when I see the country the first time, I come to Alice Springs and I visit the Flying Doctor base there. This is my first real contact to the Flying Doctor. And then I realise, because of my profession as a doctor, there is much more in Australia than the country, the nature, the animals, the plants and all those things. There’s also a very important health service. The Royal Flying Doctor Service, it exists, already, over more than seventy-eight years. John Flynn founded it and it is very important for the people who live and work in the outback, and for the people who are travelling there. And in the outback there are travelling much more Germans and if there becomes health problems the Flying Doctor helps, and it costs no money.

  And this is why I founded, in Germany, the association to support the Royal Flying Doctor Service. I am President and I am the founder of this association and I guide this association, because I thought I should do much more to support the RFDS. And I knew many people in Germany who would give much more money if only they could use it as a tax deduction, and the fan club cannot do that. And so I founded this association. It’s incorporated, so if they give a donation they can claim it on their tax return. We have a President — that’s me — and we have an Assistant President, who is a doctor of law and he has done the statutes, and we have a cashier. You can find all about it at the website. But it is not so important for me to have much members because the most money we get in Germany, we get not from the members, we get from the people we speak to and tell them all about the organisation of the RFDS and what it is doing. Then, of course, many pharmacy factories and other factories also donate their money. But it’s very important for me to get money to support the Flying Doctors.

  So it is two years, nearly three years, since we have become an association. And now, I come to Australia two or three times every year, for four or five weeks each of those times, and I travel all over Australia and I visit as many of the Flying Doctor bases that I can to give them the money. This time we handed over more than $52 000, cash, to the Royal Flying Doctor Service bases, all over.

  But, oh, I love Australia. So many, many Germans do. My fascination will be, Australia is a country where I can breathe. I like to be free in the outback, to feel the nature, to see the sky, to see the landscape, to see the sunsets and the sunrises. You cannot do these things in Germany. You can only do that in Australia. And if I will be in a town or a city for some days or weeks, I then must go back to the outback, to see the wideness again.

  When I come back from my trips to Australia I see many people standing in the airport who are very sad to leave this nice country. If you go out of the aircraft at Frankfurt, a busy town, people don’t look nice and much stress will be there in them. I’m sad to leave too, but it’s just a little sad now because I know I will work very, very hard when I get back and then I can tell, ‘Now, I must fly back to Australia.’ So I am not so sad.

  But after coming back from Australia, I will come back to my practice with much more inside power and I am happy once again to be in my practice. And all these emotions I bring with me from Australia help me, and I can work ever much harder with that power. But after some weeks or some months, I know I must come back to Australia to refresh my motivation. So I’ll be back here again after three or four months, and with some more money to give to the Flying Doctors.

  Heroes out of Mere Mortals

  When I was reading through the first book, Great Flying Doctor Stories, I came across one that was titled ‘Peak Hour Traffic’ and I thought, You know, hang on a tick, I’ve been writing history books about Tilpa for the past twenty-five years or so and I’ve never heard this story before.

  So I rang the RFDS base at Broken Hill and I was speaking to the lady there and she told me I should go back to the source and see if I could clear up whether the old character named as ‘Joe’, who featured in the story, well, maybe he was someone else and things have been changed around so as not to incriminate the guilty, so to speak. Because, for the life of me, the name Joe just does not ring a bell, that is, of course, unless his real name’s been changed, just in case, and it’s actually old Clem who the story’s about.

  And also I was thinking about how it says in the story that this character Joe lived in the caravan park when there’s never really been a caravan park in Tilpa. Oh yes, there’s accommodation rooms at the hotel, and Carol and Bernie Williams, who own the Tilpa Trading Post — the store — they now have a couple of cabins and sites for caravans. But they didn’t have them back then, when the story took place, and they’re certainly not situated next to the pub. They’re next to the building where the first Flying Doctor clinics were held. Actually, the funny thing about Tilpa is that what now is the store was originally the hotel and what’s now the pub used to be the store. So they’ve sort of swapped functions.

  But my line of thinking is that, if that story about the old feller in the book was about Clem, well, I can understand that because Clem was a very private sort of a bloke, just like the Joe character. What’s more, Clem would also be the sort of bloke that, if two cars drove past his caravan on the one day, yeah, he’d say that the traffic was getting too much for him.

  So I reckon that it might be about old Clem and I know a fair bit about him because Clem was a bit of an institution around here. I say was because he’s dead now. He was also a Tobruk Rat. Originally he came from, I think it was, out Tibooburra way or Broken Hill, maybe. From recollection, a couple of his sisters used to live in Broken Hill, where they taught piano.

  But Clem was a fencing contractor in the Tilpa district for, I’d say, about forty years and, oh, wasn’t he a perfectionist, especially when it came to fencing. The words ‘It’s just about right’ weren’t in his vocabulary. If the fence wasn’t absolutely perfect, he’d go and pull it out again and put it back in at his own expense and in his own time. He was that sort of a bloke was Clem. Then when his working days were behind him he moved into a caravan over on the opposite side of the Darling River, across from the hotel, and it’s quite possible that, as the story in the book said, when the Flying Doctor came up here to run their clinics they kept an eye on him.

  I’ll just tell you a little story about Clem that’ll give you some idea as to what a sort of tough and independent character he was. On one occasion, he wasn’t too well, he was crook, and he realised that he needed to visit a doctor. So rather than ringing up someone he knew at the hotel or anyone locally and asking them if they could give him a lift he literally walked over to the edge of the road and hitched a ride the 150 miles or so, all the way to Cobar to see a doctor.

  And that’s where he died. He died in Cobar. And he’d expressed a wish that, if he did die out this way, he wanted to be buried in the Tilpa cemetery. Then, well, one thing led to another and because the Tilpa cemetery was actually situated on private ground and the people who owned the property didn’t want him buried there, Clem ended up having to be buried in Cobar, which is something we were all sorry about. So, basically, that was Clem.

  Now, as for Flying Doctor stories, I could tell you a few of those because my family have been involved with the medical clinic here in Tilpa since it first came into being, back on 18 September 1969. My mother had been a Matron with the Red Cross in the Second World War so, being a trained nurse, she took on the role of, well, not quite district nurse but at least clinic coordinator, when the RFDS clinic first came into existence in Tilpa.

  And that, in itself, is another story, because how my mother got out here to Tilpa was that, well, she married a local of course, and that local was my father. But there’s a funny little story about that, too, because my mother and my father first met in my mother’s grandmother’s house in Wilcannia. That was on the Wedne
sday before my mother’s aunt was to marry Dad’s uncle, the following Saturday. At that time Dad, whose name was Roy McInerney, was only sixteen years old — I think he acted as the best man for his uncle — and Mum was only nine years old. And to her dying day, Mum swore that the moment she saw this young sixteen-year-old, Roy McInerney, she said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry. He’s the one for me.’

  But Dad was never one to do anything in a hurry because, you see, it was twenty-six or so years later, when he was forty-three, that they got married. So there’d been a whole lot of life going on and a whole lot of water under the bridge, between times. So that’s how Mum got to Tilpa and when she got there she took on the clinic coordinator’s role and she did that right up until I got married in 1973. After Mum finished, one of the other ladies in the district, Pat Luffman, she took on the role for a few years, until she and her husband retired to Cobar. Then, carrying on the family tradition, my wife, Jill, she took on the job as clinic coordinator and she’s been doing it ever since. And on the few occasions we’ve been away over the last couple of years our daughter’s taken it on. So you could say that it’s been in the family for three generations.

  But as to some stories about the Tilpa clinic, I can remember one of the very, very early ones. This was after the days when they had a punt going over the Darling River, at Tilpa, and we used to hold the monthly RFDS clinics in a couple of rooms in a house that had previously been the old Puntman’s Cottage. One room was for the doctor and the other room was for the dentist, and the verandah acted as a waiting room, sort of thing. So everybody would line up on the verandah.

  The Puntman’s Cottage was owned by the local postmaster, Fred Davidson. Fred lived and had his post office in a separate building in Tilpa and had, for some reason or other, also acquired the old Puntman’s Cottage, which then became known as Fred’s Flats or The Villa Davo. And it was just lucky that he did because years later the building came in handy when the post office building burnt down and the ‘office’ was shifted to the ‘Flats’.

  But in those earlier days, with the dentist, all his drilling equipment was powered off a 12-volt battery and, as well as me being the official driver to get Mum into the clinic, it was also my responsibility to make sure I brought along a fully charged 12-volt battery. The only trouble with that was, as the clinic wore on, the power in the battery tended to wear down. So if you happened to be the last one in the queue, it was a case of the drill going at a slow woo…woo…woo. And it’s not very funny to start to get a filling with a very, very slow drill. In actual fact, there’s been a couple of cases where they had to send out an SOS for someone to pull a battery out of a vehicle somewhere and use that before the old battery went flat and the drilling equipment stopped completely. So the trick was that, if you had to have any fillings, you tried to make sure you got there nice and early.

  I can remember one clinic in particular when Ted Eslake was the dentist. Actually, I think that Ted first started with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Broken Hill, as a dentist, and later on he became the Director for the south-eastern section of the RFDS. It’s a bit like Clyde Thomson, how he used to be the Chief Pilot with the RFDS at Broken Hill and now he’s the CEO there. Anyway, I can remember this particular RFDS clinic when Ted was the dentist. And you must remember that this was an afternoon clinic because they’d already been to Louth or Wanaaring or White Cliffs or somewhere before they flew into Tilpa. But when they got there Ted had twenty-one patients to deal with and the last three, would you believe it, were all extractions.

  So, by the time Ted gets to them, the sun’s slowly going down, down, down and the RFDS pilot’s watching the sun get lower and lower and lower and, of course, he’s getting very, very toey because we only had an outback dirt airstrip at Tilpa so there was no lighting or flares or anything back then. Anyhow, it’s getting very late and the sun’s setting and the pilot’s getting extremely worried about all this so, in the end, to save time Ted lined these three blokes up — the ones that needed the extractions — and it was like working on a production line. It was a jab… ‘A needle for you.’ And jab… ‘A needle for you.’ And jab… ‘A needle for you.’

  When he’d finished doing that he waited for the shortest possible time then he came back to the first feller and asked, ‘Is it numb yet?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Good.’ And so it was yank and out come the tooth. ‘Here’s a wad of cotton wool. Chew on it.’

  Then he went to the next feller, ‘Is it numb yet?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’ So out come that feller’s tooth and, ‘Here’s a wad of cotton wool. Chew on it.’

  Then the same thing to the third one. ‘And here’s some cotton wool. Chew on it.’

  So there’s the three fellers, still sitting there like stunned mullets, munching on these huge wads of cotton wool, and Ted calls out to the pilot, ‘Okay then, let’s chuck all this stuff into the car and go out and get on the plane.’

  And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they took off only about half a minute after last light. And so that would’ve been back in about 1970, because by November 1971 we had a new Community Centre in Tilpa, which had a separate room for the doctor. Unfortunately, though, the dentist was not so lucky because he had to work in a corner of the main room.

  But that old area we had for the dentist, I tell you what, it made heroes out of mere mortals, because the only thing they had around the dental chair, to screen it off, was a bit of a curtain sort of thing. That’s all there was between you and the audience. So everybody knew if you were whimpering or not. Oh absolutely, if you screamed, everybody in the district of Tilpa knew all about it.

  Naturally, things have changed over the years. We’ve now got a three-roomed demountable building for the RFDS doctor and whatever nurses arrive. And the dentist, she’s now got her own room off the end of the hall. Mind you, she’s still using the same old dentist’s chair that Ted Eslake used away back then. So it’s a pretty well-worn dentist’s chair and a lot of us can still recall a life-changing event occurring while we sat in that chair, getting our teeth pulled or drilled or what-have-you. Of course, that’s the few of us that remain living in the district and who can still remember back that far.

  And what’s more, the Flying Doctor people have tried a few times to get that old dentist’s chair back and put it in their museum at Broken Hill, and every time they try, we’ve said, ‘Not on yer life. That’s part of Tilpa’s history, that is.’

  How the Hell

  I’m afraid I don’t talk about it too much because I still get a bit emotional about the whole thing. But it was 1966, about this time actually, February, bad dust storms. Terrible dust storms. You see, there was a big drought throughout central Australia at that time. I don’t know how long it actually went on for but I was told that there were seven-year-old kids living out there that had never seen rain. Then when it broke, later in ’66, I happened to be in Alice Springs and when the rains came, almost everyone in the whole town went down to the Todd River, just to look at the water going past.

  I was only new to the Northern Territory. I was only a young feller out there with my best mate, Ken McEwen. We’d done everything together ever since we were little school kids. Anyhow, I’d never seen a dust storm in my life and I don’t think Ken had either, and when we first arrived in the Territory it’d been so dry that there was hardly a scrap of vegetation anywhere and the little that there was looked like it just wanted to blow away. So on a regular basis we’d get these huge dust storms. I remember when I was in Alice — and I filmed it happening — it was as clear as anything, then, in the distance, you could see this mountain of dust and it rolled in like a massive cloud from the west and engulfed everybody and everything.

  And when the dust started coming through town it got so dark that the street lights automatically came on and you could see all the street lights and the car lights turn blue. And that’s true because, apparently, the silica in the sand tur
ns the lights blue. Then sometimes the wind stops and it’s deathly still but the dust is so fine that it just hangs up there in the air, like it’s suspended. Oh, it’s real eerie, I can tell you.

  So anyway, we had quite a few terrible dust storms the particular year it happened. At the time I was working for a Canadian company called ODE (Oil Drilling Exploration). ODE was doing a lot of contract well-drilling, out in central Australia, for oil and gas. They contracted for companies like X Oil and French Petroleum. I think they were also involved with Shell because Shell was also drilling madly all over the place in search of oil, even over in western Queensland.

  How it all worked was that there was another company, Austral Geophysics, and they’d go ahead of us and do some preliminary drilling then get all the relevant information up on maps. Then Austral would go to X Oil or French Petroleum or whoever owned the leases, show them the maps, and the oil companies would decide where they wanted to drill and they’d come to ODE and say, ‘Righto. Put down five holes for us over in this particular area.’

  Then we’d charge them whatever-it-was per foot and we’d bring the rig in, put it up, drill the hole, have a look, finish the hole, knock it down, pull the drill rig down, put in what we called a ‘Christmas tree’ and then we’d move off to the next place to drill another hole. A Christmas tree was a structure that sealed off the drill hole for safety because of the gas. Oh, there were all these painted valves on it and illuminated safety signs bolted to the chain wire fence that surrounded it. They stood out like dog’s balls in the desert, that’s why they were called Christmas trees.