The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (21 page)

And he said, ‘Why?’

I said, ‘Because it’s your birthday today and it’s my birthday tomorrow.’

Well, he got a bit of a giggle out of that. So, anyway, the elderly lady there — she must’ve been the grandmother — when she brought the birthday cake out she had two candles on it: one for the little feller and one for me. And it was a really lovely night: with a good feed and what-have-you, plus a few yarns. Then the next morning I headed off and I got into Tilpa and I set up camp, probably about 300 or 400 yards from the hotel. Then after I’d done that I thought I’d go over and see if they served a counter tea and, if they did, I’ll shout myself a meal for me sixtieth birthday. So I went over to the pub and the publican there, he said, ‘Have yer set up camp for the night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, do yer reckon yer’d know your way there and back?’ he said.

Of course, all this had me sort of intrigued, so I said, ‘Yeah, why’s that?’

And he said, ‘Because yer probably mightn’t be able to walk back to camp tonight.’

‘Why?’ I said.

He said, ‘Because I believe it’s yer sixtieth birthday.’

Well, within half an hour, I reckon there would’ve been, oh, I don’t know, about sixty people came and went, you know. At any one time there was probably
thirty people there, in the pub. And there were only about six people who actually lived in Tilpa. There was the publican and he had a barmaid and then there was a couple over at the little store. Well, that was about it. So there might’ve only been about four people, I guess, that lived in Tilpa. So, all these other people, I don’t know where they come from. But I reckon there was a good number of ringers and fencers and shearers and all that amongst them so they must’ve come from off properties or something.

Now I think what must’ve happened was that the elderly woman where I stayed the night before — the grandmother — she must’ve rung the publican. And things travel fast in little places like that. But I never saw a penny go over the bar all night so I think the publican and this elderly lady must’ve paid for everything. I don’t really know. And the next morning the publican handed over something like $400, which was good money. And then, when I opened me little camping fridge that night, they’d also snuck a couple of fresh bunny rabbits in there. So that was Tilpa, yeah at the Tilpa pub.

And so I finally made it to Ceduna. I left Rockhampton on 9 April 2001 and finished up in Ceduna on 26 October 2001 and I travelled a distance of 3200 kilometres. Seven months it took me, and I raised a total of $4511 for the Flying Doctor Service.

But that’s just what the typical Aussie is, isn’t it: a giver. And since then I’ve been back and I’ve seen a lot of the people who looked after me and here they were, doing the same thing again. I mean, they weren’t giving me donations but they were making me stay overnight and they were feeding me and all the
rest of it. So it truly is an amazing country with some amazing people living in it. And what truly amazed me was how the isolation out there in the outback doesn’t really isolate people, it brings them together, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a great part of that.

This is an interesting story about a feller, a true legend, who was a pilot with the Royal Flying Doctor Service for I-don’t-know-how-long. His name’s Phil Darby.

At the time this particular incident happened I was Chief Pilot with the RFDS here in Cairns, in far north Queensland, and also their Senior Checking and Training Pilot. So, in that capacity, I quite often found myself out at different RFDS bases for a couple of weeks either checking and training pilots or doing relief work while one of our pilots went on holidays or something.

In this case it was one of my very early trips down to Charleville, in south-western Queensland, and while I was relatively new to that area Phil had previously been the pilot down there for — oh, for heaven’s sake, I don’t know — maybe ten years or more. Actually, Phil worked with the RFDS when it first opened down at Charleville so by then he’d had a chance to solidly cement his persona within the township and the surrounding countryside.

Anyway, by this stage, Phil had been posted over to Cairns and I was relieving out at Charleville and while I was there we were called out to this property — Thylungra — which was then owned by CSR (Colonial Sugar Refining Company). It was also the place where they had a polocrosse weekend, you know, the polo they play on horseback. But Thylungra was run on behalf of CSR by a manager chappie whose surname was Green. Anyhow, this chappie’s wife fell ill and we
were called to go out there. So the doctor and I and a Nursing Sister, we climbed into — I’m not sure if it was a Queen Air or we took the King Air that time — but anyway, off we went out to this property.

When we landed, there was the truck waiting at the airstrip so we pulled up and we all got out of the aeroplane and the manager bloke, Green, was there with his wife, and she was looking very grey, indeed. She was not well at all. So the doctor went to have a closer look at the wife. Anyway, the manager, this chappie, Green, I could see that he was sort of eyeing me up and down in an extremely suspicious manner. And he was rolling a durry — a roll-your-own cigarette — in the fashion that they can only do in the outback. You know how they roll the durry, sort of nonchalantly while they’re deep in thought about something or other, and in this particular case I had the strong feeling that it was me he was thinking about.

‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘this feller obviously doesn’t know who or what I am.’ So I went up to introduce myself. ‘G’day,’ I said, ‘my name’s Nick Watling. I’m flying the aeroplane today.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, in a half-interested sort of way. ‘So where’s Phil?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Phil’s been posted. Phil and I are at the same base in Cairns these days.’

‘Oh,’ he grunted, sounding none too pleased with this turn of events.

Then he left it at that, but you could see that what I’d said wasn’t really sinking through to this feller, Green. So there he is, he’s still rolling his durry and he’s deep in thought then he looks at me and says, ‘But Phil’s the pilot for Queensland, isn’t he?’

And I thought what a brilliant job of PR Phil had done during the years he was out there, in the Charleville area. Because this feller, Green, he just could not possibly imagine that anyone else other than Phil Darby flew aeroplanes for the RFDS. And the fact that Phil had gone to Cairns, you know, 800 nautical miles to the north-east, didn’t affect a thing. If anybody was flying out to pick up anybody’s wife or anyone who was sick or injured, the pilot had to be Phil. Nobody else would do, and so who was this strange bugger by the name of Watling, and what right did he have to be out there flying ‘Phil’s aeroplane’? And that’s the way it felt to me.

So that was Phil Darby, a wonderful feller, a brilliant bloke who was tremendously valued and loved as both a man and a pilot, particularly throughout the Charleville area, where they virtually looked upon him as a god. Oh, he’d give you the shirt off his back, Phil would, he was that generous. And if you ever wanted someone to fill in anywhere, there’d always be Phil. He’d be the first to put up his hand, every time.

But, on the other hand, if you wanted someone to obey the rules to the strict letter of the law, well then, perhaps not Phil. Of course, being Chief Pilot, I was responsible to the Civil Aviation Authority for the running of the place and Phil had to be reined in on occasions. So we had our moments together. But, in saying that, Phil went through his many, many years flying for the RFDS without having one accident relating to that sort of approach to life. In fact, I’d reckon that Phil could land the aeroplane on a postage stamp, in the middle of the night, you know, and there’s not too many that could do that.

Well, I suppose, something that pops straight into mind was my first lesson in cultural safety. To be more accurate, I guess I should say that it was a real lesson in how to work appropriately with an Aboriginal patient.

There was one old fella, he was into his seventies and it was the first time he’d ever been in an aeroplane. The only trouble was that I didn’t speak his language and he didn’t speak English so we had this real communication problem right from the start.

Anyhow, we got him into the aeroplane and I’m trying to tell him to put his seat belt on, but he couldn’t understand what I was on about. So then thinking I was being helpful, I went over to show him how it was done. And, well, didn’t he take exception to that. He got angry at me for trying to interfere with him. Obviously he didn’t know what was going on because he got stuck into me. Oh yeah, he was hitting out at me and everything. Then finally I worked out how he must’ve been seeing the situation, from his point of view, what with it being his first time in an aeroplane and then, to make matters worse, here was this white woman pushing and pulling him around.

‘That’s okay. Now I understand,’ I said and I got one of the other patients to explain to him what he had to do, and he was alright after that.

Then I had another old patient who was incredibly incontinent in the aircraft, so then we had an
overflow problem, out onto the floor, didn’t we. And at the altitude we were flying, it was so cold that the urine froze. At the time I was unaware of what had happened, that was until I went to stand up and I felt this crack, crack, cracking. That’s funny, I thought, and when I looked down I saw that my shoes were stuck to the floor of the aeroplane.

And there was another old fella who obviously didn’t understand the principals of aircraft safety because he decided to light a fire on the floor of the aeroplane. Oh, he just got cold so he started pulling old bits of rubbish and stuff out of his pockets and then he tried to light it with a match. Yeah, on the floor of the aeroplane, as we were flying along, because he was cold.

Of course, when we saw that we freaked out. ‘No, no, you can’t do that!’

‘But I’m cold,’ he said.

‘I’ll turn the heater up! I’ll get you a blanket! I’ll do anything, but don’t light a fire on the floor of the aeroplane!’

So, yeah, I must say, it’s a true privilege sometimes with these Aboriginal people, particularly with the real old traditional people, to see them when they’re having a first-time-in-their-life experience. I remember when I took one old fella from here, in Alice Springs, down to Adelaide. Oh, he was a lovely man. I’d say he’d also have to be well into his seventies and, anyhow, he’d never seen the ocean before.

At first, I found it really hard to believe. But then, when I thought about it, I realised that he wouldn’t even have come across an ocean on television or anything because he’d never even seen a television before, either. Maybe he’d seen a dam. I guess he’d seen
a creek and probably a river, but it was obvious that he couldn’t grasp the concept of what an ocean actually was. But you just think that everybody knows, don’t you? We just sort of take it for granted.

Anyhow, I pointed out the window of the aeroplane and I said to him, ‘Out there, that’s the ocean.’ And he gazed down upon that huge, vast expanse of water, spreading all the way out over the horizon, and he was so shocked. He just couldn’t believe there could be so much water anywhere. Even the word ‘ocean’ was strange to him.

‘Ocean?’ he kept asking. ‘What is ocean?’

I said, ‘Water. Karpi.’ Because karpi is the word for water in their language.

So he stared back out the window of the plane for a while, then he looked back at me and he said, ‘No, no, not karpi. Too much for karpi.’

I met my husband, Phil, in Cairns. He’d previously been a pilot with the RFDS out in south-western Queensland, at Charleville, and had come to fly with them in Cairns. That was around 1974. At that time I was working for the Queensland Education Department as a teacher at the School of the Air in Cairns, and, in a way, we shared the HF radio because the School of the Air was in the same building as the RFDS.

It proved a very suitable accommodation for both organisations because the RFDS did medical calls before school started of a morning, then we took over. But just because School of the Air was using the radio, that wasn’t to stop anyone from out bush, who had an emergency, to cut in and call on the same frequency. When that happened, someone from the School of the Air would go and get someone from the Flying Doctor side of things. So, yes, it worked quite well, really.

Back then, at the Cairns base of the RFDS, I think they only had two pilots, two doctors and two nursing sisters. So staff wasn’t all that plentiful and it was just in Phil’s nature to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. That’s just the sort of person he was. So, you know, it was like he lived his life waiting on his next call. Of course, they didn’t have mobile phones or anything back then. They just had, like, a little beeper that they attached to their belt and when that went off it meant you had to ring up the base and see what was going on.
Virtually, he was on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day; so your life was pretty governed by the beeper, and that placed huge restrictions on where we could go.

I can remember a time in the late 1970s when the other pilot went on holidays and that left Phil to hold the fort for about two weeks. And, as what usually happens, you know, that coincided with a very busy time and he was working for forty-eight hours straight or something. I mean, they just wouldn’t allow those sorts of things to happen nowadays. In fact, I think it’d be illegal, even if it were in special circumstances.

But I suppose a lot of the flights Phil did perhaps mightn’t have had that great twist in the tale for them to be good reading. Oh, I’m sure he made a lasting impression on the people or the patients who he flew out for and brought back to hospital or whatever. But I doubt he’d remember most of them because being a pilot for the RFDS was his job, and that was that.

Like, I was thinking the other day of an American lady who lived at an outstation of Wandovale, west of Charters Towers. She was a mum of five and an aeronautical engineer by profession who’d married an Australian stockman. I was quite friendly with them because I taught the kids through School of the Air. At one stage she purchased an ultralight aircraft and during clinic flights out there she and Phil used to talk flying.

But bringing up a family is tough at any time, let along doing it in a remote area like that where things can become even more difficult. Because, one day, in just a few unsupervised moments her second littlest child poured a whole packet of Rinso over the face of
the littlest one — a babe who was probably only eight months old or something. Phil then got the call to say that a child was suffocating.

And that was really dramatic for the mother, as you might well be able to imagine, and Phil flew out there for that child and it all ended up happily ever after. But there were no difficulties with the weather or in landing the aeroplane on the dirt airstrip and there were no problems with the people getting the child to the airstrip or any of that stuff. You know, in a movie they’d make it much more dramatic. But in real life it was just a part of Phil’s job, so to speak.

And I’ll tell you a funny one. Phil hadn’t been feeling too well with the flu one weekend and he was called to fly to Cooktown to pick up a lady who’d miscarried early in her pregnancy. No one was accompanying him so he asked me if I’d like to go along for the ride, which I did. It was a beautiful clear day and we arrived in Cooktown after a stunning flight up the coast. Being the only other person on board, after we landed I let down the door of the Queen Air and the young lady and her partner made their way over to the plane. Of course, they mistook me for a nursing sister and so the patient handed over a rather large specimen jar — it was bigger than a coffee bottle — that must’ve contained the miscarried material.

I’m a bit more hard-hearted now but, back then, blood didn’t really grab me. So I was a bit taken aback, but I tried to take it in my stride. Anyhow, we flew the patient back to Cairns where an ambulance took her to hospital. But then, later on, and this is the funny bit, Phil told me that there was a further side to the story. Apparently, Phil had met the partner of the lady
who’d had the miscarriage at a clinic, in another town, the year before and he’d shared with Phil the fact that he was organising a vasectomy for himself. Yes, a vasectomy. And that was always a bit of a joke between Phil and myself because it was obvious that this lass was, unfortunately, caught out in one way or another. So I guess if any story had a twist to it that one would have.