by Bill Marsh
Then after Miethke had become President of the Women’s Centenary Council of South Australia, she helped raise money to establish the Alice Springs base of John Flynn’s Aerial Medical Service. This was the connection with John Flynn because, by that stage, she’d become the Flying Doctors’ state branch’s first woman President as well as the editor of the magazine Air Doctor. That’s when the idea of using the Flying Doctor’s two-way radio network to set up a School of the Air came to mind. Some of the teachers at Alice Springs Primary-High School took radio lessons and trials began after a landline was laid from the base to the school. On 8 June 1951 the first broadcasts of School of the Air were made from the Flying Doctor base in Alice Springs.
But, unfortunately, John Flynn didn’t get to see the realisation of this part of his grand vision because only a month before School of the Air was officially opened, he died of cancer in Sydney. At his request his ashes were interred at the foot of Mount Gillen, just west of Alice Springs. It was said at his service that: ‘Across the lonely places of the land he planted kindness, and from the hearts of those who call those places home, he gathered love.’
In 1955, the designation of ‘Royal’ was added to the Flying Doctor Service. As was John Flynn’s dream, the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a non-profit organisation that provides free healthcare services to ‘all people who live, work or travel in the world’s largest medical waiting room’: a waiting room that stretches from Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean to Elizabeth Island in the Great Barrier Reef, and all the states and territories in between.
References:
John Behr, ‘Traeger, Alfred Hermann (1895–1980)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 251–252.
Graeme Bucknall, ‘Flynn, John (1880–1951)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 531–534.
Suzanne Edgar and Helen Jones, ‘Adelaide Miethke (1881–1962)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 497–498.
John Lack, ‘Hugh Victor McKay (1865–1926)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 291–294.
J. Percival, ‘Fysh, Sir Wilmot Hudson (1895–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 603–605.
Neil Smith, ‘Lt. John Clifford Peel, Australian Flying Corps’, essay published online at www.3squadron.org.au/subpages/ peel.htm.
A Short Little Story
Well, I don’t talk too much, so it better be just a short little story. I’ve lived here in Hungerford, now, for about fifty or sixty years or thereabouts. I guess a lot of people mightn’t know where Hungerford is, would they? Well, it’s right on the Queensland side of the Dog Fence, between Bourke, in New South Wales, and Thargomindah or, if you go the other way, it’s between Bourke and Cunnamulla.
As you can see, there’s not too much here other than a few houses, the police station and the pub. I live in one of the houses. But if you go back to the old cemeteries around here and you have a good look at the graves, you’d be lucky to find anyone over fifty. I’d say that most of the graves out there are from around the turn of the century and that’s when the big sort of flu epidemic came through. And that killed quite a few people.
Anyhow, not that they were about then, but the Flying Doctor Service flies out here about every month and they have a medical clinic, just to keep a check on us all. They usually come out from Broken Hill, or occasionally from Charleville. They were here just last Thursday, actually. Well, you just ring up and say you want to see the doctor about this or that and so, when they arrive, you join the queue. Most times it’s just the pilot and a doctor or a nurse; then sometimes there’s also one woman comes out, what does the women’s health.
I’ve always supported the Flying Doctor. In fact, they started up an annual field day here a few years back and a big part of it was to raise money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. They did that out here at the sports ground, and that’s been going real well; but then they had to put it on every second year so it didn’t run into the one that they had in at Broken Hill. And so now Broken Hill has it one year and we have it the next. It’s only a one-day turn-out but, oh, they do lots of things, and at the end of the day they have this big auction and all the dealers and wheelers, they put in different things to be sold. Like, someone might hand in a fish or something and, you mightn’t believe this, but it might bring in anything between $300 and $400. Yes, just the one fish. No, there was nothing special about it.
About three or four years ago I think it was, they auctioned a rain gauge, and that brought in around $1000. Just between you and me, I don’t know why anyone out here would want a rain gauge because it doesn’t ever rain that much. It wasn’t even raining then. And there was nothing special about that rain gauge, neither. It was just a normal old rain gauge; I’d say, about thirty odd dollars’ worth in the shop. But, see, what would happen was that one bloke would buy it for, say, $200 or $300, and then he’d donate it back in to the Flying Doctor Service and so then they’d go and put it up for auction again and it’d be sold again for another $150 or $200. And it went along like that till it ended up fetching something like $1000, as I said.
So that was a good little earner for the Flying Doctor.
But living out here like, with the Flying Doctor Service, they can have a plane land in Hungerford within the hour, which is fairly fast. And I’ve seen quite a few emergencies in my time too, and when they get here they stabilise you first. Sometimes they might bring a paramedic or whatever. Actually, my exmissus would’ve been dead if it weren’t for the Flying Doctor Service. She was having a heart attack out here some years ago and they were here in around the hour, or a bit over. Sometimes it depends if there’s a plane available because they fly thousands of kilometres a year. Yes, it’s just unbelievable, isn’t it? Anyhow, they flew her down to Broken Hill and I went down in the plane with her. This was about ten years ago now. They had the King Airs back then. But I remember when I first came out here, back in the early 1950s, when they had the De Havilland Dragons. You know, the three-engined thing, with the double wing.
A Team Thing
I’ve got lots of memories of my time with the Flying Doctor Service but some of it’s pretty warped medical humour, really — the type of humour that a lot of readers wouldn’t understand. But I think probably the main thing I’d like to say is how it’s an incredible team thing, not only with the support staff but also when the doctor, the nurse and the pilot go out.
An example of that would be the time we unfortunately bogged the aircraft out at Laura, which is west of Cooktown, on the edge of the Lakefield National Park. I think it might’ve been the Queen Air or C-90, I’m not exactly sure now, but they had a dirt strip there at Laura and we were flying in for a clinic. So the pilot’s coming in to land and there’s the local nurse, parked in her car, in a place at the end of the runway, which was making things a bit difficult for our pilot to land. So our pilot’s saying, ‘What the hell’s she parked there for?’
Anyhow, we landed okay and our pilot’s taxiing the plane down the strip and he’s going on about how dangerous it was for the nurse to park where she had because she could’ve caused an accident and all that. ‘Get outa the bloody way!’ he says. Then, after the nurse had moved her car, the pilot went to turn the aeroplane around and he bogged it. So it then became very apparent as to just why the nurse had parked her vehicle over that particular section of the airstrip — to warn him that it was too wet.
Anyhow, we went ahead and we did the clinic that morning. Then once we’d finished the clinic we spent the afternoon digging the aircraft out of the bog. And that turned out to be a real team thing too, because there we all were — the pilot, the doctor and nurse, along with every other able-bodied person in town — all with shovels and so forth, helping get this aeroplane out of the bog.
That’s just one incident.
Another example was when we had to shut one of the engines down. It was the right-hand engine and because the pilot couldn’t leave his seat, he couldn’t see out that side of the aeroplane. So he asked me to get up the front, in the cockpit, which I did. Then he got me to look back around the window.
‘Can you see the engine?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are there any flames?’
Thankfully there weren’t.
So not only do we have to work as a team, we’ve also got to be flexible within that team structure, because there’s a lot of times when we might land somewhere and we’ve got to grab all our gear and get out of the aeroplane and jump into the back of a truck or ute and be driven out along some shockingly rough, slippery, muddy track to where the patient is. And everybody pitches in and helps each other out. Say if there’s an accident: usually it’s the pilot who’s trying to erect a shade over the patient or they’re standing there holding the IV (intravenous) drip, or maybe the pilot’s running backwards and forwards to the aircraft to ‘get the big orange pack’ or to ‘get the little black pack’ or whatever, while the doctor and the nurse are busy attending the injured. Naturally we don’t overstep our boundaries and we don’t cross disciplines but we all help each other out, under direction, and the best we can.
Then there’s other times when we’ve all had to get in a boat and row across a creek to get a patient out of their humpy and bring them back. That actually happened at Bloomfield, which is up in the Daintree National Park. I wasn’t the nurse in that case; another nurse was involved. But with that one, it was wet season and this feller was sick and his mate had radioed for help and warned us that the creek was flooded. So the RFDS crew got the message and they flew up there and when they landed they got a lift out to the flooded creek. Then they jumped in a boat and rowed across the creek, and after they got to the other side, they went off to do the house visit. The feller was pretty crook in bed so they then had to get him out of his house, back to the creek, into the boat, then row him back across the flooded creek, where they got a lift back to the airstrip, loaded the patient in the aeroplane, then flew him out to hospital. I mean, that’s service, isn’t it?
Also, I guess that a lot of the weather-related stories you’ve heard have been about dust storms and deserts and that. But because Cairns is one of the wettest places in Australia, we get lots of wet ones up here. So getting bogged is probably our worst problem and also not being able to land because of the poor weather or just having to go round and round and round till you just about throw up. And then you have to call it quits because if you did manage to land, you’d get bogged anyway and you wouldn’t be able to take off again, and that doesn’t help anybody.
Of course, situations like that can be totally devastating, especially if there’s an emergency and you can’t land the aeroplane. From that point of view, the worst time I remember was when we were running a clinic in Birdsville, which is in the south-western corner of Queensland, just down near the South Australian border. This was back, very early on in the piece, when I was working out of the Charleville base and a lot of the medical calls were still done by radio. Anyway, we got an emergency call through on the radio from a father who lived about 150 miles east of Birdsville. He was in a shed and he was telling us that his son had been electrocuted. But because the airstrip on his property was so wet, unfortunately there was no possible way we could get out there. In fact, it’d been raining so heavily everywhere east of Birdsville that it was heavy flooding. And having to listen to this call on the radio, over the speakers, it was just very, very…well, it stayed with me for a very long time, because basically we were trying to talk the father through CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and when you’re very nervous or upset, like the father was, you get the shakes.
Even medical people sometimes get the shakes in emergency situations. That happens because your body’s producing adrenaline in an attempt to try and help you cope with the situation. It’s exactly like you’ve had a big fright or something like that. And when people get like that they think they can feel a pulse when, in reality, they can feel the shaking of their own pulse. And this distraught father thought he could still feel a pulse and he was calling out, ‘I can still feel a pulse. I can still feel a pulse’, and we were trying to explain that there was no possible way we could get out there and land on his strip because of the flooding. So then he’s calling out, ‘Quick, get a helicopter then. Quick.’
But it’s tough to have to say, ‘Sorry, it’s just not going to help, because even if we could get a helicopter, it’ll be at least eight hours before it reaches you.’
What he didn’t understand was that the nearest helicopter would’ve been at Toowoomba, or maybe even Rockhampton, and even if we could’ve organised a helicopter, it still would’ve been five or six hours’ flying time away. And there’s no way anyone could keep doing CPR for that long and have the person survive. Generally, after thirty minutes, that’s when you’ll make a call. By saying ‘make a call’, I mean having to make a decision. Usually, if you haven’t got any heartbeat back within thirty minutes and you’re still doing CPR, well, then you’ll ‘make a call’ and declare the patient dead.
So after being on the radio for at least half an hour and from how the father was describing that his son had turned blue and he was still unresponsive, the doctor was forced to say, ‘Look, if you’re still having to do CPR and he’s not responding, I’m afraid your son’s dead.’ And the father was still screaming, pleading with us to get a helicopter out there, which, being a parent, you can understand he’d do.
That’s probably the saddest story I’ve got. But we just couldn’t get out there because of the wet conditions. Even if it’d been dry it still would’ve taken, I don’t know, maybe an hour or something to fly out there, and that would’ve also been too late. I mean, we probably would’ve attempted it because that’s the way we are. We never give up. But that was a heartbreaking one, that one was — to hear the father just so, so distressed and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. Sometimes, logistically, it’s a nightmare.
Anyhow, I guess I’ve got off the track a bit there, because as I said, really the main thing I wanted to get across was that with the doctor, the nurse and the pilot, and even with all the support staff, when you’re working for the RFDS, it’s an incredible team sort of thing.
Almost but not Quite
I was amazed that in my earlier years as a pilot, with both the Cairns Aerial Ambulance and the Royal Flying Doctor Service, just how we were able to find some of these places, because really we had little to no nav (navigation) aids at all. In fact, I’m certain that somebody up there was looking after us.
Still and all, there were techniques you could use. Like, once you got airborne, if you held the correct heading that you’d flight-planned and you’d allowed for the estimated wind direction and speed, realistically, in the end, you could only be out by as far as the wind forecast was wrong, if you get what I mean. Of course, these weather forecasters, they’re human just like the rest of us and while they do their best, at the altitudes we travelled there’d always be the potential for errors in their forecasted winds anyway.
So you’d have to take all that into consideration. For example, if you were flying to a place which is on the coastline, say the Aboriginal Community of Pormpuraaw up in the Gulf, what you’d do was you’d lay off significantly to one side. Then by doing that it’d bring you out 5 or 10 miles north of the community and then, when you came out of the cloud or if it was at night or whatever and you crossed the coast, you knew you had to turn left. But if you didn’t allow for that variation and you came across the coast, well, you wouldn’t know if you were to the south of Pormpuraaw or the north of Pormpuraaw and you’d then be left with the dilemma of ‘Which way do I turn?’ So those were the sort of techniques we used to use.
But as time went by and we started getting basic navigational aids at some of the remote locations, then
you were pretty much home and hosed. By navigational aids I mean things like a non-directional beacon or VHF omni-ranger. You know, you’d have some sort of electronic guidance to the place via the radio. They call them radio ‘nav aids’. Nowadays, of course, a lot of them have been superseded by route navigation based on Global Positioning System (GPS).
In actual fact, I remember the first time we put Global Positioning System in our King Air aircraft. It was after the Gulf War — the first Gulf War, that is — in the early ’90s, just when GPS first started becoming available to the aviation community. The end result of this story was actually a bit disappointing but that had nothing to do with the GPS we were trialling. Anyhow, we put a GPS called a Trimble TNL 2000 into our evacuation King Air. There, that’s not a bad memory for a bloke who’s been out of the game for a fair while, is it? I don’t know whether they’re still in existence any more, but all of a sudden, with the help of twenty-three satellites or what have you, we were able to go to a geographical point with complete accuracy in all weathers.
Anyhow, a station property along the road up to Musgrave from Laura called us up one afternoon. I think it might’ve even been Kalinga Station though I’m not 100 per cent sure about that. But it was the middle of the wet season and it was raining and we had a conference here at Cairns that I was involved in. I happened to be on call at the same time so I got dragged away from the conference, with the ever patient nursing sister, and the two of us headed off to this particular property for an ‘evac’.