The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  After being ordained in 1911 John Flynn volunteered to go to the Smith of Dunesk Mission, at Beltana, in the remote northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Dunesk had been established by the Presbyterian Church and was located in a parish that covered a vast area of the South Australian inland that extended over to the railhead at Oodnadatta. Oodnadatta was situated along the original old Ghan railway line and at that time it had a floating population of around a hundred or so. Many were Aboriginal, plus there were the Afghan traders — hence the term ‘the Ghan’. Oodnadatta also happens to be one of the hottest places in Australia, with temperatures of over 50° celsius having been recorded.

  Anyway, that’s where the mission had placed a nursing sister and where it had also planned to build a nursing hostel, and it was under Flynn’s guidance that the Oodnadatta Nursing Hostel was opened in late 1911. The following year the Church asked Flynn to survey the Northern Territory region and after he handed in a couple of reports — one on the needs of Aborigines and the other on the needs of white settlers — the Presbyterian General Assembly appointed him as superintendent of what was to be named the Australian Inland Mission (AIM). In doing so the South Australian, Western Australian and Queensland Assemblies transferred their remote areas into Flynn’s care. So the AIM was officially established and it commenced operations out of Oodnadatta with just the one hostel, the one nursing sister, the one Padre and a ‘fleet’ of five camels. It began, as it has continued, ‘without preference for nationality or creed’, and was based on the idea of a remote areas network of nursing hostels and hospitals, all working in conjunction with a Patrol Padre.

  By 1918, and despite World War I, John Flynn had managed to establish Patrol Padres out of Port Hedland and Broome in Western Australia, Pine Creek in the Northern Territory and Cloncurry in Queensland. He’d also appointed nursing sisters to Port Hedland and Halls Creek in Western Australia, and to Maranboy and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

  Flynn’s commitment to the AIM was absolute. He even involved himself in the design of the nursing hostels, along with the architects, engineers and the local people. His aim was to make sure that each building suited its own particular regional climatic conditions and the availability of local building material. The large stone building of the Alice Springs Hostel is such an example. He helped design it in such a way that it was cooled via a tunnel under the ground floor, where wet bags filtered the dust, and then the cooled air was drawn, by convection, through the hostel wards. Then as the air heated up it rose to the lantern roof from where it was expelled. Wide verandahs also provided extra cooling.

  Another of Flynn’s passions was his magazine, The Inlander. The Inlander was used to spread the word to a wider Australian public. This was where he first mentioned his idea of a ‘Mantle of Safety’. The magazine also promoted his fight for a ‘brighter bush’ with his photographs, documents, statistics, maps and articles telling of the needs of the outback people. He also wrote about inland Australia’s potential for development and about how it could only reach its full potential by providing for the women and children. He didn’t overlook the Aborigines either. And, mind you, there weren’t too many people around back then who were as outspoken or knowledgeable as Flynn was on the subject. In fact, one particular issue of a 1915 Inlander was pretty much entirely devoted to the plight of the ‘fringe-dwellers’ and described how their situation was ‘a blot on Australia’. He went on to say, ‘We who so cheerfully sent a cheque for £100 000 to Belgium to help a people pushed out of their own inheritance by foreigners…surely we must just as cheerfully do something for those whom we clean-handed people have dispossessed in the interests of superior culture.’

  The next part of Flynn’s overall strategy of a Mantle of Safety was focused on the possibility of radio communications between doctor and patient and the idea of a ‘Flying Doctor’. In Flynn’s mind the two had to work hand-in-hand. Even as early as 1925 he said that ‘the practicability of the Flying Doctor proposal depends almost entirely on the widespread adoption of wireless by bush residents’.

  To that end, in late May 1925, Flynn and a returned soldier and radio technician by the name of George Towns took delivery of a specially designed Dodge Buckboard that was to be used for the first inland experiments in radio transmission. They picked the vehicle up in Adelaide and drove to Alice Springs via Beltana, Innamincka, Birdsville, Marree and Oodnadatta, doing test transmissions as they went. Interestingly enough, they used a pulley drive from the jacked-up back wheel of the Dodge to generate electricity for radio transmission.

  The following year the ever-persuasive Flynn talked a man called Alfred Traeger into going to Alice Springs to conduct further experiments. Alf Traeger was to become another vital link in the development of the Flying Doctor Service. Alf was born near Dimboola, Victoria, back in the late 1800s. I guess if he lived today Alf Traeger might be considered a bit of a geek. He was once described as ‘a curious, patient, precise child, who, at twelve, made a telephone receiver and transmitted between the toolshed and his house’. So it seems his pathway in life was set very early on.

  After his parents had moved to South Australia, Alf attended Balaklava Public School and the Martin Luther School before going to a technical high school. He then studied mechanical and electrical engineering before being employed by the Metropolitan Tramways Trust and the Postmaster-General’s Department. When World War I started he tried to enlist but was refused on the grounds of his Germanic heritage, this is even though his grandparents had been naturalised. For Alf, not to be able to serve his country was one of his bitter disappointments.

  Instead, Alf threw himself into his work and it wasn’t long after he’d obtained an amateur operator’s licence and built his first pedal transmitter-receiver that he formed Traeger Transceivers Pty Ltd. That’s when John Flynn arrived on the scene and employed Alf to help him out. After a brief outback tour where it’s said that despite the severe heat Alf always wore a dark suit and braces, he returned to Adelaide to start developing a transceiver for the Flying Doctor network.

  Flynn’s basic outline to Traeger was simple: these radio sets had to be cheap, durable, small and easy to operate. So by using bicycle pedals to drive the generator, Alf found that a person could comfortably achieve 20 watts at a pressure of about 300 volts. He then enclosed the generator’s fly-wheel and gears in a metal housing, with the pedals outside, and added a cast base so that the whole contraption could be screwed to the floor beneath a table. Traeger built the transceiver into a box, and set up a master switch to separate the crystal controller transmitter from the receiver. To put it more simply, Traeger’s wireless was basically a pedal-operated generator, which provided power for a transceiver. But as simple as it seems, once the first pedal sets came on the market in the late 1920s they created a communications revolution, especially throughout the remote inland.

  While Traeger was working on his pedal wireless, Flynn had been busy on the second part of his overall strategy, and that was to try to set up an aerial medical service. Some say that Flynn’s original vision of a ‘Flying Doctor’ had been inspired by a letter from a Lieutenant John Clifford Peel — or just Clifford Peel, as he preferred to be known. Now, going back to around 1912, a then eighteen-year-old Clifford Peel had read a book John Flynn had written, titled Northern Territory and Central Australia: A Call to the Church. Apparently the book captured Peel’s interest in the work Flynn was doing and the problems he faced of being able to cover the huge distances he needed to, to create his Mantle of Safety. The book got Peel thinking about the logistics of how aerial care could be provided to the people in the remote areas of Australia.

  Then, later on, after World War I began, Peel trained as a pilot at Laverton in Victoria. The story goes that he wrote to Flynn with some of the thoughts he had on the practicalities of using aeroplanes within the AIM. Now, keep it in mind that, back then, aeroplanes were a relatively new invention and, to the vast majority of people, it would seem bon
kers to jump into a basic wooden frame with a bit of canvas stretched over it and go flying into the vast unknown of outback Australia. But the idea excited Flynn. He wanted more information, which in turn produced Peel’s much recorded reply of November 1917. At the time the letter was written, Peel was sailing from Melbourne to the United Kingdom, on his way to begin his life as a wartime airman. In part, it read:

  Aviation is still new, but it has set some of us thinking, and thinking hard. Perhaps others want to be thinking too. Hence these few notes.

  Safety.

  The first question to be asked is sure to be ‘Is it safe?’

  To the Australian lay mind the thought of flying is accompanied by many weird ideas of its danger. True there are dangers, which in the Inland will be accompanied by the possibility of being stranded in the desert without food or water. Yet even with this disadvantage the only reply to such a query is a decided affirmative. Practically all the flying for the last three years has been military flying…and if we study the records available…we will find that the number of miles flown per misadventure is very large, while the number of accidents per aerodrome per annum is very small.

  Difficulties.

  As in every new adventure there are initial difficulties… The first and greatest of these is cost… With aeroplanes I venture to say that, given proper care, the upkeep is relatively light while the cost of installing compares very favourably if we realise that to run a train, motor car, lorry, or other vehicle, roads must first be made and then kept in repair, whilst the air needs no such preparation.

  The problem of overhauls and major repairs presents another great difficulty… The question of ways and means remains to be solved. Landing grounds may present some difficulties in certain regions, but these will be found where needed. Machines for Inland work will need to have a large radius of action, say a non-stop run of at least 700 miles, so that the fuel carrying capacity will be large.

  Many of these and other difficulties loom very large, as we view them from the distance, but with the progress of aviation, and the more universal use of the motor car, many of them will automatically disappear.

  Advantages.

  The advantage of an air service will be quickly appreciated… With a machine doing 90 miles an hour, Darwin is brought within twelve and a half hours of Oodnadatta (excluding stops). It takes little imagination to see the advantage of this to the mail service, government officials, and business men while to the frontier settlers it will be an undreamt of boon as regards household supplies, medical attention, and business.

  A Scheme.

  Just by way of a suggestive scheme, I propose to consider that portion of A.I.M. territory east of the Western Australian boundary. In this large tract of land, consisting of one-third of the Australian continent, I am assuming that the bases are situated at Oodnadatta in South Australia, Cloncurry in Queensland and Katherine in the Northern Territory. At the present time these are railheads, hence supplies can be brought up with comparative regularity and minimum cost. From each of these centres the A.I.M. workers can work a district of say 300 miles radius, or an area of 270 000 square miles.

  In the not very distant future, if our church folk only realise the need, I can see a missionary doctor administering to the needs of men and women scattered between Wyndham and Cloncurry, Darwin and Hergott [now named Marree]. If the nation can do so much in the days of war surely it will do its ‘bit’ in the coming days of peace — and here is its chance.

  The credit side of the ledger I leave for those interested in the development of our hinterland to compute. Sufficient to say that the heroes of the Inland are laying the foundation stones of our Australian nation.

  J.CLIFFORD PEEL, LIEUT

  Australian Flying Corps, A.I.F.

  At Sea, 20/11/17.

  Unfortunately, Peel didn’t live to see just how successful his idea became because only thirteen months later — and only seven weeks before the end of the war — his aircraft disappeared during a routine patrol in France. The mystery of Peel’s fate has never been solved. But the seeds had been sown.

  How those seeds grew to fruition came about through Flynn’s friendship with two men: Sir W Hudson Fysh and Hugh Victor McKay.

  Hudson Fysh was born in the mid-1890s at Launceston, Tasmania. It doesn’t appear that he was the most dedicated of students because, after attending various schools, he went out working as a jackeroo and wool classer. When World War I started he enlisted in the Australian Light Horse Brigade and served at Gallipoli and in Egypt and Palestine. He was commissioned lieutenant in 1916. Following that he transferred to the Australian Flying Corps where he won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  After the war Fysh and another ex-serviceman, Pat McGinness, along with Arthur Baird, an engineer, decided to enter the Australian Government’s £10 000-prize contest for a flight from England to Australia. But because of the death of their backer, Sir Samuel McCaughey, that didn’t happen. Instead, Fysh and McGinness were paid by the government to survey the Longreach to Darwin section of the contest route. They did this in the first vehicle to go overland to the Gulf of Carpentaria, a Model T Ford.

  The next year Fysh and McGinness, along with three Queensland graziers, got together and formed the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd, or Qantas, as it’s known these days. With only an Avro Dyak and an old BE2E war-disposals aircraft, the company moved from Winton to Longreach where the planes were then used as a taxi service, as an ambulance, for stock inspection services and for joyriding. Around about this time Hudson Fysh and John Flynn struck up a friendship and they talked about the practicalities and possibilities of a Flying Doctor Service. In doing so, Fysh told Flynn that he’d be willing to support him in any way he could.

  Hugh Victor McKay was another person who helped John Flynn create a Flying Doctor Service. Hugh McKay was born at Raywood, Victoria, in the mid-1860s. He was the fifth of twelve children and he had very little education other than his parents’ devotion to the Bible. By the age of thirteen he was working on the farm.

  Back in those days harvesting was done with a horse-drawn stripper and manual winnower. But when the government offered prizes for producing a single harvester that would combine stripping, threshing, winnowing and bagging, Hugh, his father and one of his brothers built a prototype stripper-harvester from bits and pieces of farm machinery. By the early 1890s they’d built an improved model which they marketed as the Sunshine harvester. The Sunshine was an instant success.

  Then, when Hugh Victor McKay died in the mid-1920s, he left £2000 to help Flynn’s Aerial Medical Service experiment. The bequest was made on the proviso that the Presbyterian Church doubled that amount. The Church okayed the idea and Flynn raised a further £5000. With the money raised, Hudson Fysh honoured his promise of help and Qantas leased to Flynn — on extremely favourable terms — a fabric-covered De Havilland 50 aeroplane, named Victory.

  On 17 May 1928 Victory took off from Cloncurry, Queensland, after the AIM Aerial Medical Service received its first emergency call, no doubt via one of Alf Traeger’s famous pedal wirelesses. Arthur Affleck was the pilot and the doctor was St Vincent Welch. And so all the various threads of Flynn’s vision of a Flying Doctor Service had now become a reality.

  The final part of John Flynn’s work began with turning his AIM Aerial Medical Service into a national community service. This vision was far greater than the Church could handle by itself. What Flynn now wanted was an arrangement between state and federal governments and the AIM itself. And so the idea of a National Aerial Medical Service of Australia (NAMS) was set into motion. To get it up and running, Flynn travelled throughout Australia addressing public meetings, talking to politicians and holding press interviews until the NAMS became a reality.

  The mid-1930s also saw a different role that the two-way radio was to play for the people in remote areas and the children in particular. Around that time John Flynn was looking to establish a base of the Aerial Medical Service i
n Alice Springs. In doing so he got help from a long-time educationalist named Adelaide Miethke. At that time Miethke was a member of the Council of the Flying Doctor Service of South Australia. And, on a visit to Alice Springs, she saw the potential of the Flying Doctor two-way radio network, not only as a tool for patient-doctor contact and remote community contact but also for educational purposes.

  Adelaide Miethke was born in June 1881 at Manoora, South Australia, the sixth daughter of ten children. Her father was a Prussian schoolmaster. She was educated at various country schools and at Woodville Public School before becoming, as had John Flynn, a pupil-teacher. In the early 1900s she attended the University Training College and her first teaching appointment was at Lefevre Peninsula School

  A workaholic by nature, by 1915 she was Founding President of the Women Teachers’ League where she fought to place women as headmistresses. The following year she became the first female Vice-President of the South Australian Public School Teachers’ Union. She studied part-time to complete her degree and became an Inspector of Schools in late 1924. Miethke applied extremely tough teaching standards. She was a stickler for formality and devoted much of her life to helping improve teachers’ industrial conditions and to raising the status of women.

  Miethke also believed that ‘technically gifted girls should have a chance of developing their bent’ and that while ‘her home was a woman’s place, it need not be her prison’. To that end she also helped set up what were to be known as Central Schools. These were training schools for young women to become housewives of ‘skill and taste’. Initially the schools offered pre-vocational training to girls aged thirteen to sixteen. General subjects were studied as well as practical classes in things like laundry work, cookery, household management, first aid, drawing and applied art, needlework and dressmaking. Second-year girls received millinery and secretarial training.