The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  Now, there was some Murries still there and they were watching all these goings on, and all with a bit of a smirk on their dials. But I had to put on a brave face, see, because I had a big rep up in that country because I used to mill a lot; you know, scrap around and brawl and fight and all that. So all these Murries reckoned I was real tough, except I wasn’t, especially when Tim really started getting stuck into me with the pliers. Oh, he was huffing and puffing and pulling this way and that until I could feel the crunching sound of my molar and jaw. Now, I don’t know if you can go numb with pain, but I reckon that I did. And then I started sweating all over and going from pale to paler and all this while these Murries were looking at me like they were enjoying every moment of it.

  Anyhow, Tim eventually got it out. And I tell you what, I can still remember it. There he was, Dr Tim O’Leary, standing there with this huge, bloodied tooth in his pliers, holding it up to the dull light and saying, ‘No wonder it was so difficult to get out. Look,’ he said, ‘the roots are crossed.’

  And apparently, when the roots are crossed, half of your jaw comes out with the molar. So there Tim was, looking very proud of himself, and he turned to me and he said, ‘And what’s more, that’s only the second tooth I’ve ever pulled.’

  ‘Well then, keep it fer a souvenir,’ I replied, half jokingly.

  So that was one of my experiences with the RFDS, and that was with Dr Tim O’Leary, back in 1958. And for the life of me, I don’t know where that molar ended up. I never saw it again after that, so I reckon he might’ve taken my word and kept it as a souvenir, aye.

  The Spirit of the Bush

  My name is Esther and I am the first female pilot of the Royal Flying Doctor Service within the Central Division. That is only the Central Division because, as you might be aware, the RFDS already, I believe, has had a female pilot over in Western Australia, somewhere, and also there has been another female pilot up in Queensland. I was just reading the book again the other day and the Queensland pilot, her name was Beth Garrett. Her husband initially worked for the RFDS in Queensland and he died, and years later, I think it must’ve been in the late 1960s, she started flying there. So she was one of the real pioneering women doing it.

  But for me: how did I get to become a pilot for the RFDS? Well, it is a long story. I was three months old, initially, when I first came to Australia from Holland with my parents, and we lived here till I was the age of four. Then we lived for two years back in Holland and then we went to the United Arab Emirates for a few years and to Nigeria, to Holland a bit again then back to Australia. And the last time when we just landed here in Australia, in 1989, in July, I literally come off the plane and we drove from the airport to where Dad had a home in Sydney and I just looked around and I thought, ‘I’m home. This is it. Australia is my home.’

  But my parents, they left again after another four-year stint in this country and, of course, I stayed and it took me in total six years to get my permanent residency, and I got stuck here, and I have no regrets at all. I love it.

  Then in 1996, after I got my pilot’s licence in Bankstown, Sydney, I went looking for the ‘famous first flying job’. I had planned to look as far as Sydney to Dubbo but I ended up in Darwin, and the further I got into the outback the more I loved it. So yeah, that was it. I was hooked with the outback.

  But to get a job with the RFDS, it was just through a lot of experience in different areas of flying and general aviation. I’ve worked in the Northern Territory in places like Arnhem Land, Darwin, Kununurra. I’ve done night freight from the big cities like Sydney to Brisbane and Melbourne and I was also based in Queensland doing what they call bank runs. That’s where all the documentation from the bank is needed to be back to their State office, or their head office, at the end of each day. So from the smaller towns, all over Australia, you’ve got all these aeroplanes that leave at six in the morning and they deliver, not just bank documents but also overnight freight. Then at four in the afternoon they backtrack their steps before they return to the main city again. And that happens all over Australia.

  Over that time, already, I’d applied to all the Flying Doctor bases, Australia-wide, and one day the Chief Pilot from the Central Division in Adelaide was nice enough to call me up and say, ‘You have an interview.’

  So here I am at the Royal Flying Doctor base, at Port Augusta, at the top of Spencer Gulf, in South Australia. I’ve been here now for about eight months and the Central Division covers anywhere from Adelaide to Tennant Creek, in central Northern Territory, and from over near the Western Australian border which, I think, Cook is the nearest place, then over to about Mildura, which is into north-western Victoria. I think, off the top of my head, it is something like 840 000 square kilometres. But of course, we have a Flying Doctor’s base in Alice Springs and another base in Adelaide, so we only do the area south-east of the Riverland if Adelaide is busy doing other stuff and we only go up to Alice Springs sometimes, because they always cover their own area.

  The plane I fly is a Pilatus PC 12. They are our newer aeroplanes. It has a single-engine turbo prop so they’re a cheaper plane to operate than our previous plane, the King Air, which has a twin turbo prop. The PC 12s have a shorter land and take-off than our King Airs do, so they have become a great success. And I think that the South Australian Section of the RFDS has got the highest flight time of PC 12s anywhere in the world. But they’re very expensive, up around $5 or $6 million, all fitted out. That’s why we were doing some fundraising at a rodeo last night. Every little bit helps.

  But I was very accepted as a female pilot. It has been great. In the first few weeks I was working in Port Augusta one of my first night shifts I was on, I was sent to Peterborough, which is about 150 kilometres south-east of Port Augusta. As we do at Peterborough, the lights need to be put on by an airport manager. The Airport Manager at this time was Norm. So the Coms (Communications) people here in Port Augusta contacted Norm saying when we are expected to be in to Peterborough and he would go out and turn on the lights. And apparently the Coms people, when they were talking to Norm, they were saying about ‘she’ and ‘her’ in regards to the pilot. So by the time I got there, Norm just came up to the door straight away and said, ‘How fantastic.’ He said, ‘You are the first female pilot I am meeting.’

  That was so nice and a few weeks later there was an article in the Peterborough Times about, you know, the first female pilot working here, and Norm was such a gentleman that he actually made a copy of it and sent it to the base here in Port Augusta. So that was just a really lovely reception and a good thing to remember. But it was very funny that, often in the beginning, people would come up to me and start talking about the patient as if I am supposed to be the flight nurse. Of course, by now, I think most people are used to me being the pilot.

  But the outback people are the most wonderful, and their support for the Royal Flying Doctor Service is just absolutely fantastic. I was saying that I was at a rodeo just last night and the RFDS had a little tent there and they were being supported by the people. Wherever you are, it’s just amazing. You know, it makes me almost always so proud to be part of it because I can be just going on a four-wheel-drive trip on my own and you meet some people and they say, ‘Oh, where do you live and what do you do?’

  And I say, ‘I live in Port Augusta and I am a pilot with the RFDS.’

  Well, the people just look at you and they go, ‘Oh, that must be such a fantastic job, working for the RFDS.’

  And anybody, whether they are German or Japanese or Australian people they all have heard about it. It’s like there’s some sort of invisible communication out there, in the outback, and that was what John Flynn was fascinated about too. Even though, of course, nowadays, you do have different means of communication, the attitude in the bush is still just amazing.

  I remember when I came from Broken Hill to Port Augusta for the first-time interview and I came through the mountains from Wilmington, and the mountains were nice and green an
d as soon as we got over the mountains everything was that yellow dead colour. Then 5 kilometres further on you see the power station and then there’s Port Augusta, and I loved it just so much that I said, ‘If things would change, or anything like that, I might just buy a little farm here, up in the hills near Wilmington.’

  And I was just talking to the organiser last night, at the rodeo, about it and she asked me, ‘Why would you like a little farm?’

  ‘It’s always been my dream,’ I said, ‘to have a little farm with a few horses, you know.’

  And she said, ‘Oh well, if you get any horses, you don’t need to buy a farm. I’ve got 2000 acres. You can just put them up there.’

  You know, where else in the world would someone just offer land like that to another person? It’s as if it was, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. Take some of mine.’

  So I said, ‘You must be joking. I could not do this.’

  She said, ‘No, I mean it.’ She said, ‘If you have a horse and you want to put it somewhere, give me a call and you can put it up on my land.’

  It was like the most normal thing ever, you know. And where would you come across anything like that? I think only in Australia, in the bush. It’s the spirit of the bush. It was just so simple an offer, but so very nice.

  The Tangle with the Motor Bike

  I’d actually moved from Adelaide to Western Australia. Then my ex-boyfriend had a friend who was a real estate agent in Katherine and, this real estate agent, she needed someone to look after a station property that she was selling in Arnhem Land. So yeah, we decided to do that and so we flew up there, out to Mountain Valley Station, up in the Top End of the Northern Territory.

  But at Mountain Valley I was doing little bits of everything and I didn’t like that too much. I even ended up being the cook and I didn’t really enjoy cooking. I wanted to find some place where I could get involved with the mustering and everything, so I ended up going down to Mittiebah Station to work there. Mittiebah’s in the Barkly Tablelands area of the Northern Territory. It’s about 1.8 million acres, so I got to do some mustering and stuff like that, and no cooking.

  Out at Mittiebah they had composite cattle; it’s like Brahman and Shorthorn Cross and then they second cross with something else. It’s basically just a whole lot of different types of cattle that are bred to get what they want as far as beef quality and temperament and stuff goes. And, also, we were trialling a different sort of technique where we don’t try and stress the cattle out too much. It’s like low-stress cattle-handling. Because if you get them all agitated they’ll get stressed out and start to lose condition, and that’s the last thing you want. So we weren’t allowed to use dogs or stockwhips or any poles or anything like that and we weren’t even supposed to make too much noise in the yards or anything.

  Actually, I haven’t learned all that much about it yet, because of my accident. But we’re doing a course this year where you learn to use pressure release and make the cattle work off you. Pressure release is when, say, the cattle are all in a mob, in the corner, and you want them to go through the gate. Well, you’ve just got to walk in on them and once they start moving, you back off and they’ll go through the gate. Of course, if you educate the cattle they’re a lot easier to handle and they sort of know what to do and so they work off you. We still use horses and motor bikes and stuff, but the horses are easy on them and, though the motor bikes make a bit of noise, I don’t think they stress them out too much, either.

  But about the accident — the tangle with the motor bike — that happened on 12 December 2005. I was riding a Honda XR 250 at the time and I was mustering some cattle with my Overseer, Mike. Anyway, Mike and I, we’d sort of done one back bit of the paddock and we were pushing the cattle — the bulls — up along the fence line. They’d settled pretty well, so Mike decided to leave me with that lot and go and get the next mob of cattle from the other side of the paddock. Then, yeah, we were going to meet at a fenced-in bit called ‘the cooler’, where we could hold them on water. Probably they call it the cooler because that’s where the water is and the cattle can cool down there. It’s certainly not a meat cooler.

  So, I was pushing these bulls along, then I left the fence line and I took the bike out around the mob a bit and, while I was doing that, I hit a hole. But because I was only going very slow I decided to give the bike a few revs to jump it out of the hole but, when I did, the bike stalled. So then I put my leg down to try and hold the motor bike upright but, because I was in the hole, the bike rolled back and I lost balance and it fell on me. At first I didn’t realise what had happened because my initial thought was, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta get the bike off me.’

  But then, when I tried lifting the bike, I noticed that my jeans were ripped up around the area of my inner-left thigh. So I had a look and, yeah, there was the clutch lever stuck right into my leg.

  Anyhow, I still had to try and lift the bike up and pull the clutch leaver out of my thigh. And I was really worried about doing that because I thought that when I pulled it out there might be a great spurt of blood or something because, maybe, I’d cut the main artery that’s there. So that was the first thing I thought of, the blood spurting out, and I sort of freaked out a bit about that.

  But anyway, yeah, I eventually pulled the clutch leaver out of my thigh and no blood spurted out. That was good because it meant that the main artery wasn’t broken. Perhaps it was only just sort of punctured or something. The cut, or the gash, in my thigh was about 7 centimetres by 4 centimetres. That’s what the doctor told me later, anyway. And yeah, there wasn’t much blood at all, so I was really lucky with that.

  But, just to be safe, I ripped the sleeve off my shirt and I tied it around my leg to act like a tourniquet. I was thinking that that was what I was supposed to do, though I found out later it’s what you’re not supposed to do at all. But I didn’t know that at the time, so I tied the ripped shirt sleeve around my leg and then my idea was to get back on the motor bike and ride home, back to the station. The only trouble was that, when I tried to stand up, I couldn’t put any weight on my leg, so then I was stuck out there.

  As I said, I was still off the fence line, but I did manage to get over there and put my helmet on the fence, like on a picket, because I thought that was the only way they’d find me, by seeing the helmet on the fence. And then I just went back and crawled under a native berry bush because I knew that when Mark reached the cooler with his cattle and saw that I hadn’t arrived yet, he’d realise there was something wrong.

  So, I just waited there in the shade of the berry bush and, naturally, Mark came back along the fence line looking for me and when he found the cattle but not me, he really got a bit worried. So he kept on coming along the fence line and it was just as well that I’d put the helmet on the fence because, when Mark got there, he didn’t see me, but he saw the helmet. So he stopped there and had a bit of a look around and, yeah, that’s when he found me.

  But when he asked me what was wrong, I didn’t want to freak him out too much, so I just said, ‘Oh, I’ve just cut myself and I can’t stand the bike up.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll stand the bike up.’

  Then I said, ‘Oh, and when we get back, I might have to go to town, though.’

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  And I pulled my jeans over a bit so he could have a look and he goes, ‘Oh fuck, Myf.’ And he nearly vomited. He said, like, ‘Don’t worry about the bike, you stay there and I’ll go and get help.’

  Then he rode back to the station and he got the bore runner, which is the dude that checks all the bores on the station, and the bore runner came to get me in one of his bore utes, and he also brought along a big bottle of water, thank goodness. Then, because the bore ute’s got a big 900 litre diesel tank on the back and there’s not much room, the bore runner, he got me in the front of his ute. It’s got like a bench seat and so I sort of lent against him and stuck my leg out the window for the trip back.

  Yeah, so then
the bore runner, he took me back to the station and he put me on the table in the kitchen and everyone started coming in to have a good look, while they were having a cup of tea. But the cook there, Kay, she had some sort of nursing training so she took over then. The first thing she decided to do was to cut my jeans off and I was a bit freaked out about that because I don’t wear undies when I work. It’s more comfortable, that way. And so I was freaking out, like, because there’s a couple of guys in the kitchen and I’m, like, whispering, ‘Hey, Kay, I don’t wear undies.’

  So Kay got everyone to leave the kitchen and then she cut my jeans off to see just what damage had been done. While she was doing that the others had been on the phone, calling the Flying Doctor and all that sort of thing to find out what they needed to do. Apparently the doctor told them that I was meant to have morphine, which I didn’t have. I didn’t want it anyway, because I wasn’t in that much pain. Well, I didn’t really have that much time to think about the pain and so, maybe, that’s why it didn’t hurt just then. So yeah, Kay just tried to dress the wound as best she could and they said that the RFDS were going to send a plane out to get me.

  But then there was some sort of complication about flying out to pick me up — and I can’t quite remember what it was — but our airstrip was just a graded strip and, maybe, there was something wrong with it, like it’d rained the day before and it was too wet to land an aeroplane on it or something. So they decided to drive me over to the station next door, to Alexandria Station, where they had a really big, all-purpose airstrip. The same company owned both Mittiebah and Alexandria Stations. So we jumped in the car and it was about an hour’s drive over there, I think.