The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  Now, had we not had GPS on board, there was no way in this world — other than by just pure luck — that we would’ve been able to find the property. But the latitude and longitude of the place were well known and recorded so we were able to enter that into the GPS and it took us straight to the spot.

  The only problem was that — and this was the disappointing bit — because it was raining so heavily, visibility was poor. And this is one of the things about visual flying: see, once you come off instrument flying into visual flying, naturally there has to be sufficient visibility for you to conduct a visual approach or what’s called a ‘circling approach’. That’s ‘circling’, meaning you’re making a circuit-type approach rather than straight into a runway. So of course you’ve got to have sufficient visibility to be able to meet those circling minimum requirements. But on this occasion we didn’t have sufficient visibility and each time we tried to make a circuit we’d lose sight of the runway. So it was a case of almost but not quite, and after making three attempts we had to pull out of that one and we never got there.

  But, as I said, that had more to do with the prevailing conditions rather than the GPS we were trialling and, as it turned out, three vehicles were already bogged on the airstrip, with the patient, so the odds were that if we’d have landed we wouldn’t have been able to help anybody anyway. We’d only have ended up with a stuck aeroplane, which meant that we would’ve had to tax their fuel by them having to pull us out of the bog, plus taxed their food bill by us having to stay there for a few days until the strip dried out well enough for us to take off again. And so, as I said, all that wouldn’t have helped the patient at all.

  So, after having found the place with Global Positioning System — and what a tremendous advertisement it was for GPS — we weren’t able to finish it off by landing. Anyway, I think it convinced management that the sooner we put GPS into all our aeroplanes the better it’d be for everyone involved. But I must say that it was actually a pretty rare event when a Flying Doctor aeroplane was unable to reach a patient. Anyhow, in the end in that particular case they somehow managed to get a four-wheel-drive vehicle out to the property and they miraculously evacuated the patient to Laura. Then I think he was brought up by helicopter to Cooktown or something, so it was quite a roundabout route to go. But he did survive.

  Are You Sure?

  Of course, each and every one of us in the Royal Flying Doctor Service always try to present ourselves to the public in the best light possible. That’s a given. It’s a simple matter of professionalism.

  And, anyway, in the greater scheme of things, this was sort of irrelevant, I guess. But we are talking about ‘anecdotal’ stories, aren’t we? I remember when I was working up in Broken Hill. Back in those days I was the administration officer out at the RFDS base up there and we had this doctor who used to ride his push-bike out to work, as opposed to drive. It’s about a 5 or 8 kilometre trip, and it can get very hot in the summer. So he’d just wear any old casual clothes he could find laying around his home, and he’d ride his bike out, knowing that, even if an emergency arose, he always kept a set of nice clean clothes there, out at the base, and all he had to do was have a quick shower, jump into his good clothes, and he’d be ready to fly out in no time flat.

  Anyway, he and I were what I’d call mates. You know, he’d always come into my office and we’d have a good chat about this, that and the other. The usual sort of stuff that blokes talk about: the weather and that, mixed with a bit of bull. Then one day he was the doctor-on-call and so in the morning he just threw on some old clothes and he rode out to the base, as per usual. But he’d no sooner got to work than he got paged. It was a priority one. An emergency. I think it was a roll over and there were some fatalities. From memory, it was a family with a caravan, out on the Sydney road, the other side of either Cobar or Nyngan, somewhere in that area. And with it being a priority like that there’s a lot of organising to be done in a very short time. Other than the medical side of things, there’s the assessments for a road landing and things like that. Anyhow, all that’s okay; everything’s ready. He’s been given some details — not all, but some, and they’re just about ready to go.

  The next thing, he comes rushing into my office. ‘I’ve left my clothes at home,’ he says. Apparently he’d taken his good clothes home to be washed or something and he’d forgotten to bring them back out to the RFDS base, as he always did. Well, almost always.

  Now, this was back in the good old days when the presentable, and even the fashionable, attire was, you know, the long socks and the good shorts and the open neck shirt. I think it was called the ‘Safari era’. So there I was dressed like that and there he was decked out in a dirty old pair of stubby shorts and a tatty old round-neck T-shirt with, I reckon it might’ve even been a Newcastle Brown beer logo or something of that description, in the middle of it.

  Anyway, as it happened he and I were a similar size and so he looked at me and I looked at him and it was basically, ‘No option.’ So we disrobed in my office. He takes off his stubbies and T-shirt. I take off my shorts and shirt and long socks. I think we might’ve left our footwear as it was. I’m not sure now, but the thing is, I’ve now got his dirty old stubbies on and his tatty old T-shirt and he’s looking nice and presentable and professional. And so off he flew, out to this high priority along the Broken Hill to Sydney road.

  Good, that’s all done, and so I go back to work. The next thing, my secretary comes into the office and says, ‘There’s an official from the Australian Nurses’ Federation outside. She’s come out to have some discussions with you about our nurses and to see how things are going.’

  And there’s me, always the one for good presentation and professionalism, and I’m dressed like I’ve just come in from the garden or somewhere. So this woman comes into the office. She was a good-looking woman: very well presented, very professional looking.

  ‘G’day. I’m John, the admin officer,’ I say.

  And the shock on her face. You should’ve seen it. She just stood there, looking me up and down as if to say, ‘Are you sure?’

  I mean, it was quite embarrassing at the time really, because, as I said, we always try and present ourselves to the public in the best possible light. Still, I guess on that particular occasion, given the circumstances, you could say that I had presented myself in the best available light I could possibly present myself in. But, oh, it was a funny reaction she gave me. I can still remember the look on her face.

  Broken

  I left school when I was about twelve or thirteen and I got a job out at a place called Ned’s Corner Station, which is up there in the top corner of Victoria, near New South Wales and South Australia. I’d say that that was in about 1939. So I got this job with a drover, but what I didn’t count on was that I’d be working seven days a week for two and sixpence per week. And not only that — I also had to get up and do a two- or twoand-a-half-hour watch every night of the week and live on damper and corned beef; then, for a change, we’d have corned beef and damper.

  But anyhow, I stayed with droving for a good long while and over the time I had a few tangles, mainly with horses. Like, four or five years ago I had some special infra-red ray tests on my lungs and they told me that I’ve had twenty-two broken ribs. Some might be just cracks, I don’t know. So you could say that I’ve not only broken a few horses in, but also a few horses have broken me in too.

  There was one time, back when I was packhorse droving, when a horse kicked my ribs in and I ended up with a big red-blue patch that you could cook a bloody egg on. But anyhow, I kept on working; then ten days later when it was time to come home, I couldn’t get up on the horse. So I had to walk all the way back. That one hurt so bad that after a while I went to a doctor and he said that one rib was sitting on top of another and the underneath one was all split. Apparently it’d tried to knit but it kept breaking off and it’d turned into some sort of a big abscess. See, bones have to knit straight; they can’t knit crooked. I fo
und that out the hard way.

  Then I’ve also got a few bumps on my foot. See, just there — all those bumps. That happened in ’49 or ’50 when I broke the bones right across the top, there. It was a Saturday morning, and it’d started to rain, and a couple of mad bullocks had come down from out of the Blue Mountains, so I said, ‘I’ll just go up and grab these two bullocks.’

  So I on the horse flew up a narrow ridge, through wire-grass this high, and the horse went straight into a rabbit warren. He didn’t even see the thing. Anyhow, I managed to get clear but when I saw that the horse was trying to get back up, I got back in the saddle. So I got back up but then the horse scrambled in the wet and he slid right down the side of the hill and I went with him.

  Now, I don’t know exactly what happened but I heard the bones break and I felt my foot crack. I think that the tail of my boot must’ve hooked against a stone or something and it brought my foot back around like that, twisting it right up, and snap. Then when I looked down, I saw these two bones sticking out of my boot, so I cut the boot off. A good pair of boots, too, they were.

  The horse was alright, though. He was better off than me. He was just covered in mud from sliding down the side of the mountain. But then he couldn’t get back up to where I was because it was too slippery and there was a fence in his way so I ended up having to crawl for eight hours until I got to help. And I tell you, I was getting a bit worried there for a while because it was still pouring with rain and the gullies were getting fuller and fuller and the water was flowing faster and faster. Anyhow, I eventually made it back.

  But a couple of the bones in my foot just wouldn’t knit so they had to go and re-break them. That proved to be a bit of a problem too, because it was so hard to get the bones dead straight for them to set and so they had to keep on re-breaking them. In the end I think the foot had to be broken seven or eight times until eventually they set. And then they had to scrape out all the bone chips.

  Then there was another droving trip I was on. We hadn’t been on the road too long. Anyway, I’d drawn two horses to ride and one of them was pretty flighty, and I knew that if this feller got his head right down he’d do me, so I had to keep his head on his chest. I mean, he was a good horse but he just never wanted to go to work in the morning.

  Anyway, one morning just after daylight the bugger threw me and broke my arm. And, oh hell, he done a proper job of it too, because it was all bent around the wrong way. Now this happened somewhere before we got down to Barringun Gate, on the Queensland-New South Wales border. The area was all new to me, but luckily the boss knew his way. So they tucked the arm up there, like that, and they put it in a sling, then the boss and me, we jumped on our horses and off we went for help. Now I reckon we rode for about twenty or thirty mile before we come to a dogger’s camp. Doggers are blokes who go out setting dingo traps. Dingoes are a big problem up that way, too. So, anyhow, we got fresh horses there, then we done another 20 mile until we came across a mustering camp. We got fresh horses there again and then we rode another 20 mile to the homestead. I forget the name of the place now, but the Flying Doctor was only an hour or so away and when he come he took me over to the butcher’s table.

  See, at the homestead there was one of those huge big tables for laying a bullock on to butcher it. The top end was made of wood so that they could cut the beast with knives then the other end was steel so that you could slide half a bullock around. I mean, it was a pretty solid table, bolted down to the floor and all. And it had to be, because you didn’t want it to tip over when you dumped a bullock on it. But anyhow, running at an angle from the table to just down the legs, there were these iron stays. Now as I said, my arm was pretty badly broken and for it to have any chance to set, first they had to straighten it out. So they just put my broken arm through one of these stays and the doctor got his feet against the table and he yanked like hell on the arm until he got it back into position. Boy, it hurt. I reckon my eyes just about shot off in different directions, all at the same time.

  ‘There you go,’ the doctor said. ‘That didn’t hurt much, did it?’

  Like bloody hell. I mean, it was my arm that was broke, not bloody his.

  Anyhow, after the Flying Doctor bloke pulled my arm back together, he plastered it up and I went out and I sat in the sun to let it dry off a bit. Then at about five o’clock that night, after I’d had a cup of tea and a bite to eat, the boss and me, we set out again and we relayed horses all the way back until we got to our camp at daylight, just in time for me to start work again. Anyhow, with my broken arm all plastered up, I picked out a nice quiet horse this time.

  But I tell you, that night I was never so pleased to see a dinner camp in my life. Then one of the other blokes, a ringer mate of mine, a black fella, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Dusty, I’ll do yer watch tonight. She’ll be alright.’

  ‘Beaut,’ I said, and I didn’t even wait to have dinner. I just went and curled up in my swag and I slept for hours.

  Then about six weeks later I was supposed to go back to the Flying Doctor to get the plaster cut off. But I didn’t bother about that. ‘Blow it,’ I said, and I just got a pair of tin snips and I cut the bugger off myself.

  Burns

  I worked as a doctor for the Royal Flying Doctor Service for fifteen years and, while it was a very rich and rewarding experience, oh, we had some very harrowing things to deal with. Because unfortunately not all our retrievals lead to happy endings. But if you’ve got a job to do, you just do it and that’s all there is about it. That’s the doctor’s edict, isn’t it? But in my experience, extremely severe burns cases are probably the hardest ones to deal with, because if the veins have been burnt then you can’t get the cannula in, to give them fluids — and they need lots of fluids — plus, of course, there’s the intravenous analgesics to relieve the pain.

  For example, I got a call once on the HF radio that a feller had gone out on his motor bike to burn off windrows of scrub on his station property. He was by himself and he had some sort of fire lighting machine, or flame thrower, tied around his neck, which ran on a combination of diesel and petrol. So he was lighting the windrows of scrub with this machine and whether he had the wrong fuel combination in it or what I don’t know, but, anyway it exploded while it was still attached to his neck and he received full thickness burns and partial thickness burns to over 50 per cent of his entire body surface area.

  As I said, this feller was by himself. What’s more, he had no means of communication with his home base. So he rolled on the ground to put the flames out then, with these extensive burns to his body, he got on his motor bike and he rode 18 kilometres back to his home, opening and closing three gates along the way. And that was an amazing act. Because you know how in the bush it’s continually drummed into us to ‘always leave the gates as you find them?’ Of course, you wouldn’t expect someone to follow that rule when they have 50 per cent body surface area burns, would you? But he did. This feller, he did it to a tee. He opened and closed three gates along the 18-kilometre journey back to get help. So it’s really ingrained in people, isn’t it — ‘always leave gates as you find them.’

  Anyway, he finally arrived at the homestead and that’s when we got the call. So the pilot flew the nurse and I out there where, first of all, we resuscitated him. Then we prepared him for transport by putting in an indwelling catheter to catch his urine. We then loaded him in the plane and headed off to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. And this feller was in such a bad way that on the flight down to Brisbane his urine was just solid myoglobinuria, from the muscle which had been burnt. So you could say that he was sort of urinating melted muscle.

  But he died, the poor feller, four or five days later on, in the Burns Unit at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. But, once again, as distressing as it was, that was a story of just sheer courage in my books. ‘Always leave gates as you find them.’

  Another extremely distressing event was when we got a call that two fellers had been burnt in an explosion at an oil rig,
out on the South Australian border. The most serious of the two had received burns to over 90 per cent of his body surface area. He was still alive but he’d inhaled the flames, which meant that he’d burnt his lungs as well.

  Now, the second feller, the one with the least burns, he pulled through eventually so I’ll concentrate on the problems we had with the most seriously burnt feller. When we got out there, firstly I had to try and find a vein where there were no burns. With having burns to over 90 per cent of his body, that was difficult. In the end, the only place I could cannulate him was down at his ankle. I then put him to sleep — paralysed him — then I had to put an intratracheal tube into his trachea so that I could ventilate him. This also caused problems as his vocal cords had also been partially burnt and I had to split them before I could get the intratracheal tube into him. I was then faced with a greater problem; perhaps a more ethical one. I had a pretty fair idea that this feller was going to die. But, if at all possible, I wanted him to remain alive at least until his relatives could see him before he did die. And as our destination was the Royal Brisbane Hospital, that meant we’d have to keep him going for a fair number of hours. So we loaded the two fellers into the aeroplane and we called up another RFDS plane and we organised to meet halfway, at Charleville.

  At Charleville we performed an escharotomy on the most serious of the two fellers, which entailed the cutting of burnt tissue. See, skin tissue, when it burns, contracts and causes a blockage of the blood flow, which doesn’t allow the chest to expand for respiration purposes. So we did an escharotomy on him at Charleville and then we put him in the other plane and they took him down to Brisbane.