The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories

by Bill Marsh

  Then, no doubt you’ve heard many stories about having to clear the airstrip of stock such as horses, cattle or sheep, and, of course, there’s the ones about kangaroos or emus hopping in front of the aeroplane and being chopped up. But I very much doubt if you’ve heard of anything like this happening: late one afternoon we took off from the Aboriginal settlement of Kowanyama to go to Pormpuraaw settlement, where we were to run another clinic. Pormpuraaw would only be half an hour’s flight from Kowanyama, maybe less. Anyhow, we were up at about 1500 feet, doing the circuit area of Kowanyama, when there came this terrible bang!. Oh, I can tell you, it shook up everyone in the aircraft, me included.

  Then, when I looked out the starboard or the right-hand side of the aircraft there, much to my surprise, I saw the backside of an eagle. On further investigation, the rest of his body was embedded in the leading edge of the wing. The poor thing had been happily freewheeling through a beautiful day, not looking where it was going, and the next thing, bang, it’d flown into the wing of the aeroplane, and that’s where it stuck. As you might imagine, the wind resistance caused by this body being embedded in the wing disrupted the airflow, which in turn caused the aircraft to veer to the right. There was no hope for the poor bird I’m afraid but, luckily, still being in the circuit area, I decided to land back at Kowanyama, which I did safely and much to the relief of everyone on board. A number of photos were then taken of this magnificent bird, which had a wing-span of over 8 feet.

  But of course not all the things that happened were caused by external influences. Some disasters happened on board. Such an event I remember only too well. We were called to Killarney Station, in the centre of Cape York, to evacuate a seventeen-year-old who’d broken his ankle while riding a motor bike. It turned out that the lad was the nephew of the owners and was out there holidaying from town. And this young ‘townie’ had primed himself to the absolute for his ‘bush holiday’ by giving his image a complete ‘manly’ overhaul. Oh, this lad was dressed in all his new, and obviously expensive, gear, which was obviously much prized by the lad; you know, the flash RM Williams riding boots, the moleskin trousers, the checked bush shirt, the lot.

  Anyhow, after we arrived the doctor wanted to examine the broken ankle. But because of the swelling they were unable to remove the boot so they had to cut off the expensive RMs. That was the first dent to the lad’s new, and expensive, image. Then after his RMs had been cut off, the doctor wanted to get a decent look at the other injuries, so then the precious trousers were cut off. Apart from being in considerable pain the patient was now also severely distressed at realising that this ‘manly’ image of his was being slowly cut from him and that his ‘bush holiday’ was coming to a rapid and disastrous end. But more was to follow. Because, amid much screaming, the lad was finally settled onto the stretcher and loaded onto the plane. Then, as we took off for our two-hour flight, the young frightened patient called out, ‘I’m gonna shit myself.’

  ‘No, you’ll be all right,’ replied the extremely patient doctor.

  ‘I won’t,’ came the loud cry from the lad, as the most shocking smell pervaded the cabin of the aircraft.

  ‘Bush holiday’ well and truly over. ‘Manly’ image completely and utterly destroyed.

  Through a Child’s Eyes

  Now, here’s a little ditty for you, and one that’s quite cute in its way. It’s all to do with how people see things, children in particular. This happened on Killarney Station, which is somewhat north of the Pinnacles, in Queensland, around the Cape York Peninsula region. Now, the people from Killarney Station and the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland had just arranged for the RFDS to begin flying in there on a regular basis to run medical clinics. So, of course, we’d never been to Killarney before. Anyway, we’d arranged that our aircraft was to come into the station, I think it was at something like ten o’clock in the morning, on such-and-such a day.

  Anyhow, all during the day before we were due to fly out there, and even more so as it got towards nightfall, the family from Killarney were getting pretty excited about our arrival, especially the daughter, who was a young girl of about eleven years of age. So, as the day progressed into night her excitement about the grand occasion built to such an extent that she was almost beside herself. If you could imagine, it was a bit like the grand anticipation of Father Christmas coming the next day. She was forever asking her parents, ‘When’s the Flying Doctor coming?’ and ‘How long will it be before the Flying Doctor gets here?’

  Now, how they finally got the girl to bed on the night before our arrival, I don’t know. And I don’t think she even slept a wink. That’s how excited she was at the prospect of seeing the Flying Doctor arrive. Then she was up and dressed at about six o’clock the next morning, and wanting to go down to the airstrip.

  ‘Look,’ her mother said, ‘just leave it a while.’

  Anyway, the young girl left it to about eight o’clock, until she could wait no longer, and so then she wandered down to the airstrip by herself, there to stand gazing up into the skies. At about 9.45 am the mother came down to join her. And the little girl, you know, by this stage she could hardly control herself at the prospect of the Flying Doctor arriving. It was just beyond her.

  So the mother and the daughter, there they are, the seconds ticking by and they’re looking into the heavens in great anticipation. Then as ten o’clock approached they see this tiny, little speck in the sky and, just at the sight of this speck, this little girl’s eyes are becoming the size of saucers. She’s just so excited. ‘Look, Mummy. Look, Mummy,’ she calls, ‘it’s the Flying Doctor.’

  Then as this little speck gradually gets larger and larger and the aeroplane comes more clearly into sight, the little girl’s mouth falls open and she looks at her mother in great disgust and disbelief and she grumbles, ‘That’s not the Flying Doctor, Mummy. It can’t be. That’s just an ordinary old aeroplane.’

  And so, in her childlike imagination, this little girl truly believed that the Flying Doctor was a real doctor, with wings and all, who was going to fly into Killarney Station. And of course Howard William Steer, the great artist of Broken Hill, always paints the Flying Doctor that way: depicting a person, with wings attached, flying through the sky, holding the doctor’s bag.

  Too Close

  I’ve been with the Flying Doctor Service for nineteen years now and, even still, it’s very difficult at times to separate the nurse part of you from the heart and soul person. I guess a good example of that would be when there was a big bus accident out of Coober Pedy, the opal mining place up in the north of South Australia. A group of kids were on a school excursion from Melbourne and about thirty or forty of them were taken to Coober Pedy which, of course, overwhelmed their hospital’s resources. Now, I’m not sure just how many injured kids we ended up ferrying out to Adelaide, but we had three aeroplanes working up there. They even flew a plane over from Broken Hill to help out on that one, too. So, it was a big accident.

  But in cases like that you always feel for the parents, because no matter how hard you try, sometimes you just can’t neglect the mother inside you. And the thing that got to me was that these Melbourne kids were the same age as my own children. And there they were, they’d gone off on a fun school holiday, like most kids do, but, yeah, they ended up in an horrific accident like that. Oh, there were a lot of routine injuries but there were also a few really critically serious ones as well.

  So yeah, it took me a long time to come to terms with that. Though an odd thing happened about that accident because some years later, after we’d moved down to Adelaide, I did an interview for a local newspaper and during that interview they asked me, ‘What’s been the worst thing you’ve ever been involved in?’ So I mentioned that accident, out at Coober Pedy, and I told them why. Then the night after the newspaper article came out there was a knock on my front door and it was the young lady who owned the house across the road from us.

  ‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘I was one of the kids
who were involved in that bus accident.’

  So yeah, that was great, because she told me how some of them had got on and what they were doing, further down the track. So you never know, do you? She was a virtual stranger, just someone you’d say ‘hello’ to in the street or whatever, and she turned out to be one of the kids we helped that particular night out at Coober Pedy.

  But no, to be honest, you don’t always survive emotionally intact. Sometimes you’re just too close to it all and you get very hurt. Really, one of the reasons I left Port Augusta was that I was starting to pick up people I knew. Some I’d even known when they were babies and I’d seen them grow up, and that was devastating because sometimes they’d suffered indescribable injuries and sometimes they were even killed. So, yes, it became hard, very hard.

  Another accident that I found quite emotionally difficult started out when we were on our way up to Mintabie one time. Originally that was for a routine pick-up so we didn’t have a doctor with us, because on the more straightforward trips like that you don’t need one. So there was just the pilot and myself and we were diverted to Oodnadatta, which is north of Coober Pedy. There’d been a vehicle roll over involving eight people and they were being brought into town by locals, just as we landed. Anyhow, it turned out to be a family that both my husband and I knew very well. Some had even been at school with our children.

  But what made it even more difficult was that, other than having to deal with the emotions of knowing these people, basically, to start with there was just myself and two other nurses, plus a man and a woman from Oodnadatta, to attend to these eight people. And a number of them were critically injured and one died before any other help arrived.

  Anyhow, we worked on these people for three hours before a retrieval team got in Oodnadatta. The retrieval doctor on that occasion was Fred Gilligan. Fred was lovely. He was just wonderful. As it transpires he went on to be a board member of the RFDS. Yeah, he’s just a darling. I fell in love with him that night.

  But as you might be able to imagine, with only the three of us there to start with, trying to deal with eight critical patients, stuck out in the bush in a small ‘cottage-hospital’ well, we were under a huge amount of stress and pressure. We had no X-rays, we had nothing, and we were trying to do the very best we possibly could. So you couldn’t really expect us to give the same care as a large city hospital would.

  But obviously that’s what they expected down in Adelaide. Because after we’d got to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and handed our patients over, I walked outside and discovered that some of the paperwork or something was still in my pocket. Of course, you wouldn’t do that these days. But anyway, when I went back to hand it in, one of the Adelaide doctors was going on to Fred Gilligan about the level of care that the patients had received, pre-hospital. And, on top of everything else, what with knowing these people and working under almost impossible conditions, that really hurt, you know. Really hurt.

  But Fred stuck up for us. He told them straight out, ‘You just have no idea what you’re talking about. This was an absolutely horrific accident and those people were working in the most unbelievably difficult conditions.’

  So I just thought, ‘Good on you, Fred. I love you. At least you understand what it’s like.’

  Watch What You Say

  Just off the bat, I tell you what: you’ve got to be very, very careful what you say when you’re around people who are unconscious, because they can recall things. It’s like when someone’s in a coma. The best thing to do is to just sit there and chat away to them because quite often, on some subconscious level or other, they can hear you. In cases like that, it’s beneficial to the patient. Then, of course, within the Flying Doctor Service there’s the other side to it where, particularly if there’s been an accident or if there’s a fatality where a child is involved, you just don’t talk about it anywhere around anyone who’s unconscious, especially if it happens to be the parents.

  But one, which was a bit of a scream, was when a pilot of ours was doing a retrieval out of Peterborough, in central South Australia. It could’ve been a road accident, though I’m not sure. But it was out of the old Peterborough airstrip and he was flying the Chieftain and by the time they were ready to take off, he had quite a load. You know, on a trip like that there’s not only the retrieval team and the patient but they also carry a lot of extra gear.

  Anyhow, the patient was unconscious and because the pilot had so much weight on board, even though he’d done all his calculations, he was still just a little concerned that he didn’t have quite enough airstrip to take off. Like, he was sure but not quite 110 per cent sure, if you catch my meaning. And so as he was starting to roll down the runway, this pilot turned back to the retrieval team and he remarked, pretty much tongue-in-cheek, ‘When I yell out, I want you all to take a deep breath so I can get this thing airborne.’

  Anyway, later on in hospital, when the patient gained consciousness, some part of him remembered that remark. And when he made enquiries he was told that, yes, in fact the Peterborough airstrip wasn’t the most suitable for a retrieval like that and the Flying Doctor Service had mentioned the situation to the authorities, and his particular case was mentioned. Then, after he recovered, he was so grateful to the RFDS that he was the one who instigated the airstrip being moved to a better location and he was also the one responsible for it getting lengthened. I think the old one used to be north-east of Peterborough, out near the meatworks, and the new one’s to the south of Peterborough. So that was one of the rare cases where the spoken word around an unconscious patient actually did do some good.

  Then I had an incident with a nurse once. It didn’t turn out funny, but I thought it was at the moment, though maybe that’s just because of my odd sense of ‘pilot’s’ humour. I went to Kadina one time with a nurse. It was in the Chieftain again. So we took off, then, because I couldn’t get the green light to come on to give the okay that all was right with the main undercarriage, I decided to return to Adelaide. Really, in a situation like that, in your mind you’re fully convinced that it’s simply a micro-switch fault. But of course if the worst came to the worst and we did have undercarriage problems, well, it was best to come back to Adelaide and land, because Adelaide Airport has all the fire facilities and the emergency services and so forth.

  Anyhow, as we were coming back to Adelaide, coming in to land on runway one and two, from the Gulf, I briefed the nurse on the evacuation of the aircraft. See, as the pilot, it’s your job to calm everyone down so they can deal with the emergency. Then, once they’re calm, you can go about briefing yourself so that you’re also better able to deal with the situation.

  But anyway, this nurse kept on asking me question after question and I was getting to the stage where I could hardly think myself. Then as we were coming in on final landing and we were getting in on short-final landing, she said, ‘What’s the worst that could possibly happen here?’

  By this time I was getting a little bit sick of all these queries so I replied in a more or less flippant manner, ‘Well, the worst thing that could happen is that we crash and burn.’

  She just fell into complete silence then and I didn’t think any more about it because I was concentrating on the job at hand. So we landed and everything went okay and I taxied back to the hangar and went and spoke to the engineers about the problem. After I’d finished doing that, another pilot came up to me and said, ‘What did you do, or say, to the nurse? She’s down in the back room in tears.’

  And I said, ‘Oh God, sorry. I know what it is. I told her that we were going to “crash and burn”.’

  So I had to go down and console her about it. But, you see, I said it straight off the bat. As a pilot, during your training you’re taught to focus in an emergency and delete any of those unnecessary peripheral interferences. So it meant nothing to me, you know, but she asked the question and in the worst case scenario that was the worst thing that could possibly happen — that we would ‘crash and burn’. I mean,
naturally you don’t want that to happen. But, anyway, that’s what I said and she took it very seriously.

  So you do have to be careful what you say around people, even if they are conscious. And, off the top of my head, that’s all I can think of at the moment.

  West of the Cooper

  There was an old grazier; for the sake of the story we’ll call him Arthur. Well, old Arthur lived out west of the Cooper, around the border area of south-western Queensland and north-eastern South Australia. The name of the station just escapes me for the moment so we’ll just stick with ‘west of the Cooper’.

  Now, what you’ve got to realise here is that a lot of these old fellers who live out in those remote parts of this wide brown land of ours have probably never been out of the bush. So you can imagine that some of them are probably not quite as academically educated as some of us. In fact, some of them can’t even read or write. Mind you, that doesn’t make them any less of a person. It’s just the way it is.

  But old Arthur had a cardiac condition and he needed to go and see a specialist, so I gave him a referral to go and see a specialist in Brisbane. Brisbane was the town of his choice. It wasn’t an emergency or anything, it was just routine, so he got on a commercial flight from Windorah and headed off to Brisbane. It was all a new experience for him because, firstly, I don’t think he’d ever been on a commercial aeroplane before and, secondly, to my recollection, he’d never been to Brisbane.

  When the specialist saw old Arthur, he reckoned that there wasn’t much more to be done other than what I’d already recommended he do. That was reassuring to me. But a few weeks later the specialist sent Arthur an account and on the account you’ve got the Medicare item number which was, we’ll say for argument’s sake, ‘Item number seventy-six’.