by Bill Marsh
Statistics and Brief History
Queensland The first base of the Flying Doctor Service was established in Cloncurry, in north-western Queensland, in 1928.
Victoria The Victorian Section was formed on 9 November 1934 and was the first of the Sections of the Australian Inland Aerial Medical Service. Because there was no need for Flying Doctor services in Victoria this section went outside its state borders and took over the responsibility of providing medical services in the vast and remote north-west of Western Australia, in the East and West Kimberley. The section’s first base at Wyndham became operational in 1935.
New South Wales The New South Wales Section was formed in 1936. Its Broken Hill base, in the far west of the state, was initially jointly operated by the South Australian and New South Wales Sections and became operational in 1937. It later became known as the South Eastern Section.
Central Formerly known as the South Australian and Northern Territory Sections, this section was formed in 1936 and has since been changed to Central Operations and is administered from South Australia. Initially it operated (from 1937) out of Broken Hill, jointly with the New South Wales Section. This arrangement continued until the Central Section opened its own Flying Doctor base at Alice Springs in 1939.
Eastern Goldfields Although the Eastern Goldfields Section was officially established in 1937, in the Kalgoorlie area, the ‘Goldfields Flying Doctor Service’ provided a medical service for people in the outback as far back as the early 1930s.
Western Australia The Western Australian Section was officially registered on 14 June 1936. However, a provisional Section Committee had already purchased a De Havilland Fox Moth Aircraft in 1935. The section’s first base at Port Hedland became operative on 10 October 1935, and the first medical flight was made on the opening day.
Tasmania Although emergency medical flights were operated in Tasmania going back as far as the 1930s, the Tasmanian Section of the Flying Doctor Service was the last section to be formed, in 1960.
RFDS GROWTH STATISTICS
Sticks in the Mind
Well, all up, I was flying for forty-five years, and the last eighteen of those were with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It was a marvellous time really, as well as a great way to finish one’s flying career and, I must say, the RFDS were a great crowd to work for. They were just wonderful people. And it goes without saying that the people in the outback were marvellous as well; a hardy variety of Homo sapiens. Then, of course, we also had great aeroplanes to fly, particularly the turbo prop ones. And what tremendous machines they were.
As far as stories go…let me think: well, there’s one that I’ve quoted before. Actually, it might’ve even appeared in a Flying Doctor publication at some stage of the game, but it’s one that really sticks in the mind. It happened before we received our first King Air, so it was back while we were still flying the Queen Airs, which probably made it about 1983.
Anyway, we got an emergency call one night to go to a place called Cape Flattery. Cape Flattery’s in far north Queensland, about 120 nautical miles up the coast from Cairns. It’s where they have a big silica sand mine. In those days they used to bring the larger vessels in as close as they could to the little bay area behind the hill, then they’d take the silica sand out on smaller barges, called lighters, and load it up onto the larger ships with cranes and so forth.
But one vessel that came in on this particular day had a lot of Korean seamen on board and one of the unhappy fellers managed to get his hand and arm caught in a winch, which, I must add, is not something to be recommended. Actually, it might be more accurately described as exquisitely painful. So they called on us to go up there to get him. ‘This feller, he’s in a real bad way,’ they said. ‘His arm’s shockingly damaged and he’s bleeding badly.’
Of course, the weather had to be bad, didn’t it? You know, it’s Murphy’s law. You could put your money on it every time. I went with a nursing sister, Stone was her surname. So we took off in the Queen Air from Cairns, with this not-very-promising forecast, and as we got closer to Cape Flattery nothing improved. In fact, it got worse. When we arrived, the place was nothing but cloud and rain.
Now, Cape Flattery was just a sandy surface airstrip that ran sort of north-west/south-east, with a bunch of kerosene flares along each side to provide the light. There were no navigation aids there and by now it was about eight o’clock at night and, being night time, of course, that made it even worse. So I was faced with the immediate decision of: What do I do?
Anyhow, we went down to what they call ‘the lowest safe altitude’. That’s as low as you can go in cloud and still have a nice clear buffer from any of the surrounding high terrain. And, oh dear, it wasn’t looking too good at all.
We had the radar on, which I had in weather mode just in case there were any storms amongst all this stuff, which, luckily, there weren’t. It was mostly rain from stratiform cloud. So I turned the radar into mapping mode and picked up the coastline and the area around Cape Flattery and very quickly devised a circuit and an approach to the airfield, using the radar on the aeroplane. This particular action was not approved, of course, not at all. But under the circumstances, considering the condition of the bloke, I figured that the risk was worth taking. It was a calculated risk, put it that way.
Of course, I had escape clauses all the way along. There was absolutely no point in compounding the tragedy by ending up with a crashed aeroplane and two dead crew members: myself and Nursing Sister Stone. In a case like that, the final analysis, of course, doesn’t help the patient at all.
So anyway, I worked out this circuit diagram and, by using the radar, I was able to track myself down to a downwind leg and a base leg and line myself up into where the radar indicated the runway should’ve been. So I started letting some flap down, and the gear extended, and in I came on a fairly low powered setting. So what you’re doing is that you’re bringing the speed back to — I forget what it was in the Queen Air — but it’d probably be approaching about 100 to 110 knots.
We didn’t have a radar altimeter on board so we were just using the pressure altimeter. I’d already made the decision that, when we got to the 300 feet indicated, then if I didn’t have visual siting it’d have to be, ‘Well, sorry mate we’ve done our best. We’ll just have to put on the power, pull the gear up, pull the flap up and go home.’
But would you believe, I was just about to say, ‘Well that’s it’ when lo and behold these dim runway lights appeared from these kerosene flares. So I plonked the Queen Air down, and I must say that it wasn’t the most gentlemanly of arrivals. But that didn’t matter. It was still pouring with rain and we sloshed our way down the strip. Then we turned around and taxied back up again and, I can tell you, there was a tremendously grateful group of people there, waiting for us, with this very, very sick Korean feller.
So we took him back to Cairns and they saved his arm, which was tremendous because, I mean, I’m no doctor but I’m guessing that if we hadn’t been able to fly him out when we did, at an absolute minimum, he would’ve most certainly lost his arm, or else he probably would’ve been dead by the morning.
Stories about the Flying Doctor
Howdie,
I did my best to get some stories on the Flying Doctor. I have this letter from Etheen Burnett who was round in the Gulf Country but being well into her eighties and has had bad health for the last six months. Even so she has typed out these two stories in the hopes that you may be able to use them in your book if it be at all possible.
I have had no experience re: the Flying Doctor Service but I saw plenty of planes flying over me when I was droving out of the Gulf Country straight after the war, but never had to call them.
With the good roads and most of the places having their own planes now and of course with big four-wheel-drive vehicles, I think all that may relieve the pressure on the Flying Doctor Service. But, I know that the Flying Doctor will always be there, picking up the pieces if called upon.
&nbs
p; Regards
Jack
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Etheen’s Letter
I remember one day my niece and I, returning from the stock camp, were told the Flying Doctor was due to land to see a patient from a neighbouring station. We quickly drove out to the airstrip about three miles away to make sure there were no cattle on it. As we drove along it we noticed the plane landing on one end so we quickly drove off into thick grass on the side. My niece was standing on the running board and I had one arm on the door above the glass window.
No one noticed an ant hill in the long grass which we duly hit. What a jolt! My niece fell off the running board skinning her shin badly. My arm was cut by the glass and both of us were bleeding profusely when the doctor got out of the plane. The patient whom he had come to see with a broken arm was there and on alighting the doctor looked at us and asked which one is the patient? Of course we thought we would be okay but after three days my niece developed blood poisoning and had to be taken away by the Flying Doctor. She and I still have the scars of that accident.
* * *
When Dr Tim O’Leary was Flying Doctor in Mount Isa he was very particular about treating patients with dysentery, especially children. He insisted only fluids and no solids whatsoever. One child he was treating did not seem to be improving so he flew out to see him. While examining him the child vomited and brought up fruit cake. Can you image what our Irish Doctor said!
The Crook Cocky
HG Nelson: HG Nelson with you on ‘Summer All Over’. Now, you have some Flying Doctor info, Clinton.
Yeah, just a little story here, HG. Back in 1984 I was doing a bit of an outback adventure and I ended up in a little whistlestop town called Kajabbi, which is out near Mount Isa, sort of in the Cloncurry area, in north-western Queensland. And I stayed there for a few days in the local pub. Now, when I say a township, basically, there was just a pub. That’s all. There was nothing much else there, at Kajabbi, though I believe that, at one time, it was a rather large place but, over the years, it’d declined to the state of it being, more or less, just the hotel.
But the story is: I was in the bar at about eleven o’clock one mid-week morning. There were about four people in the bar and all the talk was around the doctor coming to town. And I was quite amazed. I thought, ‘Well, what would a doctor be doing out here?’ In my mind, of course, I was conjuring up ideas of a buckboard arriving and a doctor jumping out with an old medical bag — that type of thing.
Anyway, about twenty minutes later I heard the sound of an aircraft. It circled around overhead a few times and, along with everybody else, I went outside and, with drinks in hand, we all watched the aeroplane land on an airstrip, which was just in behind the hotel. When I say ‘everybody else’ I mean the whole four people that were in the bar.
Then about five or six minutes later a doctor came in and, by that time, a few more people had drifted into the pub. Now I believe that there was just the doctor, on his own, because I didn’t see a pilot. So I assume he was piloting the aircraft himself. But anyway, by now I’d pieced it together that this was the Flying Doctor who’d come to visit and that the pub was a regular stop for him; meaning that he came, like, once a fortnight or whatever, stopped off and all the people who wanted to see him would drop in at the pub for a medical consultation.
Anyway, the doctor disappeared out to a back room, followed by one guy, and when the guy returned I noticed that he had a new dressing on his hand. After him, a couple of other people went out to the back room for a while before returning to the bar. Then about ten minutes later the doctor, himself, came out into the bar and I saw a feller go over and talk to him. And this feller looked like he was of some sort of Indian extraction.
Now, I couldn’t actually hear what the conversation was about but it seemed quite intense because this Indian feller was nodding to the doctor in a very concerned fashion. Then, after a while, the Indian guy turned and he nodded to his wife and she went outside and, when she came back into the bar, she was carrying a cockatoo in a cage. It was a golden-crested, well, a silver- or sulphur-crested cockatoo. To explain, the lady, herself, I think she might’ve been of South Sea Islander extraction, with blonde hair. As I said, the husband looked like he was Indian. I found out later that he was Fijian Indian and, apparently, he and his wife had lived there, in Kajabbi, for many years.
So I’m sort of taking this all in and by now I’m thinking: ‘Surely the doctor’s not going to look at the cockatoo’, you know?
But anyway, the cockatoo came out of its cage and it got on this Islander lady’s shoulder and I watched as the doctor went over and lifted its wings. Then after he’d taken a good look underneath each of the wings he lifted its comb up and took a check around its head area. Now, I was absolutely amazed that this aircraft had flown into this little country town and here was the Flying Doctor actually diagnosing a cockatoo.
HG: Oh, they can do anything, the Flying Doctor Service.
But I was just spellbound, HG. I just couldn’t believe it was happening. The whole scenario was just absolutely crazy. But anyway, after he’d checked over the cockatoo, the doctor spoke to the South Sea Islander woman for about four or five minutes then she thanked him very much for his expert advice. Then she popped the bird back into the cage and placed the cage on the bar.
The next thing I see is the hotel owner talking with the woman who had the cockatoo and out came a plastic bag and they put some crushed ice in the plastic bag and then they flattened it out, sealed the end off, put a few pegs on it, and sat the cockatoo’s cage on top of this bag of ice. So I assume that the Flying Doctor had diagnosed that the cockatoo was suffering from heat stress and, believe me, it was very hot.
Then the doctor, well, he grabbed his gear and he disappeared out the back door. And I was amazed that everyone sort of automatically got up and, with drinks in hand, they wandered outside, to the back of the pub, and they watched as the Flying Doctor gunned the aeroplane up and down the airstrip and away he went out into the wide blue yonder.
But that always stuck in my mind. To think, well, you know, here in the middle of nowhere, which it was because Kajabbi is a long way outback, was the Flying Doctor arriving, not only to look after the local people — you know, to put a dressing on a guy who’d obviously hurt himself plus, probably, talk to a few other people — but also he gave service to this lady’s, obviously, much-loved cockatoo, which, I may add, thanks to the Flying Doctor, is most possibly still alive and well at Kajabbi today.
The Easter Bunny
In total I worked with the Royal Flying Doctor Service for nine years. That was at both their Broken Hill and Dubbo bases. For much of that time I was employed as an emergency flight nurse and well, in the end, I more or less left because I got married and we moved over here to Walgett, in the central north of New South Wales. That’s the only reason why I finished up. But I really loved my time with the RFDS, and I actually kept a diary through the years I was working for them so I’ve looked up a few stories, if you’re interested. I guess they’re both about determination of spirit, but in very different ways. What’s more, both incidents happened up at Tibooburra, in the far north-western corner of New South Wales.
Well first: one time we got a phone call from a very distressed husband up at Tibooburra. He told us that he’d delivered their last nine babies, all by himself, and there’d been no problems. That’s right, nine! And he’d delivered every one of them. But now he said that he was having a bit of trouble delivering their tenth baby. His wife had been in labour for quite a while and, to make matters worse, she didn’t want any medical help. In actual fact, she was adamant that there be no medical intervention. No doctors. Nothing. She wanted all home births — just natural — and that was that. No argument. So there he was, this distraught husband, hiding in the next room, out of earshot from his wife, whispering to us over the phone, ‘The baby just won’t come. What to do?’
From what he was telling us, we surmised it was probably a bree
ch birth because it wasn’t coming down well at all. Anyhow, we had a clinic plane in the area so we sent that out and, you know, they arrive and they went in to see how the wife was going and she gets very upset, particularly with her husband, because he’d gone against her wishes and he’s asked us to come in to help her. In fact, she’s downright angry with him. She was still in labour at that stage and had been for a good twenty-four hours or so, which was very unusual for a tenth child. They should come, probably, within about an hour.
So they tried to settle her down and talk her into coming back down to Broken Hill with them to have the baby in the hospital there. Anyhow, much against her wishes, they eventually managed to coax her on the aircraft and I was in radio contact, waiting at the other end for them in Broken Hill.
There was little change during the flight but then, just as the clinic plane was coming into Broken Hill, they told me over the radio that they thought the baby was coming. So I was telling them what to do and where to find the delivery packs on the aircraft. Still and all, she hadn’t had the baby by the time they landed so I got straight onto the aircraft and helped the woman out into the waiting ambulance. Even at that stage she was still complaining about our intervention.
Then, just as we were going over the bridge on our way to the Broken Hill Hospital, we delivered a breech baby in the back of the ambulance. So, we ended up with a hell of a mess and I virtually finished cleaning up the baby and the woman in the ambulance bay of the Broken Hill Hospital.
Now, once the placenta is delivered the mother, more or less, stops bleeding and she can stay fairly comfortable. Anyhow, after I’d cleaned everything up, I turned around to the woman and I said, ‘Look, how about we just take you into the hospital and get you checked out?’