by Bill Marsh
Now, because One Arm Point was so new, it had no medical facilities. Oh, there was a very short airstrip there, but it couldn’t take the Flying Doctor aircraft, certainly not at night time. So basically, there was nothing at One Arm Point while Lombadina — the Catholic Mission about 30 to 40 kilometres south — had a serviceable airstrip, plus it had lay missionaries, and that included a nurse.
So Gail and I got ourselves dressed and we jumped into the Nissan and headed off around to the camp where this young woman was in labour. We pulled up there and her mother and her mother-in-law and a couple of other people carried her out on a mattress and put her in the back of our vehicle. She didn’t look too well, at all. Then the mother and mother-in-law got in the back with her and we headed off to Lombadina. It was still dark. Thankfully, the high winds had passed by then, but there was still a fair bit of rain around and the road was, as I said, in a terrible condition.
Anyway, we’d been driving for, I don’t know, about fifteen minutes or so, when we heard a lot of cries from the young lady in the back. And all of a sudden, one of the older women lent over and said, ‘The baby’s come. The baby’s come. Will you stop? Can you get me a razor blade?’
Well, you know, we didn’t have a razor blade lying around in the vehicle, but Gail hunted around and she did find a pair of scissors in the glove box. So they used this pair of scissors to cut the baby’s umbilical cord then they said, ‘Oh, can you give us some string?’
Well, we didn’t have any string either, nor fishing line. I mean, we just weren’t prepared for an event like this. But anyway, we did have some old carpet in the back of the Nissan so we pulled a thread out of the carpet and they used that to tie the baby’s cord. So then we continued on to Lombadina, with the newly born baby, the mum and the two new grandmothers, all in the back.
We eventually arrived in Lombadina Mission at about sun-up and we got the lay missionary out of bed. She was a lovely girl. She came out and took the mother and baby inside, into their clinic there, and tended to her. At the same time she got on the radio and called the Flying Doctor who gave us an estimated time of the plane’s arrival at about seven o’clock in the morning. We then headed out to the Lombadina airstrip, again using our vehicle as the ambulance, and the RFDS plane landed and they took the baby and the mum. After the plane had taken off, the grandparents returned to One Arm Point with us.
But the baby was tiny. I think it only weighed about 2 pounds. It was quite premature. Now unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a happy ending because, I don’t know if it had anything to do with the baby being so premature or whether the cyclone had anything to do with it or not but we found out that the baby died about a week later. So yes, it didn’t make it. But that was the story.
One Lucky Feller
I’m a doctor at the RFDS base here in Kalgoorlie and I have two experiences that you may want to hear about. The first one: I can’t remember the exact details, but the guy was a Driller’s Assistant for an exploration outfit. He was with a small team of men who, I think, were drilling for gold. Anyhow, they were doing some drilling just over 200 kilometres southwest of Kalgoorlie. If you can imagine, they were in line roughly between Norseman and a place called Lake Johnston. So they were west of Norseman, and it was about four hours’ drive, on an unborn track, from where they were working to the nearest airstrip at Lake Johnston.
Now, from what I remember, the phone call came into the Kalgoorlie RFDS base at around three o’clock of an afternoon, in November 2004. The first-aider from the drilling company rang to say that they’d just heard about an accident that’d happened about four hours out bush from where the company was. It was all a bit scratchy and second-hand but, from what I could gather, apparently these guys were out drilling and the drill rig struck a tree and a tree branch fell down on this twenty-six-year-old guy and pinned him under it. The first-aider said that they had a lot of gear out there so they were quite confident they could get the tree off the guy but, due to the injuries he’d sustained, they didn’t know if they could get him out to the nearest airstrip at Lake Johnston.
Eventually we got in communication with the accident site and when I spoke to them it sounded like the guy had some pretty serious injuries. He had a very nasty open-fractured leg, abdominal injuries and probably some chest injuries, as well as possible spinal injuries.
The next set of problems we faced were, first, how we could get to him and, second, if we got there, how to get him out. One option was to get the exploration company people to drive an ambulance out to the guy, pick him up, do their best and bring him down to Lake Johnston where we could fly in to meet them. But, as the first-aider had said, they weren’t sure that, with his injuries, he’d survive the four-hour, four-wheel-drive trek from the accident site to Lake Johnston, over some pretty rough ground.
The only other option was for us to fly down to Lake Johnston, hop into a four-wheel drive and go out to meet him, assess his injuries and then, somehow, take it from there. That was all guesswork and, of course, that again meant he’d still eventually have to be transported the four hours over some pretty rugged ground to Lake Johnston.
Anyway, we eventually decided to fly out to Lake Johnston while the mines people headed off in an ambulance to try and get to the accident site.
Now, yet another problem was the available light. Naturally it’s far better for a rescue operation like that to happen in the daylight, but we were rapidly running out of daylight. And the guys from the exploration company reckoned it’d take them at least six hours to get out to the accident site, pick the guy up, then drive him over to Lake Johnston in the dark. They’d then, of course, have to put out kerosene flares or set up car headlights for us to land.
So we were in an extremely difficult situation, with this guy’s life in the balance and daylight running out. But then, just as we were in the process of packing our aircraft, we heard a flight of Navy helicopters coming into Kalgoorlie. As it turned out they were on their way from Perth, back to Nowra, in New South Wales, and were stopping overnight to refuel. So after they landed, I went over and had a talk to one of their commanding officers and within about twenty minutes they’d received permission to help us out. So we loaded up a Navy Seahawk helicopter and they flew myself and the Flight Nurse straight out to the accident.
It probably took us just under an hour to fly down there and we landed in a clearing right next to where the accident had happened. The ambulance had just arrived by then and they already had the guy on a stretcher and had given him a little bit of pain relief. So we took over and stabilised him, loaded him onto the helicopter and flew him back to Kalgoorlie in the Navy helicopter. Then from Kalgoorlie we put him into a RFDS fixed-wing aircraft, the Pilatus PC 12, and took him through to one of the trauma centres in Perth.
And he survived. Mind you, he ended up with quite a lot of injuries, including spine injuries, and he spent quite a time in hospital but he survived and now he’s okay. So he was one very lucky feller.
The other incident happened quite recently, and he was a lucky feller, too. We do clinic flights out of Kalgoorlie to the remote stations and roadhouses, and one of these stations is Madura Plains Station, which is just north of the Eyre Highway. I’d actually been there the day before to run a clinic and we were on our way back along the Transcontinental Railway Line. I think we were at Cocklebiddy, which is a roadhouse along the way, and we got a call from the manager at Madura Plains Station to say that they’d been mustering and a jackeroo had failed to call in on the radio. So they went looking for him in the mustering plane and they eventually spotted him, lying on the ground next to his motor bike, and it looked like he was unconscious.
Then about a quarter of an hour later some of the other musterers were directed to him by the mustering plane and they rang to confirm that, ‘Yeah, this guy’s come off his motor bike. He’s hit his head and appears to be unconscious and it looks like he’s been fitting.’
Luckily we were only about half an ho
ur away in the clinic plane so, yeah, they wanted us to come and get him. Now, when we do clinics, we only use a small charter plane. We can’t carry patients with us. We just carry all the basic medical gear for the more minor medical first-aid treatments and pain relief and things like that. But the Flying Doctor plane, the Pilatus PC 12, you know, it’s fitted out like an ambulance, with all the proper aero-medical outfit. So the RFDS in Kalgoorlie decided to send that out as well.
Anyway, the pilot and I, we landed at Madura Plains Station in the clinic plane and we jumped in a four-wheel drive and then it was probably a pretty good fifty-minute drive out to the scene of the accident. When we arrived there we stabilised the injured jackeroo and we packed him up, put him in the back of the ute, and by the time we got him back to the airstrip at Madura Plains Station — which took about two and a half hours in total — the PC 12 had arrived with a doctor and nurse on board and they took over and flew him to Kalgoorlie Hospital. So he was one lucky feller, too.
Over the Moon
My story goes back to January 1959, when I was a nineteen-year-older, fresh out of teachers’ college in Perth and I took up my first appointment in the little school at Coonana. For those that don’t know, and I guess there’d be many, Coonana’s a small railway siding township out along the Transcontinental Railway Line, approximately a couple of hundred miles east of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia.
Up until that stage in Coonana, if you had a medical emergency and needed to get to Kalgoorlie, the only thing you could do was to catch the Fast Goods train. The passenger train wouldn’t stop, only the Fast Goods train would stop. There were a number of drawbacks with that, the main one being that the Fast Goods only came through occasionally and even then it took four hours to get into Kalgoorlie; so, for a critically injured person, that could well be too late.
Anyhow I was just getting settled there and I was fossicking around trying to sort out what was what, when I uncovered a metal box. I guess it would’ve been about 2 feet by 2 feet and when you opened it up it created more compartments. I soon found out that it was an old Royal Flying Doctor Service medical chest, and that there were all sorts of medicines in it, which were all out of date. Then also, just sitting there was this unusable old wireless.
So, I got in contact with the RFDS people and they came out and they set the wireless up so that we could now use it and they replaced the medicine chest with a complete batch of new medicines. I got the job of being their contact so if someone was crook I’d ring the Flying Doctor base in Kalgoorlie and explain what was wrong with the sick person and they’d tell me the number of the medicine to take out of the box and I’d dispense it.
Now, when I first arrived at Coonana, most of the people who were out there were refugees from countries like Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and whatever European countries. In fact, no one spoke much English, apart from me, which made things a little bit difficult at times, especially with teaching. But I got the idea that now we had an operational wireless I could use it as a teaching aid for the twenty or so children who hadn’t heard much spoken English. So in the mornings, when the chat sessions were on, I’d get the kids involved. Our call sign was ‘8 BAKER TARE’ and the kids used to get on the radio and they’d call through and chat and we also sent telegrams and received messages from people out along the trans-line. And that worked very well indeed.
Then one day a Commonwealth Railways bulldozer — or grader — came through Coonana. The driver was out there cleaning up the edges of the track and so, when I was talking to him, I said, ‘Hey, what’d be the chances of you putting an airstrip in here?’
And typical, he didn’t consult anybody, all he said was, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll give it a go.’
So he got stuck into it and he graded an airstrip out the back of the school. Then after he’d finished I got all the kids together and in an emu fashion we walked up and back the thing, at least twenty times, to pick up any sticks, glass, tin or anything else that could cause a problem with respect to the aeroplane’s landing. So now we were in the situation that, if there was an emergency, the RFDS plane could be in and out from Kalgoorlie well within an hour and a half, which was a far cry from an irregular four-hour train trip.
When I told the Flying Doctor people that we now had an operational airstrip they put us on their monthly clinic run. And you can just imagine the huge excitement of the twenty or so kids when the first plane landed. Because, even though they didn’t grade the strip, they felt that they were virtually responsible for establishing it. Oh, they were over the moon.
The RFDS held their clinics in my office where the mothers or whoever came in to see the Flying Doctor. The other thing was that, with the clinic, the pregnant women out there could now have the opportunity to be checked by a doctor.
Also, another thing, once we’d established the airstrip, other planes, like crop dusters and people like that, started to use Coonana as a stepping stone to other places out along the trans-line: say, from Kalgoorlie to Coonana, then Coonana to Rawlinna and so forth. And of course, that was absolutely wonderful for the kids because even though some of them had seen aeroplanes in Europe, they could now get close to them and see inside of them, and they just loved that.
I was also entrusted by the RFDS people to collect the 10 shillings per year levy off all the people out there. Now, I don’t know if you’ve got it over in South Australia, but in Western Australia, if you pay ‘x’ amount per year to St John’s Ambulance then you get free use of the ambulance, if you ever need it. But if you don’t pay that then, if you need to use an ambulance, you have to pay the full price per kilometerage. Well that was the same with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. If you paid the ten shillings per year you could be carted to wherever for free. So if you had to be flown from Coonana to Kalgoorlie then from Kalgoorlie on to Perth, it was all free, apart from the ten shillings per annum, of course.
And that caused some hardship because, it’s got to be remembered that the people out there at Coonana, in those days, did not see much money because, even though there were a couple of Australian families living there by then, the vast majority were still the refugees coming out from Europe. And those refugees were heavily in debt to the Commonwealth Railways because when they first arrived they had nothing but the job.
So the Commonwealth Railways supplied them with furniture, clothing, bedding, their food, and when they got their pay, not only did the Taxation Department take their bit out but the Commonwealth Railways took their slug as well. So they’d get their pay envelope and it’d state that they now only owed the Commonwealth Railways another £540, or whatever it was. For many, the only cash they got was Child Endowment and that’s what they used when it came to paying their levy to cover themselves for the Flying Doctor.
So yes, they were very difficult times for many of those people, and I remember one family saying, ‘No, we just can’t afford it and, anyway, we don’t use the Flying Doctor Service.’
But Murphy’s law: guess which family had to use the Flying Doctor. It was them.
Anyway, that was the establishment of the RFDS in Coonana. As I said, it started with the discovery of an outdated medical chest and a disused wireless, sitting idle in the school house. And of course, when they were sorted out it opened up communications for the children. Then the opportunity came along with the arrival of the grader and the kids helping prepare the airstrip so they had a great feeling of ownership and pride in being involved, as well. Add to that John Flynn’s ideology of placing a Mantle of Safety over the people in the bush, plus the huge contribution by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and that’s what happened in that small community. And to those people at Coonana, it was absolutely unreal.
Porcupine
I was born on 3 October 1950 and I got into strife on the Christmas morning of 1951, so I was too young to remember what actually happened. But I’ve heard all about it, of course, and I’ve still got the scars on my lungs. We were at Canopus Station, which is between Renmark
and Burra, in South Australia. Later on, Dad sold Canopus to a bloke called Bill Snell, then Bill sold it to the South Australian Government and it was absorbed into a massive national park, the Danggali Conservation Park.
But right from the time I was born, I had an incredible bond with my father. Incredible! Oh, as a kid, I used to go everywhere with him. I was like his shadow. Anyhow, that Christmas morning, when I was about thirteen or fourteen months old, my dad was cleaning out the bath with power kerosene. Power kero was what we used to get rid of the greasy marks and stuff that had built up from the old dam water we washed in. And the kerosene was in this container — a tin — but he left it on the floor when he went off to do something else. Then I crawled along and, next thing, Mum heard the sound of an empty tin hit the ground and, when I started coughing and going on, she realised that her little boy had helped himself to the kerosene.
I don’t know how much I drank but it was enough to be absorbed into my lungs, which started the coughing. Then, after that I became unconscious fairly quickly. But my father thought it was all his fault and he got really upset and he started to panic and he wanted to put me in the car and head straight off for Renmark. I think Renmark was something like 56 miles from Canopus, but it was just a dirt and sand track in those days, with fifty gates or something that had to be opened and shut along the way. So you know what a trip like that would’ve been like for a very sick little boy.