The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  But, really, isn’t that an amazing coincidence of divine connection? Not only for Fred but for Meg as well, and for both of them to end up becoming life-long partners. I mean, something like that really makes you think about the mysterious ways of preordained destiny, doesn’t it?

  Razor Blades and Saucepans

  Yes now, some of my memories. Well, my flying background goes back to the services. I did my training with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). That was in 1956, and I served with them for fourteen years. Then, when I got out of the RAAF, I came up to Cairns, in far north Queensland, and joined the Aerial Ambulance crowd. Back then the Aerial Ambulance was operated by the Queensland Ambulance Transport Brigade (QATB), which used to run all the ambulance services throughout the state.

  So then I flew with the QATB for about ten years, right up until the middle of 1979, which was when the QATB finally decided to get out of the aeroplane side of things. So I was without a job. Anyhow, out of fifty or so other applicants from all around Australia, I was lucky enough to be picked up by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and based here in Cairns. So I was able to stay here, which was a great relief because when I was in the Air Force, typical military, I’d moved twelve times in fourteen years. Actually, my feeling was that if I never moved again it’d be far too soon. But thankfully as it turned out, I didn’t have to move anywhere and I started with the RFDS here in Cairns on 1 July 1979.

  And I was with the RFDS then from the middle of 1979 right up until I retired in the middle of 1997 and I was basically based in Cairns for the whole of that time. I was their Chief Pilot and also their Senior Checking and Training Pilot, so that job took me around the ridges a lot, within the confines of the RFDS. You know, I’d find myself out at Charleville and then out at Mount Isa and then down in Brisbane for conferences and all that sort of thing.

  Actually, probably the correct sequence should be Training and Checking Pilot, really, but for years and years it’s been simpler to just say check and training. And there’s a funny little story about that. Years and years ago a crowd called Bush Pilots were operating here in Cairns and they had a feller who was writing stories about them and he couldn’t understand what all this ‘check and training’ was all about. He thought they were saying ‘chicken training’.

  ‘What the hell are you pilots training the chickens to do?’ he asked, and it had to be explained that it was actually a process of checking and training pilots, which had nothing at all to do with chicken training.

  In those earlier days, of course, there were only the three active bases in Queensland — Cairns, Mount Isa and Charleville — and our Head Office was in Queen Street, Brisbane. Of course, it’s all changed now. We still have Cairns, Mount Isa and Charleville but now you’ve also got Townsville, Rockhampton and Bundaberg and the Head Office has moved from its old place in Queen Street out to the Brisbane Airport. So there’s been tremendous changes since I retired.

  And, with the clinic flying, which was where we took a doctor and a nurse out to virtually provide a GP service, back then the area we covered was inland from Collinsville, which is between Townsville and Mackay, right up to the top of Cape York. In my day we started on a Tuesday and we’d go from Cairns to Kowanyama, which used to be called Mitchell River. Then from Kowanyama we’d go to Pormpuraaw, which was then known as Edward River. Both Kowanyama and Pormpuraaw are Aboriginal communities. After that we’d go up to Weipa, where we’d overnight, and the next day we’d go down to Aurukun, which is just forty miles south of Weipa. Then we’d fly across to Lockhart River. After Lockhart River we’d go back to Weipa again, to overnight there. Then the following day we might go down to, say, some places like Coen and Musgrave, and then back to Cairns. So it’d be a three-day deal with two nights away from Cairns.

  And the aeroplanes we had were the piston-engined Beechcraft Queen Airs. They had those of course before I joined the RFDS in ’79. Then, over the years, we progressively phased out the Queen Airs into the turbo prop Beechcraft King Airs. Gorgeous aeroplanes they were. Simply gorgeous. I really enjoyed flying the King Airs. We got our first one, a King Air Super 200, in 1984, then we subsequently got one, two, three, then four King Air C90s. The C90s were a smaller King Air, based on the Queen Air airframe and they had what was called a ‘pumped-up fuselage’ (pressurised) and, rather than the piston engines, a couple of turbo prop engines came on it.

  Actually, one of the air traffic controllers out in Mount Isa — a lady interestingly enough — described them beautifully, I thought. She’d been watching the Queen Airs take off and land for a number of years and when the first of the little turbo prop King Airs turned up in Mount Isa she said it was like a ‘Queen Air with balls’. And I still haven’t heard it put any better than that.

  So then there was sort of a phasing-out period of the Queen Airs, where we went from having four Queen Airs to having three Queen Airs to having two Queen Airs to having one. Actually, I flew the last Queen Air. From memory, I think that was in May 1992 and it finished up as an exhibit in our RFDS Visitors’ Centre, here in Cairns.

  So the last of our Queen Airs still exists, thank goodness. They were going to chuck it out but I prevailed upon them. I made the very strong suggestion that we really should try and retain some of our own aviation history. To my way of thinking, Australia was far too keen on discarding its older aeroplanes to turn them all into razor blades and saucepans. And of course nowadays everyone’s running around trying to find old World War II aeroplanes, you know. And, mind you, that’s only just sixty years after the event. But that’s another story.

  See Yer Later

  Now, I’ve only got just the one Flying Doctor story, so I don’t know if it’s of use to you.

  Okay, well some years ago, after exploring Ningaloo Reef, between Exmouth and Coral Bay, which is up in the northern coastal region of Western Australia, we headed off to Exmouth Airport, with our dive bags and packs, to catch a small plane to Broome. When we arrived at Exmouth, there were only a couple of four-wheel drives in the airport car park. Then, further to that, we discovered that the actual terminal was completely deserted; that is, except for one bloke who was behind a check-in counter.

  ‘G’day,’ we said.

  ‘Oh, glad you’ve turned up,’ he beamed. ‘You’re the only passengers for the day!’

  ‘What? No one else here?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘just the bloke in the Control Tower.’ Then he gave us the tags to stick on our luggage. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘stick these on your bags and have a good flight.’

  Which we did and then, to our surprise, he slipped under the counter and headed out to the car park. So we settled into these terribly bright red seats that were in the waiting lounge. To give you some idea, they were a kind of a cross between a beanbag and a park bench-seat. In actual fact, the whole terminal was done out in probably what some people would call ‘post-modern’. But at least the windows were huge, even if the runway and tarmac were totally deserted.

  So, anyway, we sat and we waited. And we sat and we waited, and the departure time for our six-seater came and went. Then eventually we heard a plane. As the plane landed and taxied to the terminal, we read ‘Royal Flying Doctor Service’ on the side of it. Of course, this obviously wasn’t our Broome service. Anyhow, the instant the engines died a young woman dressed in uniform jumped out of the plane and she started running towards the terminal. At seeing her urgency and sensing an emergency, I went over to meet her at the gateway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but we’re the only people here, except for the bloke in the Control Tower.’

  ‘No worries,’ she said, ‘I’m just busting for a piss.’ And she keep on running, straight towards the toilet.

  So I went and sat back down again. Then she emerged a little later, looking far more relaxed, and she walked sedately over to us.

  ‘So where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Broome,’ we said.

  ‘Bad luck,’ she said, ‘
we’re heading the other way.’

  ‘Oh,’ we said.

  Then she said, ‘See yer later then,’ and rushed back out to the RFDS plane, jumped back in, and they took off.

  Speared

  Well, I joined the Flying Doctor Service in 1989. That was as a pilot out at Meekatharra, which is in the central west of Western Australia. Then, after about six months at Meekatharra, in early May 1990 I went to work up at their Port Hedland base. I stayed at Port Hedland then for thirteen years, until 2003, and oh, we loved it there. We had a young family and it was such a good, safe place to bring up kids. We also loved camping so there was lots of bush trips and travelling around the Pilbara and the Kimberley. The Gibb River Road’s one of my favourite places in Australia. Actually, I think we’ve done the Gibb River Road about six times and I reckon there’s still more to see. Fabulous country up that way. In fact, just about my whole flying career has taken place throughout the tropical areas of Australia. You know, northern Western Australia right across to northern Queensland.

  But as far as stories go, you always sort of have your favourites, don’t you? One that I think was quite amusing in an odd sort of way — well, both sad and amusing, I guess — happened at Jigalong Aboriginal Community. Jigalong’s about 120 kilometres east of the mining town of Newman, in central Western Australia.

  Anyhow, once every two or three years the Aborigines conduct what’s called Law Ceremonies. Now, these Law Ceremonies happen when all the various communities from within the wider area gather together in a designated community and, along with a lot of celebrations, the Elders review events since the last get-together. So they’d do things like the initiations with the young boys who haven’t yet been initiated, and also they’d deal out the tribal punishment for any misdemeanours or whatever that may have occurred over the last couple of years or so. So you could do something wrong and then you might have to wait for a year or more before you got punished, in the appropriate law time.

  On this particular occasion there’d been a car roll over and two passengers had been killed and so the driver of the vehicle was brought before the Elders. The Elders listened to what had happened and deemed that it was the driver’s fault for causing the deaths of the two others. So he had to be punished and the Elders said that his punishment was to be a stabbing in the thigh, by a spear.

  So a few men grabbed hold of the bloke who’d been driving the car and they held him as still as they could, ready to receive the punishment. But apparently the driver bloke was wriggling and turning and writhing around so much that the enforcer of the punishment clean missed his mark and he ended up spearing the driver bloke in the lower abdomen instead of the thigh.

  That’s when we got an emergency call to go out there to Jigalong Community to pick up the bloke who’d been speared. The only trouble was that, unfortunately, it’d been raining heavily over the area for the past week or so and there was no way we could land the aeroplane on Jigalong airstrip.

  But, seeing that it was an emergency, they arranged to charter a helicopter from Karratha. The helicopter was then flown up to Newman and we took the RFDS aeroplane down from Port Hedland, where we all got into the helicopter and we flew out from Newman to Jigalong. Along with the helicopter pilot we took the normal complement of RFDS staff, which was a doctor, the nurse and myself.

  And so we went out in the chartered helicopter and landed at the local oval, at Jigalong Community, and they brought out the poor guy who’d been inadvertently speared in the lower abdomen. We quickly laid him on the stretcher, put him onto the helicopter and took him back to Newman. The helicopter then headed back to Karratha and we put the speared bloke into the RFDS aeroplane and flew him back to Port Hedland, where he was going to be treated.

  Then we’d only just arrived back in Port Hedland when we got another call asking us to return to Jigalong Community. Apparently, what happened was that the Elders had gone and handed out another punishment and that person had been speared, this time in the thigh. Anyhow, I think that in the end they decided that this new bloke’s wounds weren’t quite bad enough to warrant us going through the whole procedure again. You know — of chartering another helicopter to fly out there and for us to fly down to Newman, and all that. I mean, the cost was astronomical. I’d estimate that just that one retrieval cost would’ve been well over $30 000.

  But the irony of the whole thing was that we later found out that the second call for us to return to Jigalong Community was to pick up the bloke who’d inadvertently stuffed up the first spearing. Apparently the Elders deemed that he should be punished for being such a poor shot.

  Stroke

  I’ve got a couple of stories about sort of strokes here, if you like. Well, for a few seasons I worked out at Mulga Downs Station, cooking for the jackeroos and all that. Mulga Downs is just north of Wittenoom, in northern Western Australia. Anyhow, I had a little medical knowledge — not much, but a little — and one time I was out there and the station manager’s wife came and woke me up in the middle of the night. ‘My husband’s having a stroke,’ she said.

  Well, she thought he was having a stroke, anyway. So I went over to the homestead and the manager was lying on the bed with his legs crossed. To my thinking that didn’t really look like he was having a stroke. But he said that he had all these spots in front of his eyes and when he’d tried to get up to go to the toilet he couldn’t walk. He was also in terrible pain and was feeling sick in the stomach.

  Anyway, I called the Flying Doctor base in at Port Hedland and the doctor there asked if I could give the manager an injection of Stemetil, out of the homestead’s RFDS medical chest, and also some pethidine if necessary. Stemetil is what you have for nausea. Pethidine is for the pain. So I gave the manager an injection of Stemetil, which seemed to settle him down a bit. I didn’t want to give him the pethidine just then, because I knew it’d mask the cause of whatever his pain was and that’d only make the doctor’s diagnosis more difficult. So I kept the pethidine with me in my hand, but only to use if necessary, as I thought it’d be better to try and wait until the doctor came and had a good look at him.

  Now, because Mulga Downs only had a small airstrip which could only be used during the day, the Flying Doctor suggested that they meet us out at the Auski Roadhouse. The Auski Roadhouse is on the Great Northern Highway between Newman and Port Hedland. They had an airstrip near the roadhouse there, where the Flying Doctor could land at night. So we rang the Auski Roadhouse to let them know what was going on and asked if they could get somebody to go out and light the lamps along the airstrip. We then loaded the crook manager into the vehicle and drove him the 40 or so kilometres from Mulga Downs to the Auski Roadhouse.

  Anyway, the Flying Doctor arrived at Auski and they took him straight back to Port Hedland. But as it turned out, what the manager had was a severe migraine. So it wasn’t a stroke, it was a severe migraine. Then the next day, the manager’s wife had to go over to Port Hedland and bring him home, and he was okay after that.

  Now, to the next story about a stroke, and this was a real stroke. Again I was working out at Mulga Downs Station. The station manager and his wife were going on holiday and they’d organised for their homestead to be painted while they were away. So they asked if I’d come out a little earlier than usual that season and cook for the house painter plus Arthur, the guy who was looking after the windmills, while they went on holidays. That was fine by me and I headed out to Mulga Downs.

  For the life of me I can’t recall his name just now, but anyhow, there was the painter, Arthur and myself. That’s all. It was stinking hot and the three of us were staying in the one cottage because it was the one that had cooling. Then early one morning, around four o’clock, I got woken up by the painter feller banging on my wall. ‘Get Arthur,’ he was calling out. ‘Get Arthur, I’ve had a stroke.’

  Luckily, he could still talk. So I went in to check on him and there he was, lying on the floor, paralysed down one side. I then went and woke Arthur up and he c
ame in and looked after the painter while I went over to the homestead and called the Flying Doctor. They said that it’d take two hours for them to fly from Port Hedland, out to the small airstrip at Mulga Downs, and pick up this painter feller.

  With that done I went back to the cottage to see how the painter was getting on and, oh, he was really worried because he said that he had all his money stashed away in his car. You know how pensioners save up their money; like they put it under the mattress and in odd places like that. Well, this bloke had all his money hidden in his car and he wanted me to go and get it for him, which I did. It was a fair bit of cash too: in the thousands. So it was a lot of money.

  When I came back, I gave the money to the painter. ‘Thanks,’ he said, but, by now, he wasn’t looking too well at all; his condition had deteriorated.

  Anyhow, I took over looking after him then, while Arthur went and cleaned out the back of a ute so that we could fit the stretcher in. It was just on daylight by now and we knew that the Flying Doctor wouldn’t be too far away. So we loaded the painter in the back of the ute and we went down to the airstrip. The kangaroos were particularly bad just on dawn and so the next thing we had to do was to drive up and down the airstrip in an attempt to scare them off. By that stage the painter was going from bad to worse. He kept stopping breathing on me, and even more worrying was that I could see that his hand was clenching. That’s a bad sign. So while Arthur was driving up and down the airstrip, I just had to sit there in the back of the ute, continually wiping the painter’s face with a wet cloth in an attempt to at least keep him comfortable.