The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (20 page)

I guess I should clear something up first. Initially it was John Flynn’s idea to provide a Mantle of Safety, as he called it, for those living in outback and remote areas. To do that he established the Australian Inland Mission (AIM), which was part of the Presbyterian Church, and that organisation set up outback hospitals and sent out trained nurses and Patrol Padres, of which my father, Fred McKay, was one.

So, the AIM, as it became known, was instrumental in opening up a lot of the outback hospitals, which were staffed by trained nurses, who were recruited and sent out for two-year stints. Then the Flying Doctor Service was, in a way, established to work in conjunction with those services that the AIM and other outback-care organisations had set up. And those nurses relied on the Flying Doctor Service very heavily. Like the Flying Doctor would come and conduct medical clinics and everyone would turn up to see the doctor and, of course, the RFDS was available for emergency services like evacuations and so forth, as well. And, of course, that’s developed on a very big scale now. So the AIM and the RFDS were both instigated by Flynn and, even though they were run as two separate organisations, they were inextricably linked.

John Flynn’s title was Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission and, though I was too young to remember him personally, I would’ve met him when I was an infant. Then, when he died at the
end of 1951, Dad was appointed to take over. We were actually living in Brisbane at that stage so we shifted to Sydney, where the AIM’s Head Office was, and we moved into a home that had been provided by them for the Superintendent.

We’d been in Sydney for about a year and, I guess, things within the AIM were getting a bit rocky. There were financial difficulties and there were also problems within the Board. That’s no real secret there because it’s all been well documented. Of course, being only seven or something, I was too young to be aware of what was going on. But, apparently, it was getting to the point where the future of the Australian Inland Mission was in doubt so, when they were having difficulties getting staff at the Bush Mother’s Hostel in Adelaide House, out at Alice Springs, Mum (Meg McKay) offered her services as Matron. And she offered to do that for gratis.

So, really, we’d just got established at school in Sydney and were beginning to make friends and then we were, sort of, uprooted to go out to live in Alice Springs. Adelaide House had originally been a hospital but then, when they built a new hospital in Alice Springs, the AIM took over Adelaide House and John Flynn redesigned it with the wide verandahs and the natural air-conditioning system that uses the soil temperature underneath the building. That was quite revolutionary back then. So Adelaide House became what was called the Bush Mother’s Hostel and that was the place where mothers could come into Alice Springs before they had their babies at the local hospital. Then they could also convalesce there afterwards, before going back to their properties.

So, that was how we ended up in Alice Springs. I mean, we all thought it was a big adventure but, of course, Alice Springs wasn’t the town it is now. There were only about two or three thousand people living there back then and we lived in a small, square upstairs room in Adelaide House, which is in the main street, Todd Street.

At that stage there were three of us kids in the family: my brother, my elder sister and myself. So when Mum and Dad were there, it got pretty crammed at times with the five of us, all living together at the top of the building where we also had to deal with the extreme heat in the summer and the bitter cold of the winter. But, of course, Dad was still going backwards and forwards to Sydney. So it was basically just the four of us upstairs, with the outback ladies living downstairs and the other staff members. Jean Flynn was there for the first few months also.

But then, when they started building the John Flynn Church, on the vacant block next door, my father more or less returned to supervise that. So we watched the church being built, which was quite amazing because it also showed a lot of the Flying Doctor story. Out the front there’s the two wings, which symbolise a Flying Doctor plane. I mean, they really did an amazing job in designing and incorporating the entire story of John Flynn’s life and achievements into that building. So Dad was involved with the building of the church and I remember we had the architect staying with us a lot of the time, and what a very eccentric and funny man he was, too.

So we had two years in Alice Springs before we returned to Sydney. Then the following year, in 1956,
the AIM started up a home in Adelaide at the seaside suburb of Grange, where outback children could come and stay while they were receiving specialist medical treatment. Once again, my mother offered her services as matron and my brother and I went to live with her in Adelaide, while my elder sister, who was doing her Leaving Certificate, stayed in Sydney.

I remember that as a difficult and emotional year for everybody because the family was, sort of, split in two. Dad was off everywhere, but mostly based in Sydney. Mum, my brother and I were in Adelaide and my eldest sister was boarding with the neighbours in Sydney. Then somewhere in amongst all that my youngest sister was born. So I got another sister, and then at the end of 1956 we returned to Sydney and we were based in Sydney from then on.

But Mum and Dad, they were a real team, and a very committed team. Mum wasn’t nursing after we came back from Adelaide but, instead, she was going around and speaking to a lot of women’s groups and other organisations. The term they gave it was ‘Deputation Work’. It was more or less publicising the work of the AIM in conjunction with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and, I guess, seeking donations and support and manpower and just keeping the work in the minds of, mainly, the church people. So she was quite busy with her speaking engagements and whatnot.

And Dad, well, as Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, he spent a lot of time travelling around to the various outposts visiting the nursing staff and the various developments that were happening. Later on he’d do a lot of flying — some of it
with the RFDS — but in the earlier days he still drove. Sometimes he’d be away for anything up to a month or six weeks. So, we saw little of him and there were even Christmases when we never thought he’d make it back home.

I recall one particular Christmas when he was driving his truck, an International. We were living in the Sydney suburb of Northbridge then and from our front windows we could look out over the gully and see the traffic approaching. And I remember all us kids, full of excitement and anticipation, sitting at the windows watching and waiting for him to come home for Christmas.

So, yes, they were a very committed couple, especially to the work they were doing, and I think my father sort of missed out on the family a lot. But at every opportunity they’d try and make up for it. I mean, we never felt deprived or unloved or anything like that. It was just the area of service they were involved in. And of course, being kids we didn’t fully realise that we had to share our parents with a lot of other people and a very big space of country. So, yes, I guess we felt that we didn’t have them around enough. And also, with Dad not being there that much, it must’ve been hard for my mother. But when we did have time together, they both made a special effort. Holiday times were very memorable. Oh, we did some really wonderful things together as a family then.

Then, of course, they passed away pretty close to each other. We’d all grown up and had left home by then. But Dad passed away quite suddenly in 2000. It was unexpected. Our mother’s health had been
deteriorating for some time but, after Dad died, she sort of really went downhill. I think it was because they were such a team that, without him, she felt she really had very little more to offer. So she lost a lot of her sparkle, then she passed away in 2003.

Well, for a lot of years I’d been wanting to do a big trip because my grandfather had Clydesdales all his life. He did all the roads around Victoria, up around Kerang and that area. That was his lifetime job, and I sort of grew up with the horses there, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna do something one day.’ And I started thinking about it and I thought, ‘Oh well, while I’m doing it, it’d be good to do something helpful for somebody.’

Then, probably about ten years beforehand, I’d had a hernia after doing the Border Dash out on the Nullarbor. I was in a bit of a bad way there for a while and the RFDS flew out to the Nullarbor Roadhouse and they picked me up and they took me to Adelaide. Then they picked me up and flew me back again.

Now, with the Border Dash, I guess that I should explain that every year over on the Nullarbor they had, and still do have, I think, an event that they call the Border Dash. It’s also a fundraiser for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It started off as just a bit of an argument one night in the pub at Border Village when they reckoned one bloke couldn’t run the 12 kilometres from Border Village Roadhouse in South Australia, to Eucla Roadhouse, which is in Western Australia. So he ran it. Then the next year they said, ‘Oh well, you know, we might make this a yearly thing.’

So it became known as the Border Dash and, back when I got my hernia, it used to be a very friendly run. You know, you’d have a support vehicle driving along
beside you and there’d be a stubby of beer passing hands, here and there. It was all very social, nice and casual. And Eucla’s a little township and there’re a few married women there and they’d come along and be pushing their kids in prams and all that and the women from the roadhouse staff, they’d join in, and so while most people ran, some people walked.

But everybody who went on the Border Dash had a sponsor and whatever amount they were sponsored for, it all went to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Of course, it’s all grown since then. Nowadays, they get professional runners from Adelaide, Perth and all sorts out there. Oh, they get big heaps of people. It’s just before football season and a lot of the footy teams use it as a training run, plus it’s also a bit of a bonding weekend for them.

Anyhow, about four days after I did the Border Run, I come down with this hernia. So when I started thinking about doing this big trip, I started thinking about how the RFDS helped me out back then and I thought, ‘Why can’t I do it for them? They probably saved my life out there.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I will. I’ll do it for the RFDS.’

So I went and saw the Flying Doctor people here in Rockhampton and I told them that I wanted to do a trip from Rocky, which is about 700 kilometres north of Brisbane, all the way down to Ceduna, which is out on the west coast of South Australia. And they gave me the addresses of who I should contact about it all and I wrote away and I told them what I was going to do and they sent me big heaps of pencils and stickers and stuff like that.

That’s how it sort of first got going. Then I had to send away and get a letter that made it all legal for
me to raise money for the RFDS. And I went to the Commonwealth Bank and opened a special account and they gave me a pay-in book, with all the details, so that each time I got to a town I’d bank what I’d picked up along the road. That’s where most of the money ended up coming from: people stopping along the road to have a yarn and to take a photo, then they’d put $2 or $5 or $10 in the Royal Flying Doctor Service collection tin I carried with me. Rotary Clubs along the way helped out as well.

While I was getting all that organised, I did a lot of test runs. You know, I’d go out for three or four days testing things. I had a covered wagon and one of me mates set up one of them things that the sun shines on — a solar panel — and that charged the battery I had on the side of the wagon. I ran lights and a little caravan fridge off that. Actually, this mate first set it up with a generator that he had running off the rear axle, but I couldn’t keep the belts on it so we gave that away and we finished up settling for this solar panel. So that was good. It worked out well. And I just had a piece of flat timber going from one side of the wagon to the other and bunked down in there, in the swag. But a lot of nights it turned out to be so beautiful that I just threw the swag down by the camp fire. Fantastic.

So when everything was organised, I set out in the wagon from Rocky with two Clydesdales, Big Mac and Bill, and my little dog, Minnie, a fox terrier. And all along the way people helped with water and horse feed and a bit of food. It was really unbelievable, especially through outback New South Wales. There was an eight-year drought going on and nobody out there had anything. Oh, it was a terrible, terrible drought.
You know how the little bit of moisture runs off the edge of the road of a night, and so there’s the tiny pickings there? Well, the drought was so bad that the kangaroos were coming into the edge of the road just to get what was left of that. And they were so weak from lack of food that they couldn’t move. They didn’t even bother to take any notice of me when I come along, and the horses didn’t worry them either. And you’d see a vehicle go past and the driver would toot the horn to warn the roos and half of them would fall over dead. That’s true. There was just no feed, no nothing. It was that bad, it was.

And a lot of the stations out there, they were still going, but they just had managers on them. You know, there’s thousands and thousands of acres or whatever and these managers, all they did was go around the boundary fences. They had no stock or anything. I guess the properties were all owned by Sydney lawyers and doctors or what have you: probably tax dodgers or something. I don’t know. But these people had nothing out there, you know, and they did everything in their power to help me. Absolutely everything.

Because what you’ve got to realise here is that there wasn’t just Minnie and me. The horses needed food and they needed water every night. Like a Clydesdale will drink 75 litres a day. You know, I did carry water but just emergency water and the New South Wales Pastoral Protection Board supervisors helped with water drops along the way. But, oh, I would’ve never have been able to do it without the station owners or the station managers, that’s for sure.

Well, there was one woman, she heard that I was coming through and she drove all the way out to the
main road with some water and food for the horses, then she picked me up, took me back to her place where I had a shower and what-have-you and I had a beautiful tea with her and then she drove me all the way back to camp. And that was a 210-kilometre round trip she did. That was the sort of thing that was happening.

And a lot of these people I’d never even met before. Some I didn’t even get to meet. Like, I’d just be driving along and there’d be a 44-gallon drum of water and a couple of bales of hay, sitting on the side of the road, with a sign on it saying, ‘For the Royal Flying Doctor Service horse-drawn wagon trip.’ And I didn’t even have a clue who left these things.

Then, at one stage, I got bogged. That was near G4 Station, between Walgett and Brewarrina, in the central north of New South Wales. It’s all black soil through there and we got this rain and the horses were slipping this way and that and the wheels on the wagon were sliding all over the place. Then the trailer wheels got clogged, and the horses just couldn’t handle it. So we just could not move.

Anyway, I walked the horses into G4 Station and the people there came back out with a big four-wheel-drive tractor and towed the trailer in. Then we were there for about eight or ten days, waiting for everything to dry out enough to get out of the place. But they looked after us really well. They killed a sheep for us and everything. And those people had nothing, neither.

Then sometimes the news would get out that I was coming along and people would kill a sheep and they’d cut up half a side and put it in little bags for me. And here I am with a little caravan fridge, you
know. The freezer was flat out holding six mutton chops and here they are hitting me with about thirty or more chops.

And another funny thing; everybody wanted to give me eggs: and you can’t say ‘No’ because they just won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. Anyway, this particular day I had about six dozen eggs with me and this elderly couple pulled up. They were pensioners who were just touring around in their little caravan on holidays. So when they pulled up I asked them if they’d like to have a dozen eggs.

‘Oh, lovely. Oh, lovely,’ they said.

Anyway, there I am talking to the elderly lady and the old bloke’s walking around and around and around the wagon. And he’s looking under it here and over it there and all through it and then, after he’d searched all the wagon over, he comes back and he says, ‘Where do yer keep yer chooks?’

And, oh, I had to laugh because he was thinking it was like in the olden days when they always had a cage of chooks underneath the wagon. That’s what he was looking for. Yeah, ‘Where do yer keep yer chooks?’ he asked, and I didn’t even need to have any chooks because everyone was giving me all these eggs.

So, there was quite a few funny little things like that that happened. Another one was with two English girls. They were probably in their early twenties or something. They were travelling around Australia and they stopped for a chat because they’d never seen anything like a horse-drawn wagon in their lives before, and one of them asked if she could travel with me for three or four days.

I said, ‘Yeah, that’ll be fine.’

Then the other one says, ‘No, you can’t travel with him because we’ve got to get to such and such a place at such and such a time.’

Well I thought that was a bit rich, you know, but then there was nearly a blue. Oh yes, I thought there was going to be an all-out brawl between the two of them so I said, ‘What about I make a compromise?’ I said, ‘I’ll get the fire going and put the billy on and you can have tea with me then you can head off.’

‘Oh, that’d be lovely,’ they said.

So anyway, after tea they nuzzled off and away they went.

But I must say that I did have a couple of run-ins. See, I went through Bourke and followed the Darling River down to Wilcannia, then along the road to Broken Hill and down the Barrier Highway into South Australia. But Walgett, Brewarrina and Wilcannia, they were terrible. It’s a shame. The police at Bourke weren’t going to let me go through to Wilcannia. Apparently, not long beforehand two young couples had been driving along and they were forced out of their cars, then they were beaten up and the cars were hijacked and taken for joy-rides. So they were wary of me going down that way, because of the trouble. But I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do? I’ve got no other way to go, you know.’

So, I went on and when I got to Wilcannia there was an old Aboriginal bloke, a full-blood. He used to be a drover, and when he saw me coming past, oh, he run out and he waved me down and I probably spent a good hour and a half there with him while he was going on about the old droving days. Oh, he was showing me all
his old photos and all that. And oh, it was fantastic. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Then a couple of hundred yards further down the road the kids started pinching gear. They’d just walk along beside the wagon and they’d grab something then they’d take off. And most of the time they were grabbing lumps of harness and stuff like that; stuff I needed, that was of no good to them. But they’d just take it anyway. It was really just a pain in the butt. That’s what it was. And there was nothing I could do about it. But they’re funny, kids, aye. It’s sad, that’s all you can say.

But you get all types, don’t you, both black and white, because further down along the highway, over near Peterborough in South Australia, these two white blokes pulled up in a ute. One was a decent sort of a bloke, but the other one, I think he was on something already. Anyway, the decent bloke was talking to me and, just out of the blue, the other one said, ‘So, where’s yer drugs?’

‘There’s no drugs on this trip, mate,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in that sort of stuff.’

‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘Yer’d have ter be on drugs ter be doin’ somethin’ as mad as this.’ Then he said, ‘Anyway, I’m gonna have a look.’

‘No, yer not, mate,’ I said. ‘You just don’t walk into people’s houses and do those sort of things.’

Anyway, I had a knife that one of me mates gave me, back here in Rocky. He’d made it out of a saw blade, so the blade was probably about 12 or 13 inches long, you know. I was using it for any dead kangaroos I came across; like cutting the roo meat for Minnie and what have you. Well, I had it behind the
seat so I just pulled it out and started cleaning my fingernails with it. And this bloke, well, he did a bit of a double take when he saw the knife. So while he was goggling at me I said, ‘I haven’t got any drugs here, mate. I don’t believe in ’em so I wouldn’t have ’em here in the first place.’

Anyway, he went, ‘Eh, we’ll bloody see about that. We’ll be back.’

They took off then and I was a bit concerned that they might come back, but they didn’t.

But Minnie loved the journey. She was a little girl — elderly — but she just absolutely loved it. I thought I lost her one time. Did I tell you about that? Well, there was quite a few pig shooters of a night through some of those outback places in New South Wales. Anyway the sound of their guns must’ve frightened her and she took off. And, oh, I never had a clue where she was. I couldn’t find her anywhere. There I was yelling out and yelling out and wandering around the place. But, no, nothing.

Anyway, I hung about till around ten o’clock the next morning before I left. And I was just about to hop into the wagon and drive off and here she comes. She’s in a real lather and there was blood all over her feet. Red raw, they were. God knows how far she ran that night. But it was good to have her back, I can tell you, because she was great company and, as I said, she just loved the trip.

Then I guess the highlight of the great big adventure was my sixtieth birthday at the Tilpa pub. That was unreal, that was. How it came about was that, well, the night before I was camped at a station property out of Tilpa and the people there, oh, they were fantastic. I’ve
still got all their names and everything but they were having a barbecue there for their grandson’s birthday. He was eight years old or something. Anyway, I was talking to the little feller and I just happened to say, ‘You and I are nearly twins.’