by Bill Marsh
In actual fact the Coms guy didn’t hold out much hope. But anyway, he rings up a couple of old blokes and they come in and get the story. They don’t hold out too much hope either but they get out their old surveying maps — the ones they’d had stored away at the back of their wardrobes for the past twenty years or so — and they blow the dust off them and lay them out on the table. So there’s these two old crusty miners, you know, looking at these maps and going like, ‘Gawd, it could be this camp.’ ‘No it couldn’t be that one but I remember this camp. That could be the one.’ And between them they, sort of, figured out, ‘Well, he might be somewhere in this region here but, you know, then he could be somewhere else. But if we were going to have a stab in the dark, here’s as good a place as any to start looking.’
And that’s when they got the Flying Doctor Service involved. As I said, I was working up there at the time. So they called me over and they said, ‘Well, look, we’ve got a guy. He’s out bush somewhere and he’s found an old telephone and he’s on the line and we’re going to try and find him.’
So we got the helicopter pilot in for a briefing and these crusty old miners said, ‘I reckon we should do a grid search, starting from here and just see how we go.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ the chopper pilot said. ‘We’ll start at that point and just work our way back in a criss-cross pattern.’
And well, what you’ve got to realise is that the lost Englishman could’ve been at any one of about a hundred and fifty possible old camp sites, okay? Anyway, off we all go in the chopper and this Englishman’s still on the phone talking to Moomba Coms and he looks out of the broken down old telephone box and he sees this helicopter away in the distance, and we could see the phone box and we could see him waving and we’re thinking, ‘Oh God, this is unbelievable. It’s a miracle. We’ve found him.’
Now, from him making the telephone call to us finding him would’ve only taken, probably, an hour. Mind you, he’d already been wandering around out there for a couple of days without adequate clothing and, of course, no food. But as luck would have it, that was the first point in our search pattern. So we landed the chopper and the pilot, he switches the engine off and he walks over to this English guy, who’s still standing there with the phone in his hand, wondering if what he’s seeing is really real or not, and the pilot says to him, ‘Excuse me, were you the guy who phoned for a taxi?’
And this guy couldn’t believe it. Well, neither could we. All the cards had fallen his way. He told me later that he thought it was sort of a religious experience. Like, I know his mate died and all that sort of stuff but he said, ‘I’ve never believed in God but gees, I do now because, you know, there I was out in the desert with next to Buckley’s of getting found and all of a sudden an ancient telephone box appears that somehow gets me through to Moomba Coms and then a helicopter arrives out of nowhere to pick me up.’
Anyway, before we went back and retrieved his mate’s body we flew the Englishman back to Moomba and, amazingly, he wasn’t too badly exposed. His feet were really blistered and he had a bit of sunburn. But, you know, in the scheme of things, he wasn’t too bad, though he did keep saying how hungry he was, which you could understand. So when we arrived back at Moomba, of course, all his clothes were shredded and as we walked into the Health Centre I threw him a pair of overalls and said, ‘Look mate, just put these on and we’ll go and get you something to eat.’
And he went, ‘Oh great because, like, I’m really hungry, you know.’
Well, he threw the overalls on and I took him over to the Moomba mess hall. Now, the Moomba mess hall is this great big, gigantic dining room, which can cater for about four hundred workers, right, and the food’s phenomenal. You can get just about anything. You know, this is around lunchtime and there’s salads and sandwiches and four different sorts of hot meals and there’s an ice-cream machine there, and desserts. It’s like a huge buffet at a hotel. So we go into this mess room and this guy, well, here he is, an hour and a half earlier he thought he was going to die from starvation and now he walks into this food fest.
‘Can I have anything I want?’ he said.
I said, ‘Go for it mate, you’re the one that hasn’t eaten for days.’
So he grabbed a plate and he piled it full of T-bone steaks, right. And I’ve never seen a guy go through three T-bone steaks so quick in my life. He just wolfed them down. And he’d just finished this enormous meal, right, and he turned to me and he said, ‘Oh, cripes, I’ve just forgotten. I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat in ten years.’ Then he added, ‘But I tell you what, that was the best meal I’ve ever had in my life.’
Not a Happy Pilot
I suppose you could say that I actually started with the Flying Doctor Service back in 1987 when I was working with the Division of Child Health out at Charleville, in south-western Queensland. At that stage the nurses from Child Health were seconded across to the RFDS as flight nurses. From Charleville I moved back to Innisfail, in far northern Queensland, which is where I was born. And then in 1991 the structure changed within the Division of Child Health and we were employed by the RFDS. So since ’91 I’ve been a Senior Flight Nurse, here in Cairns.
The area we cover is, well, we go right up to Torres Strait, then west out to Georgetown, and down south to just north-west of Townsville. So it’s a fair area. And the daily structure, if there is a structure — and that’s the beauty of the job because there isn’t much of a structure — is that in the Cairns, Charleville and Mount Isa RFDS bases we help the doctor run the general clinics as well as on-call work. So we’ll be on a four-week roster doing clinic work and also, because we’ve all got child health experience as well, we go out and set up a ‘Well Baby Clinic’ — that’s like a child health clinic. You know how, when you’re in the city, you go and take your baby in to be weighed and to get advice and all that sort of stuff, well, that’s what we do on the Well Baby Clinic.
The other thing is that, when you’re on your four-week roster, you’re on day call or night call so you have to stay in town and you, virtually, wait — just in case there’s an emergency or whatever. Basically, it’s a twelve-hour shift and so you know when you’re going to work but, if there’s an emergency, you don’t quite know when you’re going to come home from work. That’s about the only catch, really.
But there’s many, many happy stories. I suppose delivering a baby while you’re in the air and then having to tell the pilot we’ve got an extra one on board still gives me a thrill. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary, really. It just happens. But I was thinking about some other types of stories and I remembered once when I was working out of the Charleville base. This doesn’t have anything to do with the delivering of babies. I guess it’s really more just a comedy of errors, which, in turn, caused Bill McConnell not to be a happy pilot on this particular occasion.
Bill was an old and wise and very experienced pilot who’d been flying around out in the bush for years. Anyway, a seismic crew was out there in the outback somewhere looking for oil and they radioed through one night to say that one of them had been bitten by a snake and they thought he was going to die. So it was an emergency.
On this occasion there was Bill, a doctor and myself who headed out to this place to evacuate the bloke. Now, because we didn’t normally go there — it was an airstrip that Bill didn’t really know too well — he wanted everything prepared for our arrival. To that end, Bill gave them instructions about lighting flares along the strip to help guide him down and he also asked for a small fire to be lit so that, when he saw the white smoke, he could judge wind direction, which would help with his landing the aeroplane.
As I said, it was night, but when we got out to where Bill thought the strip was, there’s nothing there. No flares. No fire. Nothing. So we’re circling round and round, trying to figure out what’s going on. What was even more baffling was that Bill had also prearranged a channel to talk to these seismic blokes on and now we’d lost complete contact with
them on the radio. So we’re flying round and round and round until finally another voice comes over our radio and says, ‘Well, they had a bit of an accident on their way out to the airstrip. They run into a tree and their radio’s out.’
Nobody had been hurt in the accident, thankfully, and we were told that they’d soon be out at the airstrip waiting for us.
‘Okay, then,’ we said. So we flew around for a while longer and then, ‘Yes, there’s the strip and they’re there but the flares are pretty dull and I can’t see any white smoke.’
Anyhow, being an emergency, Bill decided to go ahead and land anyway. Then on final approach we realised that, instead of lighting a small fire to produce a thin wisp of white smoke, they’d basically built this huge bonfire and stacked it with old rubber tyres. So, instead of white smoke, there’s this huge plume of black smoke blowing right across the strip, which, of course, made Bill’s job of landing the aeroplane extremely difficult because he could hardly see the airstrip at all.
But as I said, it was an emergency so with Bill muttering curses at the seismic blokes’ stupidity, he decided to continue with the landing. Down we came on final with me up the front, trying to help poor Bill negotiate his way through all this black smoke. Then just as we are about to put down, one of the seismic blokes decides that he’d better take a memento of the occasion. So we’re only about 10 or 15 foot off the ground when — Flash! — Bill’s just about night-blinded by the flashlight of a camera. That was immediately followed by some very colourful and derogatory language coming from our pilot punctuated with, ‘Just hang on!’
Considering all the circumstances of a strange strip, the darkness of both the night and the smoke, plus being blinded by flashlight, Bill did a great landing. Though, by now, he’s not in a very cheery mood at all. So he gets out to have a bit of a go at these blokes and it was a Kiwi who’d been bitten. And I hate snakes. Anyhow, these blokes came over and they hand me a jar. ‘Here it is,’ they said.
‘Here it is, what?’ I replied.
‘Here’s the snake that bit him.’
And I just tossed the jar over to Bill, screamed with fright and ran back to hide in the aircraft. When Bill took a look at the snake he grunted, ‘It’s a child’s python. That won’t kill yer. It’s non-venomous. It wouldn’t kill a fly.’ Then he walked off shaking his head at all the unnecessary trouble they’d put us through. I can tell you, he was not a happy pilot at all.
So, with me hiding in the aircraft and Bill having walked off, the doctor was left to manage the situation by himself. Anyhow, we ended up evacuating the bloke. I think, being a Kiwi and there not being any snakes in New Zealand, he was a bit traumatised just by being bitten by one anyway.
Okay
I guess these two stories are about communication in its different forms. The first one is, perhaps, more rightly about miscommunication. It’s about a young bloke who was a ringer cum jackeroo at Nappa Merrie Station. Nappa Merrie’s out in the channel country, over on the south-western Queensland, north-eastern South Australian border. The Cooper runs through the property. That’s where the Burke and Wills monument is and The Dig Tree.
Anyway, history aside, this young feller had been on a holiday to Brisbane where he’d befriended a young woman. He was obviously very serious about her because, after he came back to Nappa Merrie, he then made up his mind to return to Brisbane, with the express purpose of meeting the young girl’s father and discussing future plans with regard to marriage or whatever. The only trouble was that, when they met, the young woman’s father wasn’t at all impressed with the young lad. What’s more he told him in no uncertain terms that the only way the romance had any chance to continue was, as he said, ‘over my dead body’.
The young ringer had then returned to Nappa Merrie in quite a distraught state. Then, one night, when he was feeling particularly lonely, he gave the girl a ring. But, as luck would have it, the young girl’s father answered the telephone and was rather blunt with the ringer. In fact, he told the young lad something along the lines of: Go away and slash his wrist. Which, of course, the young ringer did. He did exactly that.
It was at that stage I received the call to say the young ringer had cut his wrists and I advised them what to do to try and arrest the haemorrhage, until I got down there. We flew out from Charleville and, when I got down there to Nappa Merrie and went to the small room where the young ringer was, it looked like he’d done a pretty good job of it. There was blood all over the place.
To begin with, I resuscitated him. Next up, I had to examine the wound to see what sort of damage he’d done to himself. And it was while I was doing the examination that I felt a strange sensation running up my legs, and when I looked down I discovered that the floor was covered with meat ants. Now, I don’t know what attracted them, whether it was the smell of the blood, or what, but these meat ants had decided to crawl up my legs, which was not very comfortable, I can tell you. Anyway, I then had to get rid of them before I could fix the feller up.
Well, the young ringer survived, though I don’t know what happened to him after that, though I don’t presume his romance with the young woman from Brisbane went any further.
The second story, and perhaps a more humorous one, also deals with communication; though, more rightly, this time you could describe it as non-communication.
I was called to a motor bike accident about a couple of hundred kilometres west of Thargomindah, again in south-western Queensland. This feller, he was a middle-aged Japanese bloke and he was riding a big motor bike. I can’t remember what sort of bike it was, nor what size, but it was a big bike.
Anyhow, he’d had this accident and, of course, he couldn’t speak any English, and me, in my ignorance, couldn’t speak any Japanese. What’s more we didn’t have access to telephone or radio, to get an interpreter or anything like that. Not out there. But I soon found out that we did seem to have one word in common, and that was the word ‘okay’. We both knew the meaning of ‘okay’. Well, I presumed he understood the term ‘okay’ because as I was diagnosing him, I’d do something and ask him, ‘Okay?’
To which he’d reply with an, ‘Okay.’
Anyway, this Japanese bloke had suffered, amongst other things, a fractured pelvis. In fact, his pelvis was in quite bad shape. So having diagnosed him and resuscitated him there were then certain procedures I had to perform before he was considered fit enough to be loaded on the Pilatus PC 12 and be flown back to the hospital. And these were quite invasive sorts of procedures. In fact, they were not the sort you’d expect to have to do, out in the middle of the bush, including, amongst other things, the insertion of a tube into his bladder plus a physical rectal examination.
Of course, everything was done with an ‘okay’. And everything was going ‘okay’ until we came to the rectal examination. Then as I began my examination I looked at him and asked, ‘Okay?’
To which he sort of winced a little, but still replied, ‘Okay.’ Though, this time I noted that his ‘okay’ was not spoken in a very convincing manner.
Anyway, he got the appropriate treatment whether he liked it or not. Then we got him into the plane and we took him to Toowoomba, where he began his pathway to recovery, before being sent home to Japan.
But now, thinking back, I’m not sure just how much he actually understood about the procedures I did on him, nor why I had to do them. So I have the feeling that, by the time he’d returned to Japan, he was convinced that these rough Australian doctors were anything but okay.
One Arm Point
At the time of this story, my wife, Gail, and I we were teachers up at One Arm Point. Mind you, we’re still with the Eduction Department. I’m now a District Director in Geraldton and a lot of the area that I’m responsible for goes into the outback from Geraldton. So I have a large spread of responsibility. Gail is now a school principal. So we’ve moved on in thirty years, but we still have a strong link with the north-west of Western Australia.
Now, One Arm Point is an Ab
original community about 200 to 240 kilometres north of Broome, on the Dampier Peninsula. The Aboriginals there — the Bardi people — had once lived on Sunday Island, which is probably about 10 to 15 kilometres off the mainland. But then, for a number of reasons, their community on Sunday Island folded so they moved into Derby.
But the tribe really suffered in Derby from drink and unemployment and eventually, after quite a number of years, some of the Elders decided that they’d like to return to their land. Now, setting up a community back on Sunday Island was impractical. That was out of the question, so they got a lease on the mainland as close as possible to Sunday Island, which is where One Arm Point is now. On a map, it’s at the tip of the point that goes north-eastish from Broome, as well as north-westish from Derby. Cape Leveque is just near by. That’s where there’s a lighthouse.
So in 1975 Gail and I were asked by the Superintendent for the Kimberley to go to One Arm Point and open the school, which we did. By that stage, the Aboriginal community had only been going for a year or two and we were the first teachers to go there. We were young. I’d been teaching for seven years and Gail had been teaching for six. So we were pretty inexperienced really, and we were certainly inexperienced as far as Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal people were concerned. But we said, ‘Yes.’ And we bought ourselves a Nissan four-wheel drive and headed off.
When we arrived we had no house and there was no school to teach in. We taught under a tree and we lived in a caravan. I must say that it was quite a cultural shock really, but for all that it was to prove to be a wonderful experience.
Anyway, we’d only been at One Arm Point for two or three weeks when a cyclone came through. And that was another experience, I can tell you. Oh, there was a lot of rain and a lot of wind, that sort of thing. It knocked down a lot of trees and it really put the road in terrible condition. We had the only four-wheel drive vehicle at the community and were the only ones who could get through when the road was that bad. Then, at about two or three o’clock one morning, there came this bang…bang…bang on the side of our caravan and, when we opened the door, a white guy, Brian Carter — he’s married to an Aboriginal person there — said, ‘Would you mind taking one of the young women to Lombadina, she’s in labour.’