The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (22 page)

This story goes back to about March ’65, up at Bulloo Downs Station, and it’s about an old Aboriginal mate of mine, a chap by the name of Rex Athol Yarnold. Oh, and there was also Lenny Brock — ‘Brockie’ as we called him. We were all mates. I think the way we all first got caught up together was with this bloody speedway driving, you know. We were all speedway drivers. Anyhow, this story hasn’t got anything to do with that except that that’s where Rex, Brockie and me first teamed up, speedway driving.

But Rex and I had already been up to Bulloo Downs the previous year — that’d be in ’64 — to do a bit of shooting for a week or two and in the end it bloody flooded and the water went all grey so they put some lime in it and, the next day, we were drinking it. So there you go, the lime cleared it all up.

Bulloo Downs? It’s in the far south-western corner of Queensland, tucked in there, near the New South Wales and South Australian borders. If you ever want to get there, you go up to Hungerford and, when you leave the Hungerford pub, you turn west and you run along the fence for 64 miles and you open and shut about ten gates and eventually you’ll come to the Bulloo Downs boundary. From there you go off to the homestead where Bill Rinke lived. Bill was, like, the manager up there or some bloody thing, you know. Any rate, that’s where the Flying Doctor had to come and pick up Rex.

So, as I said, Rex and me, we’d been up there to Bulloo Downs to do some shooting back when it flooded in ’64 and then Brockie come with us when we went again in ’65. Brockie was a speedway driver, too.

How we got to know about Bulloo Downs was that Rex had some relatives living up that way who were working rabbits. They were a couple of Aboriginal ladies by the name of Gene and Maude Glover and they had about a dozen kids or more, you know, from different relatives and that, all living there on Bulloo Downs. I reckon that both Gene and Maude would’ve been in their fifties at the time, and by working rabbits I mean they had all the rabbit traps and all the gear and they were trapping for Sydney Rabbit Supply. A chap called Pat Wade was running Sydney Rabbit Supply back then and he worked out of the Haymarket, in Sydney, and Pat was paying Gene and Maude.

But anyway, all over Bulloo Downs they had these chillas. A chilla is what you put the dead rabbits in so that they don’t go off in the heat. And these chillas had a motor on them that you had to start so that the rabbits would be kept cold. Well, one day, when Rex, Brockie and me was up there, this bloody chilla was playing up so Rex goes over to see if he can get the bloody thing going. The only trouble was that when he tried to, his fingers went through the pulley thing that was attached to the motor of the chilla and it took the tops of his fingers off, on his left hand. Three fingers, just down to the first knuckle. Yeah, just up the top, up there, yeah, so he lost them.

So we took Rex up to the homestead where that Bill Rinke lived and they got in touch with the Flying Doctor Service, you know. Then the Flying Doctor flew
out and they decided to take Rex back into Broken Hill with them so that they could sort out his fingers. So off they went and it looked like Rex was all okay then because they said they were taking him straight to Broken Hill.

That’s the last I saw of Rex for a while but later on, when I caught up with him in Sydney, he was telling me that while they were flying him back to Broken Hill they got a call that someone else out that way was in trouble. I don’t exactly remember what the problem was but I think some bloke’s back went on him or something, you know, and so they decided to stop off to get this rooster. But when they landed, the ground was too soft and the plane got bogged and it wouldn’t budge. So then the pilot told Rex that if he wanted to get to Broken Hill, he’d better get out and push the bloody plane to help get it going again.

So Rex says, ‘Here I am, a bloody patient, who’s lost me fingers, and I’m out there on the wing of this aeroplane pushing the bloody thing along so we can take off.’

Then, when it got going, he had to jump back into the aeroplane real quick before it took off without him, you know. Anyway, in the end, he finished up in Broken Hill, and they’d have a record of it there about how Rex lost the tops of his fingers.

So that’s the story about Rex and the Flying Doctor. But, oh, Rex was always in some sort of strife or other. There’s something else that’s interesting, if you want to hear it. This didn’t have anything to do with the Flying Doctor because this was later on. But see, Rex and me, we had a bit of a falling out there for a little over ten years when he was living down at Ardlethan,
in the south-west of New South Wales. So for ten odd years I didn’t speak to him. Then right out of the blue, one time he come up to see me. I’m not exactly sure when it was right now but I remember it was just before Light Fingers won the Melbourne Cup. By then Rex’d already had a bloody stroke and he was telling me all about it, how he was stuck in a wheelchair for about four months and, oh, he reckoned he was dirty on the world and crooked on all the people in the hospital and then, one day, he just thought, ‘Oh, I’d better get over this.’

So he decided to get up out of that wheelchair and get on his way again. Oh, he was still a bit gimped up, like. You know, he just had a gimp on the leg and the arm, but he was mobile.

Anyhow, when Rex come up to see me that time, just before Light Fingers won the Cup, he had these bloody clippings from the local newspaper, down Ardlethan way, and it was all about him having a big run-in with a train. So he showed me these clippings and he said to me, ‘Barry,’ he said, ‘I was just driving along in the station wagon, mindin’ me own business, and I looked up and there’s this bloody train there, right in front of me, and by then it was too late to stop so I just drove straight into it.’

And when he drove into the train he reckoned he hit it so hard that he got pushed right from the front seat of his station wagon and he finished up stuck against the back window, you know, of the station wagon. And he reckoned that when they came to have a look at him, he could hear them saying, ‘He’s dead. He’s dead.’ And Rex’s all squashed up at the back window, thinking to himself, ‘I don’t bloody think so.’

So yeah, he walked away from that one, and soon after that he come up and he showed me the bloody things all about it in the paper. So yeah, he was pretty accident prone. Well, the whole lot of the Yarnold family was really, even his son, Henry. See, old Rex had a bit of a problem with Henry and Henry was up the Cross, in Sydney, one night and I don’t know what was going on in his bloody head but he jumped off a four-storey building. The only thing was that instead of landing on the pavement like he planned, he landed in this bush. So he got up and walked away, and there was a chap there who had a camera and he won an award for taking photos of it, you know. So yeah, they were a pretty accident prone family but they always seemed to survive, somehow.

Any rate, after Rex come up and seen me that time with the paper clippings of him having a prang with the train, not long after, he went back home to Ardlethan and he dropped dead from a heart attack. That was on 2 January, the year after Light Fingers won the Melbourne Cup.

In about 1958 I was working at Alice Springs Hospital. Back then the RFDS didn’t have their own specialised nursing staff so, if there was a call out, the Matron would come along and just grab whoever she could from the hospital’s nursing staff. I actually worked in the Maternity Ward for white women, but it didn’t matter what ward you worked in, you might even be lying in your bed — it could even be on your day off — and the Matron might come around and say, ‘Hoy, Kitty, we’ve had a call from the Flying Doctor Service. Get on the plane, you’re going out to wherever it was.’ And you just had to jump to it, grab whatever medical supplies you thought you might need and get out to the airport as quick as possible to fly out to wherever, help stabilise them and then bring them back into Alice Springs.

Anyway, this time the Matron came along and she said that I had to go out to, I think it was, Areyonga Aboriginal Community. ‘There’s a demented lubra out there who needs to be collected and brought back into Alice Springs,’ she said.

Areyonga’s south-west of Alice Springs and, as it turned out, she wasn’t demented at all, just depressed. But anyway, off I go and I must’ve been a bit demented myself because I forgot to take any restraints or anything. All I grabbed was 10cc of a sedative called paraldehyde, just in case.

Now, back then the Flying Doctor Service was using Connellan Airlines. Like, Eddie Connellan was quite a
famous person and he owned an airline, and the RFDS chartered his planes for their flights. So we get out to Areyonga Aboriginal Community and the manager there met us at the airstrip and he said to the young pilot, ‘The Community vehicle’s broken down. Can you taxi the plane up to wherever this woman was.’

That was something you couldn’t really do, you know, just drive the plane off the airstrip and down a dirt track. But anyway, the young pilot did. Then there was some sort of delay while we waited for them to get the Aboriginal woman ready. Anyway, the manager was very interested in planes so, while we were passing the time, the pilot took him for a bit of a flip around, which I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to do either. But he did, anyway.

By the time they got back from their joy-flight the woman was ready and they carried her the short distance from the settlement to the plane, on a litter, which is like a type of stretcher. So, we load this Aboriginal lady, the one that was supposed to be demented, onto the plane. She was only quite young and, as I said, I think she was more depressed than demented because after she got in the plane she was as quiet as a mouse and didn’t say anything.

So off we fly. Now, a lot of the pilots that used to go up to Alice Springs to work for Connellan’s were young pilots who went up there to clock up their flight hours. Many were relatively new to the job so a lot of them weren’t all that experienced. Anyway, we’re flying along and this pilot somehow got lost and he turned around to me and said, ‘Do you know where we are?’

I took a look outside and couldn’t see any landmarks that I recognised. It was all the same, sort
of, looking desert. ‘No, I don’t know where we are,’ I told him.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Anyway, I wasn’t too worried because that happened, at times, out in the middle of nowhere, and you’d just fly along looking for a road or the railway line and, when you found it, you took your directions from that. So there I was, looking out the window, hoping to see a road or something, when I happened to say to this young Aboriginal lass, I said, ‘Do you know where we are?’

As I said, she hadn’t said boo up till this stage, but she lifted her head, took a quick look out the window and she said, ‘Jay Creek’.

That’s all she said, Jay Creek. And she was right. She was spot on. We were at Jay Creek, and she was the only one who knew where we were. And I thought, ‘How ironic was that.’ Because, you know, she’d never been in an aeroplane before. So she’d never looked down on the land from that height so how could she just glance out the window and pinpoint exactly where we were? Amazing, isn’t it?

This happened back in 1975 and there’s no humour in this story because it was a fairly tragic event. At the time we were shearing up at Winning Station, which is about 150 miles north of Carnarvon, just inland from the central Western Australian coast. And the shearers’ cook there, what he did with all his scraps and fat and bones and rubbish and things was, he used to burn them outside the shearers’ quarters.

Anyhow, we were there for quite a few weeks and so there was just a heap of white ash. You know, if you looked at it, you wouldn’t even know it was hot. But one of the shearers was there with his wife and two little kids and well, you know, we’d finished work that day and it was just on dark and one of the little kids — about two years old, he was — he didn’t have any shoes on or anything and the next thing we heard him screaming.

So we rushed around and there he was, this little kid, standing in the middle of all this hot ash. I guess he’d run across it and got stuck, so panic set in and he just stood there, right in the middle of it, screaming and screaming. Actually, he was very lucky that he didn’t fall over in the fire or anything because it was just red hot coals; well, just all white hot coals really, and you couldn’t see them.

Anyway, myself and another chap, we ran over and we pulled him out of it. But all his feet were badly burnt. They were more or less cooked, really. Oh, he
was in such agony the poor little feller. So we rushed around to the neighbouring station with this little kid and they gave him some pain-killers from the Flying Doctor medical kit that they always kept at the homestead. And they also had an airstrip. It was only a dirt one but it was still a usable strip. By this time it was about seven or eight o’clock in the evening and we got on to the Flying Doctor on the two-way radio. No, actually, I think it might’ve even been a pedal radio back in those days. But it was the Carnarvon base we got in touch with.

We told them what had happened and that it was an emergency and they said they’d fly straight out. Then, at the airstrip, being just dirt, there were no lights or anything and we had to get all the cars we could muster so that the Flying Doctor pilot could find out where to land by just using the car lights as his guide. So we had the cars lined up and down each side of the runway and then we had a couple up at the far end so that the pilot could see where to stop. I’d say there must’ve been about twenty cars. From memory they had them on low beam and the pilot, sort of, flew into the lights. I think it was a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron or something like that. As I said, it was just a dirt strip, and it was in the dark and still this chap landed the RFDS plane perfectly, just by using the car lights as a guide. I tell you, you’ve got to marvel at those chaps.

Anyway, he had the doctor on board with him so the doctor treated the little boy on the plane and they flew him back into Carnarvon, then down to Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth. But unfortunately, one of the little boy’s feet finished up like a club foot and he
lost the toes on both his feet. And, you know, even now, I can still see that little kid standing in that hot ash, just screaming and screaming.

So it’s not a happy story, like I said, but still, it was a great thing that the Flying Doctor was able to fly out and get him because otherwise, I wouldn’t even want to contemplate what the end result for that little boy might’ve been.