by Bill Marsh
But of course my big worry was, ‘How on earth are we going to get back home?’ I thought we’d be stuck there forever because by that stage the tyres on Col’s truck were badly worn and we had to go back through crossings that were full of sharp rocks and logs and things. It was just terrible. It just wasn’t suitable for tourists.
But then, coming back from Coen, we hardly had any trouble at all. See, it’s when you go out into the unknown, into somewhere different like that, that’s when you have all the worries. But once you’ve done it, then the fear’s gone.
Dad
I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘Mantle of Safety’. That encapsulated John Flynn’s dream to cover all aspects of care for those who lived and worked in the outback. So, with Flynn as its driving force, the Australian Inland Mission set up hospitals and sent trained nurses out to those remote areas. Then the Flying Doctor Service more or less supported the services of the AIM, plus the many other outback support organisations.
Another important part of Flynn’s ‘Mantle of Safety’ was to also provide spiritual care and it was to that end that my father, Fred McKay, was recruited by Flynn in 1936 to go out in his International truck and work as a Patrol Padre, throughout western Queensland. Now these Patrol Padres were never heavily evangelical or anything. They tended to be more of a comforting presence to people. I mean, yes, they did weddings. They did baptisms. They did burials. They did all those sorts of things. But they were especially trained to meet outback people on their own level. As Dad used to say, ‘I meet people where their greatest need is.’ So being the pretty handy sort of feller he was, Dad was always willing to hop in and work in a stockyard or he’d help out doing odd jobs around station homesteads.
Of course, having such a vast area to cover, the truck — the International — was really his home and Dad would sleep out by himself a lot of the time. So the funny thing was that when Dad and Mum married in 1938 and planned to travel together, Mum’s parents were so alarmed at what they thought their daughter was getting herself in for, they made sure that Mum at least had something to sleep in, so they bought her a swag. In fact, the bulk of their wedding presents consisted of camping equipment: things like billy cans and tin plates and all that.
Also, by then, Alf Traeger had come up with his pedal-driven radio and for a lot of that earlier time Dad’s only communication with the outside world was via the Traeger pedal radio. Really, the pedal radio was the link between the outback people, the Flying Doctor, the AIM hospitals, the Patrol Padres and the other care organisations who had set up missions out in different places as well.
So Dad carried the pedal radio around in the truck and maintained very close contact and ties with the various Flying Doctor bases and so forth. And perhaps I mightn’t even be here today if it wasn’t for the pedal radio. Because it was in about November 1938, when my mother was pregnant with me, that they were travelling out in south-western Queensland and they broke a king pin in the truck. It was one of those things that Dad had been assured would never happen to an International truck. But it did. And I’ve still got the broken king pin. It sits in our lounge room. Anyhow, the king pin broke and of course one wheel collapsed. I mean, Dad was a pretty good mechanic and he could do most running repairs but he certainly wasn’t able to do anything as major as that. It was a crucial piece of equipment and couldn’t be replaced, and certainly not out there.
So Dad and Mum found themselves stuck in a claypan near a place called Cuddapan which was about 50 kilometres, in a direct line, from Tanbar Station. You wouldn’t find Cuddapan on a map these days but the closest large place was Windorah, which was about 110 kilometres further on from where they broke down. Anyway, there they were — stuck — and so Dad got on his pedal radio and sent out the message. Then after he’d sent the message he walked back along the track, leaving Mum in the truck. So there was my mother, pregnant with me and worried if she’d ever see Dad again and even whether she was ever going to get out of the situation alive. Anyhow, the feller from Tanbar Station heard the message. Luckily he knew the area quite well so he drove out and he met up with Dad and then they came back and pulled the International out of the claypan, much to Mum’s relief.
That’s the story I grew up with anyway. But as to other stories, you know, there were stories of Dad’s patrol days; stories told by some of these hard-bitten bushmen in the early days of the Flying Doctor Service. One I remember was about an Aboriginal stockman who’d been out mustering and was seriously injured after being thrown from his horse. As luck would have it, Dad was visiting the stockmen’s camp on his way through so he threw his aerial up in a tree and got on the radio and called the nearest Flying Doctor base, then he stayed there with the mustering crew until the plane arrived. But of course back in those early days, finding somewhere for the plane to land in many of those remote outback places was a bit of a dicey business too and they often had to chop down scrub to clear a makeshift airstrip. Actually, sometimes it was a bit of a miracle when they did ever somehow land and then take off again.
Anyway, so they cleared a bit of a space and the Flying Doctor’s plane landed safely and they picked up this injured Aboriginal stockman. Then, as the plane took off into the sky, one of the old blokes in the camp looked up and when he saw that the shape of the aeroplane, with its wings and body, resembled a cross in the sky, he said to Dad, ‘Well, if that isn’t the flying Christ, Padre, I don’t know what is.’
So that’s just another small story. But really, I guess we, as a family, have learnt a lot more about our parents and their early years from reading their diaries rather than hearing a lot of stories. I mean, we used to hear Dad telling other people’s stories but they were probably very much embellished and some of them, I recall, were unprintable. But their diaries were different because I think, in retrospect, some of the things they wrote then are more meaningful to me now. There was of course lots about everyday, normal things but then there were the hardships of travelling around the bush in a truck. There were the terrible roads, the extremes of the heat, cold and rain, plus there were all the unexpected events, both good and bad. Then of course there were times of great loneliness, when Dad was out there by himself or, later on, when it was just the two of them.
Though the thing that’s most important to me is to read of the sacrifices they made in just trying to be there for other people and it was those sacrifices that made them both realise just why they were meant to be there. Even after Dad died, time and time again it was an absolute revelation to us as a family to read or hear about just how much of a part he’d played in the lives of so many many Australians.
But that was Dad’s life’s work. Even right up until his last years, when he was in his eighties, people would always be asking him to do something or other and no matter how tired or busy he was he’d always help them out in whatever way he could. Then, when we’d ask him why he continued to work so hard, he’d say, ‘Well, it’s my calling. This is what I’m meant to be doing. This is why I’m here.’
Difficult Conditions
When I was flying for the RFDS, as far as difficult conditions went, the weather was always the telling factor. It still probably is, though nowadays the aeroplanes are far better equipped to handle most things. I mean, we never had any of these modern ‘nav’ (navigation) aids or anything so we just had to do the best we could. But things could became scary at times. Thunderstorms are usually the most dangerous, mainly because of the turbulence. To blunder into one of those is not such a good thing. If you try to pull your plane out of the thunderstorm there’s the chance that you might rip the wings off and then you end up with a wreckage trail of over 5 kilometres. I saw, just recently up in New South Wales, a plane was torn to pieces in a thunderstorm. So anyone who reckons that thunderstorms aren’t scary, well, I’d say they’re telling fibs.
Also, up in the higher levels, along with the turbulence you can get hail and that can do terrific damage. Big hail stones can wreck an aeroplane by damaging t
he front or battering the wings. But of course these days they’ve got radar and that can pick up the solids that are associated with a thunderstorm, like rain and the hail. And you also have what’s called storm-scopes. They can detect the electrical discharge, which gives you a much more accurate picture. Storm-scopes also come in handy when you hit dry thunderstorms. A dry thunderstorm’s one that’s got no hail or rain in it. Some of them have lightning but mainly it’s just severe turbulence. So if you hit a dry thunderstorm, all you can do is to try and hang on until you get spat out the other side of it.
Other than the thunderstorms, there’s dust storms. I remember once flying a Navajo out to a station property on the Nullarbor, north of Tarcoola. Someone had had an accident on a motor bike and they needed to be picked up. But on our way out we got stuck in the middle of this hell of a dust storm. And, try as I might, I just could not see a bloody thing. In fact, I never actually found the property that we were supposed to be going out to and in the end I even had quite a job finding my way back home to Port Augusta. That’s how crook it was, and rough too.
Fog’s another difficulty that we were likely to face. I remember when a call came through that a crop sprayer had had a plane prang down at Naracoorte, in the south-east of South Australia. He happened to be a very good friend of mine, actually. He’s okay now, but he was spraying and he flew straight into this great gum tree. Anyhow, we got there at night and there was this fog. Real thick stuff, it was. Now, Naracoorte’s notoriously bad for fog, especially at night. So we sort of pushed the limits a bit and we landed in this blooming fog, which would be a definite big ‘no-no’ these days. You just don’t do stuff like that now because of all the rules and regulations they’ve got in place. But that was a pretty dangerous flight.
So then, let me think: what other sort of difficult conditions were we likely to face? Well, there’d be dirt airstrips, especially after rain. You know, it’s as wet as a shag, you land your plane and you get bogged. And believe me, aeroplanes are very easy things to bog and they’re terribly hard things to get out once you’ve bogged them. Usually, before we flew out anywhere we’d check the conditions with the station owners or communities and if there was any doubt at all we’d ask them to go out and drive up and down the strip to see if it was firm enough for the plane to land. If their vehicle left wheel tracks, it was a sign that you could well end up in trouble. Also, of course, by asking them to do that, you’d have to rely on their judgment and most times they’d bias the safety aspect their way and not yours because, especially in an emergency, they’d just be so desperate to get you out there.
As well as that, depending on where you were going, you could ask them to do a run along the airstrip to clear any stock that might be wandering around the place. Then there’s always the ongoing problem of the native wildlife like the emus and the roos. You can’t do much about them because they’d come out of nowhere and just jump in front of you. And a roo, in particular, can do a terrific amount of damage, because if they hit right on the nose bill, the nose bill could collapse.
Actually, I was pretty lucky with the emus and the roos really, because most of the ones I hit ran through the prop, which basically just chopped them up. I remember at Port Augusta when the RFDS was thinking about buying the Pilatus PC 12 aeroplanes and we had all these guys coming out from Switzerland, picking our brains as to what sort of conditions we were operating in. Basically they were pretty keen to get it right, which they did.
Anyway, this particular time we had a salesman from Pilatus with us and this guy had no idea as to what outback Australia was like and what sort of conditions the Pilatus aeroplane would have to operate in. So we took him for a trip in the King Air, over the Flinders Ranges to Marree then to Nepabunna Aboriginal Community. Nepabunna was a bit of a doozy, actually. It’s stuck right in a valley, with high hills all around, and you had to approach it and take off in the one direction — it’s what’s called a ‘oneway strip’ — and so we needed a plane with a good climb rate. So we landed there, at Nepabunna, and Nepabunna was a typical example of a stony airstrip. And this guy from Pilatus, well, he’d never seen anything like it. He was so impressed that he even took a handful of stones back to Switzerland to show them just what we were landing on.
I wasn’t actually the pilot that time, so when it came time to leave Nepabunna I was sitting in the back and we were just taking off and the next thing, Bang! There’s this terrific jolt as we hit this bloody kangaroo fair in the right-hand propeller and we chewed him up into little pieces. Anyhow, we inspected the prop and one blade had a bit of a woof in it. Still, it didn’t look too bad so we decided to take off anyway. It wasn’t my decision because I wasn’t the pilot but you could feel the vibration through the aeroplane as we were flying along. It shook us around a bit. Of course, once again you wouldn’t do that these days — you know, take off after an accident like that. That sort of stuff just doesn’t go on now.
Then I guess another difficulty we had, especially in the early days, was the night landings. Before we started using flares we used to use cars to light up the strip at night. One time I remember, up at Marla Bore, in the far north of South Australia; this was back when there was only a roadhouse at Marla and it was virtually just about an all-dirt road right the way from Port Augusta up to Alice Springs. Anyhow, this truck missed a bypass around some wet ground and it rolled over with two blokes in it. It was a terrible accident. One of the drivers was crushed in the cabin and it took ages to get the other feller out of the wreck.
But, as I said, they weren’t using flares in those days so a heap of vehicles went out and parked each side of the runway, and they sat there with their headlights on so that we could see where to land. The only trouble was that they sort of misjudged it a bit and when we landed there was only a whisker in between our wings and their bull bars. So after a few experiences like that, it then became a gradual process to educate settlements and communities into having night flares. And eventually everyone got those, which saved that mad scramble of trying to get as many cars as you possibly could to come and line up along the airstrip in the dark.
With the flares, the basic ones were either kerosene or diesel in a tin or the battery operated ones. Batteries were a bit of a problem because if you don’t use them for a few months the batteries can go flat. Plus, batteries are very expensive. So really, the mix of diesel and sand proved the best. They were cheap and quick and easy to organise because the station people usually had all that stuff lying around the place anyway. You just grab a can or a milk tin or an old oil tin, fill it with sand, stick some rag in it, then you soak the sand with diesel, throw in a match and you’ve got a good flare that will last a fair while — cheap and easy. What’s more, on a good night you could see them from about 30 miles away, no worries. Of course, if somebody mistakenly put in a bit too much diesel they could set fire to the countryside and then you’d get your direction from a hell of a lot further away than 30 miles.
So yes, I guess that’s a few of the difficulties us pilots could face. But as the years go by you tend to pick up on what’s good and what’s bad and so your judgment becomes a little better. Experience has a lot to do with it because you can’t be taught about a lot of things. Only experience teaches you.
But one last story — one with a little bit of humour to it — and this has to do with turbulence. I was still at Port Augusta back then and there was this big meeting happening up at Mount Willoughby or one of those places up that way. So there were quite a few ‘bigwigs’, as I’ll call them for the sake of the story, who needed to be flown up to this meeting. I was in the King Air and just as we were on descent into Mount Willoughby we suddenly hit severe turbulence. And as we were going through this turbulence, I heard this sort of commotion going on from down the back of the plane. So I took a quick glance around and, for the life of me, I thought I saw this bloody possum running down the aisle. Then, in the split second while I was trying to work out how on earth a possum had got on board,
this woman came chasing after it and she grabbed it in a flash and then she stuck it back on her head. That’s what I meant by ‘bigwig’, and even when we landed it still looked a bit skew-whiff to me. I tell you, I wasn’t the only one who was trying very hard not to laugh.
Disappearing Flares
This was an interesting one. It was actually with the same doctor, Gary, I’d put the wind up on a previous occasion when he thought we were about to go up in flames midair. So even before we took off, Gary seemed a bit jittery. We were going up to Cape Flattery. Cape Flattery’s a mining place, on the eastern side of Cape York Peninsula north of Cooktown, not far from Lizard Island. It’s still operational today as a sand and silicon mine. I think Mitsubishi is the crowd that operates it.
Anyhow, one night we got a call to go up there to Cape Flattery to pick up a lady who was reported to be swimming straight out to sea. And because it’s full of crocodiles the local people were naturally getting a bit concerned about her welfare and so for her own safety they wanted her out of the place. Really, I think that basically she was a bit funny in the head, because apparently it was a yearly thing she did in an attempt to try and get the RFDS to give her a free trip down to Cairns ‘to do a bit of shopping’.
To explain what I mean by ‘to do a bit of shopping’… Well, I often think a lot of these people are a lot smarter than you and me. So they throw a bit of a ‘wobbly’ and do something strange or mad, which puts the wind up everyone, and so the community wants them out of the place. Basically, it’s all a set-up really. Of course, we don’t charge any of our patients so they end up getting a free flight to town. Then after they arrive in Cairns they’re taken to hospital where they’re fed and watered for a day or two. Then they’re released from hospital and away they go, ‘off to do some shopping’, you see. Well, that’s just my take on it, of course.