The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2 page)

The William Creek Races has to be the best kept secret in Australia. It’s a real true-blue bush event. Seriously good fun with a dash of alcohol. What’s more, it’s a great fundraiser for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, held on the first weekend in April at Anna Creek Station, about eleven hours north of Adelaide.

The scene is, ‘You bring your swags, we’ve got the nags.’ That’s because all the horses and camels are provided by Anna Creek Station. Along with the races it’s a gymkhana affair. No bookies allowed. There’s the Dick Nunn Memorial Cup, the William Creek Cup, plus all the gymkhana events — thread the needle, barrel races, and so on.

Community Service Groups, along with other volunteers, come from all over to donate their time and energy into helping put the weekend on. Ten dollars a day allows you to eat as much as you can. And when I say ‘as much as you can’, I mean it that way. Because if you can get it down your throat without choking, then you can eat as much as you like.

Because, I tell you what, some of that beef’s bloody tough. Again, it’s all donated and mainly from the next-door neighbour’s property, I might add. It’s cheaper that way. Why donate your own when it’s just as easy to donate the bloke-next-door’s? But that’s the way it is out there. Things are tight. So tight, in fact, rumour has it that the only thing a local will give you is a handshake and a homing pigeon. But, mind you,
they’re pretty amazing when it comes to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. That’s a different matter.

The big day is the Sunday. Before then, the horses and camels are put up for auction and everyone spends up big trying to buy something that might win one of the fifteen to twenty events for the day. Up for grabs are prizes and ribbons. The owners of the winning horse or camel are supposed to keep the prizes and the jockeys the ribbons but it usually happens the other way around. The jockeys in this case are mostly station people, jackaroos and jillaroos, or anyone who can sling a leg over a horse or camel.

And these young riders don’t hold back. Not on your life. They go as hard as they can, so hard in fact that they sometimes get injured. So you’re up there raising money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service and you have to get the Royal Flying Doctor Service to fly up to collect these people. The airstrip’s graded, flares set up, kerosene tins alight, so the plane can land at night and take someone who’s injured back to Port Augusta.

I remember the time in particular when one young stockman came a real cropper. The horse shied just past the finishing post. Down come this bloke. Thump. He hit the ground like a bucket of spuds and just laid there. Motionless he was. For about five or ten minutes he didn’t move a muscle and things looked real crook.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ the cry went up.

Being a Royal Flying Doctor Service event there were plenty of doctors about but they’d all had a beer or two or three by that stage and the last thing they wanted was to face headlines reading ‘Drunken Doctor Attends to Injured Rider’. So all these doctors gathered around the injured stockman. Cumulatively, well
over a couple of hundred years of medical expertise was then proffered. ‘Don’t move him,’ said one. ‘Get a stretcher,’ suggested someone else. ‘Check his pulse,’ came a voice. ‘Is his windpipe clear?’ another asked. ‘At least get an umbrella over the bloke or he’ll fry in this heat,’ suggested yet another doctor. ‘We’ll have to get the RFDS up,’ said another. ‘Good idea,’ half agreed. ‘I don’t know so much,’ the other half said. ‘There must be something we can do.’

It was while this verbal medical consultation was taking place that the young stockman’s workmate, a big bloke he was, staggered out of the bar. ‘Where’s me mate Clancy?’ he asked, to which someone pointed over to the gaggle of doctors standing around a prostrate figure.

So this bloke came in search of his mate. He walked over, pushed the medicos aside, took a look at his mate, and shouted ‘Get off yer big fat arse, Clancy, yer nothin’ but a lazy bastard.’ But still Clancy didn’t move. So this bloke gave him a swift boot in the bum. Thwack. In response, Clancy gave a couple of twists, woke up, got to his feet, dusted himself off, then he and his mate staggered back to the bar, arm in arm, leaving the gathering of doctors to marvel at the effectiveness of simple bush medical treatment.

Then there’s the story about Phantom and his Pommie bride, Alison Tucker. How that came about was that Alison had been hitch-hiking around Australia when she ended up at the William Creek pub. Don’t ask me why. It could have been fate because it was there that Phantom, the manager of Hamilton Station, caught her eye, wooed her, won her, and six months later they got married at the finish post during the William Creek Races.

A big ado that was, the full ceremony, the whole shooting match. Father Tony Redden from Coober Pedy got special permission to carry out the wedding. The William Creek Race organising committee programmed the event between the fourteenth and fifteenth race or something. Everyone was invited to attend.

Phantom called on his two best mates to be his best men, so you wouldn’t reckon that there were too many secrets there. They’d all been knocking around together for years. Anyhow, when the moment arrived the three of them appeared at the top of the straight like gunslingers, dressed in black Stetsons, full black tails, waistcoats, fob watches, new RM Williams boots and cigars, the lot. It looked like something out of Gunfight at the OK Corral, especially when the wind picked up from the south-east.

As these blokes strode down the straight, everyone fell silent. You could even hear the pig sizzling away on a spit out the back. It’d been donated, a wedding gift, no doubt one of the bloke-next-door’s pigs. Then as the male wedding party neared the finish post the bride and her bridesmaids arrived on the track in a Peugeot driven by the then head of the Flying Doctor Service from Port Augusta, Vin O’Brien. It was daubed with ribbons. Immaculate, it was.

Alison, who’d dressed in the William Creek pub, stepped from the Peugeot, out into the dirt, dust and flies. She looked stunning: an absolute peachy English bride, wearing a full-length wedding outfit with a parasol to boot.

Seeing as Phantom was a pretty popular bloke around the area, the ceremony had been organised to go over the loudspeaker system. So when Phantom
and his mates reached the bride and bridesmaids, Father Tony stepped to the microphone and began the ceremony. Everything was going well until the Father got to the part where he read out their names… ‘Do you Mark Spears take Alison Tucker to be your lawfully wedded wife?’ he said.

At that point the service ground to a halt. There was a gasp from the outer audience. Phantom went a bright red. The bride went white with shock.

The wind dropped. The flies ceased flying. The bridesmaids turned to each other with questioning looks. The bride did the same at her bridesmaids. The bridesmaids looked questioningly at Phantom’s best men. They gave a shrug. They didn’t have a clue. Then everyone turned to the groom.

In his embarrassed state, Phantom leaned over to the Father. ‘Excuse me, Father,’ he said, ‘but no one around here knows me by that name.’

‘Not even the bride?’ enquired Father Tony.

‘Nope. Especially not the bride.’

Then Father Tony, always the professional, took up from where he left off and he said… ‘Mark Spears, who’ll be from here on known as Phantom, do you take Alison Tucker as your lawfully wedded wife?’

‘Yep,’ said Phantom.

‘Yep, I do,’ said Alison.

Then, apart from the odd smirk or two from his mates and a bit of ribbing from the outer, the remainder of the ceremony went off like a dream.

Like I said, in the days before the Royal Flying Doctor Service was set up here in Tasmania, back in about 1960, basically the only aircraft that were available for evacuations from the Bass Strait islands and other remote areas were aircraft owned by the state’s two major Aero Clubs. Those clubs were the Tasmanian Aero Club, which was based at Launceston, and the Aero Club of Southern Tasmania, based at Hobart.

Now I wasn’t ever a commercial pilot and I’ve never flown for the Flying Doctor Service, as such. I was just a private pilot who flew out of our local Launceston club back in those early days. The aircraft we were using at the time was the single-engine Auster J5 Autocar, which was a small four-seater fabric aircraft.

But the most heart-wrenching trip I ever made was after a couple of children had been severely burnt, out on one of the islands. These kids got inside a car and were playing with matches or whatever. There they were, mucking about, when the vehicle exploded in flames, leaving them trapped inside. So we got the call during the night and I think it might’ve been Reg Munro, our Chief Flying Instructor, who flew out and brought the children back to the Launceston Hospital.

Anyway, the following day I went over to the island to pick up the children’s mother. Now just before I took off I heard that one of the kids had died. The problem was that, when I picked the mother up, it was obvious that she hadn’t yet been informed about the death. To
remind you, I was just doing the job as a private pilot through the Aero Club so it wasn’t really up to me to inform her that her son had just passed away.

But, God, I felt for that poor woman.

I reckon that there’d be nothing worse than to lose one of your own children, especially one as young as that little feller was. So there I was flying this woman back to Launceston, knowing that her child had just died, and knowing that she hadn’t yet been told about the death. And there she was sitting in the plane with me, full of a mother’s concern, full of a mother’s hope, full of a mother’s love.

I wasn’t working at the time so the only company I had at home, apart from the kids that is, was a little transistor radio. Now in saying that, there wasn’t much to listen to around Broome in those days, other than Radio Australia. So what I used to do was to tune into the Royal Flying Doctor base and listen to all the telegrams, and the gossip, and in particular to the medical schedules.

The reason why I kept such a close ear out for the medical schedules was that my husband, Tony, was the Flying Doctor, and by listening in on the tranny I was able to find out when, and if, Tony was coming home. Now that might sound like a strange way of going about things but quite often he got so caught up in what he was doing that he didn’t have the time to give me a ring. I mean, he might go out to a station to attend some emergency or other during the morning and end up in Perth later that night, and what’s more have to stay there for a couple of days or more. You just didn’t know what was going to happen. But that’s how the life of a Flying Doctor was, and we adjusted to it.

A prime example was the time the RFDS pilot Jan Ende flew over from the Derby base with the Flight Sister, Rhonda, to pick up Tony and go out on routine clinics around the area. They’d had a very quiet morning and Jan was flying the plane back to Broome to drop Tony off before heading back to Derby. Anyway, I was listening in on my tranny when I heard
an emergency call come through. A major car accident had occurred between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek.

As it turned out, what had happened was that two elderly couples were travelling in opposite directions, one coming from Darwin, the other going to Darwin. There were four or five people involved altogether. I can’t remember exactly. The road wasn’t in the best of conditions, which was something that I knew for a fact because Tony and I had recently travelled over that stretch and we’d smashed the cross member of our vehicle. That’s how rough it was. It was dirt, of course, corrugated, with lots of potholes and bulldust.

Anyway, one of the cars had been stuck behind a road train for a fair distance. Then when they reached the only straight stretch between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek the driver thought, ‘Well, it’s now or never.’ He put his headlights on, pulled out to overtake the road train and, wham, drove straight into an oncoming car.

Of course, with so much dust about, the truck driver didn’t even notice what had happened and he continued on his way. It was only when a couple of blokes from the Department of Main Roads came along that the accident was discovered. Now, luckily, there was a radio in the Main Roads vehicle and that’s when the Flying Doctor base at Derby was alerted.

So there I was, sitting in Broome listening to this drama unfolding over my tranny. I could hear the base talking. I could hear Jan and Tony in the plane. The manager from Christmas Creek Station had also arrived at the scene and I could hear him talking. They were all in contact.

It was a chilling experience, I can tell you. But the thing that I was most concerned about was just how Jan thought he was going to put the plane down on that rough and relatively short stretch of road. What’s more, the plane he was flying was a Queen Air, and a Queen Air needed about 3000 feet of straight strip to land and take off.

So I was getting quite worried listening to all this drama. Terribly worried, to be honest. So much so that it eventually got the better of me, and that’s when I rang Jan’s wife, Penny, who was a flight nurse sister back at the base, to see how she was bearing up.

‘Well,’ she said, as cool as a cucumber, ‘there’s nothing I can do about it. The best we can do is just hope.’

By that stage, some details had been radioed through about the condition of the accident victims and Jan flew the Queen Air on to Broome so that Tony could pick up whatever medical supplies he thought might be required. Meanwhile, the manager from Christmas Creek Station and the Main Roads people had blocked the ends of the straight section of road and, as vehicles were forced to stop, they got the people out to help knock down ant hills and clear the stones off the road in preparation for the plane to land.

So Tony picked up the medical supplies from Broome and they flew out to the accident scene. When they arrived Jan did a low pass-over, to check the situation out. Things didn’t look good. One of the vehicles had its engine smashed back into the driver’s compartment. The other wasn’t much better off. What’s more, the road looked a bit iffy for landing on account of both its condition and its lack of length.

Anyway, even though Jan had to negotiate some short shrubbery on his way in, he still managed to put the plane down safely. Then Tony and Rhonda set to and attended the injured. And they did a wonderful job. They really did. Especially given the conditions — the heat, the dust, the flies — and taking into account that a couple of hours had passed since the accident had occurred. And under all those external pressures they didn’t miss a diagnosis: fractured hips and fractured ribs, dislocations, punctured lungs, the lot. Of course, that’s excluding the usual head and body injuries and so forth that go with such a horrific collision. What’s more, all the accident victims survived.

But there was still one major hurdle to overcome. With so many people being injured, there was no possible way that they could fly everyone out in the Queen Air. Now, as luck would have it, the Army was conducting manoeuvres in the area and they had a Pilatus aircraft. Now the Pilatus is just a small thing so it could only evacuate two of the injured, three at a pinch. But it had one great advantage over the Queen Air in that it was a short landing/take-off plane which made it ideal for those sorts of conditions.

By the time the Pilatus arrived, about half an hour later, Tony and Rhonda had all the patients organised and ready to be flown out. Then, lo and behold, who should jump off the army plane, none other than one of Tony’s old mates from his medical student days. But this was no time for grand reunions, not on your life. It was a quick handshake, a hello, then they got stuck into loading the patients into both the planes.

Now, as I said, the Pilatus was a short landing/take-off aircraft so it got out with no problem at all.
Now came the scary bit. The Queen Air had needed every inch of the road-strip to land and, with the extra weight of the patients, things looked grim. As Jan prepared for take-off he calculated that he needed to reach a speed of at least 90 knots just to get the thing off the ground.

‘Here we go,’ Jan said to Tony.

Then he gunned it, and they went thundering down the road. The trouble was that by the time he got to 70 knots they were rapidly running out of straight road.

‘Jan,’ Tony asked, ‘do you reckon we’ll make it?’

‘A piece o’ piss,’ replied Jan.

But Tony reckoned that Jan wasn’t looking anywhere near as confident as he sounded. He’d gone a fearful whitish-grey colour. His face had set like concrete. He was sweating profusely, and his eyes had taken on a fixed glassy stare.

‘Go, you bastard, go!’ Jan called, and gunned that Queen Air like it’d never been gunned before.

At 75 knots Tony knew that they were done for. At 85 knots they’d run out of road. That’s when Tony ducked for cover. Then as Jan attempted to lift the plane off the ground there came the horrible crunching sound of the propellers cutting the low shrubbery to shreds.

The next Tony knew, they were in the air.

‘There,’ called Jan. ‘I told you so. A piece o’ piss.’