by Bill Marsh
Then by the time we landed at Adelaide I worked out that I’d spent eighteen hours in the air and that’s not including the time on the ground. But you see back then, there was no one else in Alice Springs who was qualified to fly on instruments apart from me. So that was my longest day: eighteen stick hours in one day. And except for long-distance flights, I’d say that that record would never be broken because these days, first, there’s always plenty of properly trained pilots available and second, there’s usually plenty of available aircraft around.
Anyway, the woman survived, and I guess that’s the most important thing.
So yes, Alice Springs was an extremely fascinating part of my life. Plus it’s also what you make it, isn’t it? Because, you know, you can go on about the aircraft and one thing and another and, I mean, of course, we didn’t have all this fancy stuff they’ve got today. We even took the auto-pilot out of the aircraft because it weighed too much. The damn thing usually never worked anyway. But, see, originally up in Alice Springs we just had the one doctor, the one sister, the one pilot, the one aircraft and the one engineer. Then over the years the medical side of it built up to such an extent that when I left they replaced me with two pilots and two aircraft. By then I’d flown one thousand, eight hundred and twelve hours in three years. That’s six hundred actual flying hours per year, and for that sort of work you’d normally expect to fly a maximum of about four hundred hours a year. But that’s what used to happen in those early days and that’s why they doubled up the service after I left.
And with us just having the one engineer, the one pilot and the one aircraft, we still kept our aircraft virtually as good as new. I’d write the most minute snags on a piece of paper and stick it on the wall in the engineer’s office and he’d fix them up. We had that aircraft in absolutely ‘Mickey Mouse’ condition. Actually, the whole time I was there I only ever broke down once, and that had nothing to do with our own engineer. It was because of some sort of a fault in overhaul maintenance while it was in Sydney. What happened was that the aircraft had its usual two-yearly major service in Bankstown and when they put the fuel line on they were supposed to use two spanners on it. But they only used the one spanner and they twisted the fuel line and in doing so they twisted the pipe.
Then after the plane came back from being serviced I went out to a property one day and everything seemed to be going well. But then on our way back home I got up to about 8000 or 9000 feet and the fuel pressure started dropping off and the engine began surging. So I shut the engine down. And that’s what they found out afterwards — that the pipe had twisted causing a drop in pressure and, at the high ambient temperature, the fuel vaporised. It was just something as simple as that.
Anyway, after I shut the engine down I said to the doctor, ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Here we are, we’re on one engine and it’s about 200 miles to Alice Springs. That’s a bit too far to go on just the one engine.’
I mean, I could’ve had a go at it but you don’t push your luck in an aeroplane. Never. So then I had to find the closest suitable airstrip to land on the one engine and so we went back to Ernabella Mission. I’m not sure what it’s like now but back then Ernabella was a dry mission. Even the merest mention of alcohol there was frowned upon. So we were then stuck at Ernabella Mission for two days without a drink.
Anyway, in those days Alice Springs had a population of only about three or four thousand people, and word gets around. So by the time we got back, everyone knew that we’d been stuck out on a dry settlement at Ernabella. Then the instant we walked into the Memorial Club the barmaid plonked these two huge pots of beer down in front of us. We didn’t have to say a thing. And that’s what the people were like out there in the Alice. Absolutely great. They knew where we’d been and they reckoned we’d be in need of a big beer so they got the barmaid to pour us one as soon as we walked in the club. So yes, we might’ve had some long days but, gee, they were great times.
Looked like Hell
My name is now Clemson, though O’Connor was my maiden name when I was working as an Emergency flight nurse for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, out in the west of New South Wales, at both Broken Hill and Dubbo. These days I’m married and we’re living on a property just outside Walgett, in the central north of New South Wales. But I was with the Flying Doctor Service for nine years and I enjoyed every moment of it…well, almost…because during my time with the RFDS we had to deal with many and varied incidents. Some you could draw humour from. Some were tough to take. So it was not always easy, no.
Now I know that tragic stories don’t make for the best of reading but I do remember one time at Moomba, up in the north-eastern corner of South Australia. The Flying Doctor Service had the contract at the Moomba oil and gas fields so we used to go out there and it was absolutely amazing — the harshness of the place and just how unbelievably hot it can get. And this story really brings that sort of thing home to you.
Anyhow, they had a bloke out there who was new to the job so he wasn’t acclimatised and so he was unaware of the damage that that sort of scorching heat can do to you. Now, I can’t remember what his actual job was but he was working about 100 foot up in the air, doing something on one of those big rigs they’ve got, and he was out in the sun for about three hours without drinking enough water. So it was purely dehydration that got him because someone just happened to look up and there he was, hanging upside down in a safety harness, swinging in midair and he was fitting (having a fit).
That’s when we got the call to fly out and get him. In the meantime, the nurses that were based up at Moomba, they had to somehow get up this big rig and they had to go out to where he was hanging to get the drip into him and then get him down. It was just from him purely being overcooked. And actually he was very lucky to even be alive because his whole body had virtually collapsed. He had muscle meltdown. His kidneys were shutting down. He was bleeding from absolutely every orifice. Everything. Then when we arrived we had to ventilate him, and it was difficult because we couldn’t see for all the blood that was pouring out of him from everywhere. In all, it took probably eight hours to stabilise him.
So we flew him down to Adelaide and when we got there we got him into the ambulance and we had an emergency police escort from the airport into Royal Adelaide Hospital. Oh, we had all the lights flashing and all the sirens blaring — everything. They even shut the traffic lights off so that we could get him to the hospital quicker. Then, when we got to the hospital, all the lifts were opened for us, and I think they worked on him for another three or four hours. After that he had to be put on dialysis and then he was on ventilators for a long time.
And now he’s back at Moomba. He’s just doing light duties, mind you. He might still have a few problems but he’s a very lucky man to still be alive, with what he went through. So that was a very difficult one, particularly for the nurses at Moomba who had to get right out of their comfort zone and get up the rig and treat the man while he was hanging upside down and fitting in midair. I mean, you really have to admire people with a commitment like that, don’t you?
Then there’s another story. This one’s also about someone who had to get out of their comfort zone to help a patient, though in a different sort of way. Actually, I’m reminded of this story because just last night we had a storm out here at Walgett. We only had about forty points or something but it was bad enough to cut the power and cut the road. Mind you, the rain’s nice and welcome, that’s for sure.
But talking about rain reminds me of the time when I was working for the RFDS in Broken Hill and a woman rang us from a property up near the Queensland border. In this case this woman had very little medical knowledge. Apparently they’d had a lot of rain up there and her husband had been out riding his motor bike and it had slipped from underneath him and he’d fallen off, damaging his leg. Unfortunately, they only had a dirt airstrip on their property so we couldn’t fly in there at the time, because it was too wet. So we then had to try and instruct the husband’s wife,
over the telephone, as to what to do and how to go about it.
As I said this woman had very limited medical knowledge but from her description of the injuries her husband had obviously broken the leg, and the break was both the tibia and fibula; yes, both of them. In fact, it was a compound fracture, meaning that bone was sticking out which, as you might be able to imagine, was causing the husband a lot of pain and the woman a lot of anxiety.
So, first we had to treat the pain. For that the woman had to give her husband an injection of pethidine, which was kept in the RFDS medical chest. The only trouble was that she’d never given a needle before. Oh, I think perhaps she might’ve given a few jabs to some of their cattle or something which, mind you, as it turned out, proved to be a very good training ground. So initially we instructed her how to give the injection for the pain, and she managed that.
The next problem was that, from what she’d told us, it was obvious that the foot wasn’t getting enough blood to it. She described the foot as being ‘cold and white’. Of course, we didn’t want to lose the foot, so after her husband had settled down a bit from the pethidine we had to reduce the fracture in an attempt to keep up the blood flow. Now, to reduce the fracture, the woman had to manually — physically — put the bone back into alignment. And she had to do it all by herself, and unpractised, because there was nobody out there to help her. There was just her and her husband. The only help she had was us, and we were miles away on the end of a telephone.
So we told her how to manipulate the bone back into alignment, which is done by pulling and pulling, as hard as she could, until the bone pops back into place. Naturally, she was a bit apprehensive at first but, with the fate of her husband’s foot in the balance, she eventually gathered up the courage and in fact, as it turned out, she managed to do that quite well too. So she got the bone back into alignment and then, because she didn’t plaster it or anything like that, she had to keep the leg elevated by putting it on a pillow. Once that was done it was important to keep the husband resting. Then throughout the night she had to keep checking for the pulse, just to make sure that blood was still getting down into the foot. All during this time she was in constant contact with us.
Of course, before we could get the aeroplane in there to pick up her husband and get him back to the Broken Hill Hospital, we had to wait until the airstrip was safe enough for us to land. As it happened, they didn’t get any more rain that night and so things looked promising. So the next morning she had to somehow get her husband out of the house and into a vehicle and then drive out and check the condition of the airstrip. She also had to clear the kangaroos from off the strip and check for any holes and twigs or sticks or logs that might get in our way.
Anyhow, after she gave us the all-clear, we flew in there. By then it was about twenty-four hours after the accident. And the woman had done a great job. The leg was looking really good and her husband was relatively pain free. The only trouble was, it’d obviously been a very long and harrowing ordeal for the woman because she looked like absolute hell.
Looking at the Stars
If you like, first of all I’ve got a story here that’s a little bit humorous. It’s one that, these days, has almost become part of Flying Doctor Service folklore because you’ll hear it, or differing versions of it, being told in just about every pub around western Queensland. What’s more, it’s a true story. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.
Now, I haven’t got an exact date but at one time the Charleville base of the RFDS received a call from a ringer, and the ringer said, ‘Doc, yer gotta come real quick. Me mate’s hurt his hand real bad.’
Anyhow, in an attempt to find out how the accident happened, and to get a clearer idea as to just how badly the ringer’s mate’s hand was damaged, the doctor tried to extract a little bit more information out of the ringer. But, with ringers being ringers and ringers, more often than not, being men of extremely few words, the doctor couldn’t get much more information out of him other than his mate had ‘hurt his hand real bad’ and that the doctor had better ‘come real quick’.
So they jumped into the plane and off they went. After they landed at the particular station property where the accident had occurred, they rushed to the scene and there was this ringer, the one with the damaged hand, sitting there looking sad and sorry and forlorn and the other ringers were sort of sheepishly standing around behind him. Anyhow, the doctor walked up to the injured ringer and said, ‘Show me your hand, son.’
Which he did. He lifted his hand up and his thumb was totally missing. It was gone.
‘Where’s your thumb?’ the doctor asked.
Well, the injured ringer, who was also a man of few words, didn’t say anything but simply motioned towards his mates. So the doctor said to his mates, ‘Where’s his thumb? What’ve you done with his thumb?’
‘Oh,’ one of them said, ‘we stuck it over there, on the gatepost, fer safe keepin’.’
And just as doctor turned around to the gatepost, he saw a crow heading skyward, thumb and all. So I don’t know how the ringer had actually lost his thumb in the first place, but it had certainly gone missing after the crow had flown off with it.
So that’s one story. But I suppose that every time I go out to the bush I come back with another story and this one came about when we were putting together a promotional DVD for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. There was just myself, the director and a cameraman, and we’d based ourselves at Mount Isa and we were filming right up to Bentinck and Sweers Islands. Bentinck and Sweers Islands are just off Burketown, into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
But where this story actually comes from is Burketown itself, and I thought it was rather beautiful. The lady that looks after the Burketown Clinic — if you like, she’s the registered nurse there — her name is Glenda. She’s an Aborigine, and we fly in there once a week and conduct a clinic. Now Burketown, as you may well know, is a very remote location. Just check it up on your map.
So we were there filming in Burketown and the director happened to ask Glenda, ‘Seeing that you’re the only one with any form of medical expertise out here in this remoteness, in a situation of an accident of a night time, how do you handle it all on your own?’
And Glenda said to the director, ‘Well, first I patch them up as best I can. Next, I call the Flying Doctor and then I go out to the airstrip and I look up at the stars and just wait for one to get bigger.’
Memories of Alice Springs
When John Flynn died in 1951, my father, Fred McKay, took over his position of Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission. When that happened we moved from Brisbane down to Sydney. Then we’d only been in Sydney for about a year or so and there were some financial problems or other within the organisation of the AIM. I was a bit too young to know all the details about it but it’s been well documented. Anyhow, in amongst all that, they were having problems getting staff for the AIM’s Bush Mother’s Hostel, up in Alice Springs. So my mother, Meg McKay, volunteered her services to be Matron — gratis — and so we all moved up to Alice Springs. By all, I mean it was really just my mother, my elder sister, my brother and myself because Dad still had all his other AIM duties to attend to, so he was coming and going a lot.
The Bush Mother’s Hostel was in Adelaide House. That’s in Todd Street. It’s a National Trust building now, like a museum. And I guess that you know all about how John Flynn actually helped redesign the hostel, with the wide verandahs and the natural sort of air conditioning. That was where the air came up from a tunnel under the building, to cool the place down. I would’ve only been twelve or so, at that stage, but back then Alice Springs was quite a small town. I’d say that there would’ve only been about two or three thousand people. They’d just built their first high school, the year before we went up there, and so I was in the first group of students to go to that new high school.
But it was a fascinating place and it just seemed to me that Alice Springs encapsulated a great range of people — people who
were all unique, in their own sorts of ways. You know, everyone seemed to be a character who lived their character. And there’s books out now about some of these people where they’re described as being ‘outback heroes and outback identities’.
One lady in particular comes to mind. Her name was Olive Pink. At that time I didn’t have a clue as to what Olive did but you’d always see her looking like she was someone out of Edwardian England. Wherever she went, she wore these long white dresses, with a white hat and a white scarf, and gloves. And in a place like Alice Springs that was very much a look that was out of place. But, as I said, while I was there I didn’t know what she did and since then I’ve learnt that she was a quite well known conservationist and environmentalist. Apparently she was very instrumental in opening up and saving a lot of the native vegetation throughout that area. There’s even the Olive Pink Memorial Gardens there now and I believe she helped establish a lot of that garden herself. But when you’re only in your early teenage years…well, my memories of her were just of seeing her around town and thinking what a strange lady she was.
Then when they started to build the John Flynn Church, Dad was back a lot more because he was supervising the building. So we watched the John Flynn Church being built. And if you’re ever up that way, it’s well worth a visit, not only because of its basic structure, but there’s also a lot of symbolism in the actual building, which is something that a lot of people don’t realise. It’s set out like a story of the life of John Flynn and his achievements.
Anyway, I always thought it was just interesting, how some of the things Dad did in Alice Springs seemed to have had far-reaching effects for different people. There was another feller called Ted Smith. Ted didn’t have any work but he owned a truck. He was married with two kids. So he was struggling to make a go of things. Then, in the early days of getting the church under way, he sort of turned up one day and offered Dad any help he could give. Of course, back then everything was being shipped up from Adelaide. But just at that point in time there was some sort of big transport problem or other and this Ted Smith arrived just at the right time, with this truck, and saved Dad a momentous problem. And that set Ted Smith up in Alice Springs. He helped Dad out with the building of the church, then he went on to become a very, very highly respected businessman who had this very prolific business, not only in transport but I think he also diversified into other areas.