The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (31 page)

This happened many years ago, when I was working up bush, at the Moomba gas and oil fields. Moomba’s in the far north-east of South Australia so it’s usually a desolate, dry country, as you might be able to imagine. But at this particular time there’d been a lot of rain and it’d caused flooding all through the north-east, and there was this guy who’d always dreamed of doing a walking trek from Innamincka, north-west through the Sturt Stony Desert and up to Birdsville, which is just over the border into Queensland. He was a very experienced bushman and he’d done all his research and all that sort of stuff, so he was well prepared. Then he decided to take a younger mate along with him, an English feller, who was a very inexperienced bushman. So they decided to do this walk.

Now, it was the middle of winter and by then the weather was okay: bitterly cold at night, mind you, but the days were okay, and not too hot. As I said the experienced bushman had done his homework, right. They had a radio with them, plus all the maps and they had backpacks and a cart to carry their supplies. They’d even organised rendezvous points along the way, where they’d meet people and pick up fresh supplies.

So they set off from Innamincka and they’d been walking for a couple of days. But what happens up in those regions is that, when you get big rains, a lot of water comes down all the little creeks and what-have-
you, and they overflow and then you get these huge floodplain areas — like surface water spreading out everywhere. Now all this surface water doesn’t appear on a map because it’s rarely there. So they were walking along and they came to this big lake, over a floodplain, which wasn’t on the map. They then had to make a decision: what do we do? Do we take a couple of extra days to go around it or do we try and wade across?

As a trial, they walked out a couple of hundred yards and it was only, you know, a foot deep or something like that. ‘Well, it can’t be too deep,’ they said, and they decided to walk across this lake.

But there must’ve been a washaway or a creek that they didn’t know about or wasn’t on the map, right? So they were wading along, carrying all their gear — the experienced feller was strapped to the supply-cart — and suddenly they went from water that was about a foot deep to water that was right over their heads. They both went under and because they had lots of gear strapped onto them, they sunk like rocks.

Now, somehow the inexperienced Englishman managed to struggle to the surface. Then, when he got to safety he realised that his mate, the experienced bushman, wasn’t there. So he went looking for him and some time later he found him, but unfortunately he’d drowned.

Anyhow, the Englishman’s first thought was, ‘I’d better get this guy back to the shore.’

So he unstrapped all of the dead feller’s gear, and he left his own gear there and he started dragging his dead mate all the way back through this stretch of water. Eventually, he got the body to dry ground but then, when he went back to retrieve his gear, it was
gone. Everything. He couldn’t find it. So there he was, trapped out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, which were, basically, just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. That’s all. He’d even taken his shoes off to swim. So now he’s thinking, ‘Well, what do I do now? How do I get myself out of this mess? I’ve never been in the outback before. I don’t know how to navigate. I don’t even know where I am. I don’t have any maps. Nothing. I’m going to die.’

Then he remembered that two days previously they’d crossed something that resembled a road, so he thought, ‘If I can get back to the road I might be able to find someone or track someone down.’

Obviously, he couldn’t take his dead mate with him so he had to leave the body there and he starts backtracking. There’s plenty of water because there’s lots of waterholes, you know, but he hasn’t got any food. Not a crumb. Nothing. So for two days he walks back the way they’d come and eventually he stumbles across this road, right. But, unbeknown to the Englishman, the road wasn’t a real road, it was what’s known as a shot line, okay? Now, what a shot line is: with oil and gas mining they sort of bulldoze these tracks like grid lines so that when they fly over them, they can use them for survey lines, you see? Vehicles don’t drive up and down them, they’re basically put in and abandoned, right? But this guy thought it was a road. But it’s not — it’s a shot line.

So he thinks, ‘Good, I’ve got to this road but now, what do I do? Do I sit here and wait for a car to come along or do I keep moving?’

Well, he sat and waited for a while and there was no sight of a car so he decides it’d be better to keep
moving. But then he was faced with another problem: do I turn right and walk and see what I can find or do I turn left and walk and see what I find?

Now, what you’ve got to realise, this’s out in the Sturt Stony Desert and the nearest town is Innamincka, and that’s like 100 kilometres away. What’s more, the guy’s got no idea where he is; not even a clue. But he decides, for whatever reason, he doesn’t really know: I’ll turn left and walk down the road a bit and see how I go.

So he turns left and starts walking down this shot line, which really isn’t a road. Then about 100 yards further on he walks over a rise and sitting there, in the middle of all this nowhere, is a wrecked telephone booth.

Now, what had happened was, about fifteen years before the Englishman arrived on the spot, there’d been a little camp there that they’d used when they were grading the shot lines, and maybe drilling a couple of holes or something like that. So years ago there’d been a small camp there, you know, with five or ten guys, living in caravans for about four or five weeks before they moved on. And back then, what sometimes happened was that, with these little camps, they never used radios for communication. They only had one of those old wind-up telephones, right, and they’d just plonk it in the middle of a camp, stick a bit of a telephone box around it and they’d run maybe 20 or 30 miles of telephone cable, above ground and, when they happened to come across another telephone cable, they’d just cut into that, alright. Then, when they abandoned the camp, they’d pick up the telephone box, wind the cable up and move on to the next site and
set it all up again. But for some inexplicable reason, on this one and only occasion, they’d up and left and they’d abandoned this telephone and the wires.

So, you know, this guy sees this telephone box like it’s an apparition. But it’s been exposed to the elements for donkey’s ages; the doors are hanging off, there’s no windows, the old Bakelite receiver’s all cracked, wires are hanging off it and, you know, there’s a dirt floor. So the Englishman thinks, ‘Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.’ And he jumps into this telephone box, picks up the receiver, he winds the handle and, all of a sudden, out of the deadness comes this voice. ‘Hello Santos, Moomba Coms, can I help you?’

Now, for some strange reason this telephone box was not only still there but it’d never been disconnected, as well. And this guy just couldn’t believe his luck, right? He’s out in the middle of nowhere and finds a telephone box and an old wind-up receiver and he gets straight through to Santos Communications at Moomba. So the Englishman told his tale of woe to the communications guy. Then the Coms guy said, ‘Look, okay, but do you have any idea where you are because we can’t track you on this telephone line. We didn’t even know it existed.’

‘I’ve got no idea,’ the Englishman said. But he tried giving him a basic outline, you know, like, ‘We were walking between Innamincka and Birdsville and then two days later this accident happened and I backtracked for a couple of days and I came across this road and I turned left and I think I headed south, but I’m not quite sure.’

So the guy at Moomba said, ‘Alright, well, tell you what, stay on the line, I’ve got a couple of old blokes
who were out on the surveying camps years ago. They might remember the area so perhaps they can give us a rough idea of, maybe, where you might be.’

In actual fact the Coms guy didn’t hold out much hope. But anyway, he rings up a couple of old blokes and they come in and get the story. They don’t hold out too much hope either but they get out their old surveying maps — the ones they’d had stored away at the back of their wardrobes for the past twenty years or so — and they blow the dust off them and lay them out on the table. So there’s these two old crusty miners, you know, looking at these maps and going like, ‘Gawd, it could be this camp.’ ‘No it couldn’t be that one but I remember this camp. That could be the one.’ And between them they, sort of, figured out, ‘Well, he might be somewhere in this region here but, you know, then he could be somewhere else. But if we were going to have a stab in the dark, here’s as good a place as any to start looking.’

And that’s when they got the Flying Doctor Service involved. As I said, I was working up there at the time. So they called me over and they said, ‘Well, look, we’ve got a guy. He’s out bush somewhere and he’s found an old telephone and he’s on the line and we’re going to try and find him.’

So we got the helicopter pilot in for a briefing and these crusty old miners said, ‘I reckon we should do a grid search, starting from here and just see how we go.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ the chopper pilot said. ‘We’ll start at that point and just work our way back in a criss-cross pattern.’

And well, what you’ve got to realise is that the lost Englishman could’ve been at any one of
about a hundred and fifty possible old camp sites, okay? Anyway, off we all go in the chopper and this Englishman’s still on the phone talking to Moomba Coms and he looks out of the broken down old telephone box and he sees this helicopter away in the distance, and we could see the phone box and we could see him waving and we’re thinking, ‘Oh God, this is unbelievable. It’s a miracle. We’ve found him.’

Now, from him making the telephone call to us finding him would’ve only taken, probably, an hour. Mind you, he’d already been wandering around out there for a couple of days without adequate clothing and, of course, no food. But as luck would have it, that was the first point in our search pattern. So we landed the chopper and the pilot, he switches the engine off and he walks over to this English guy, who’s still standing there with the phone in his hand, wondering if what he’s seeing is really real or not, and the pilot says to him, ‘Excuse me, were you the guy who phoned for a taxi?’

And this guy couldn’t believe it. Well, neither could we. All the cards had fallen his way. He told me later that he thought it was sort of a religious experience. Like, I know his mate died and all that sort of stuff but he said, ‘I’ve never believed in God but gees, I do now because, you know, there I was out in the desert with next to Buckley’s of getting found and all of a sudden an ancient telephone box appears that somehow gets me through to Moomba Coms and then a helicopter arrives out of nowhere to pick me up.’

Anyway, before we went back and retrieved his mate’s body we flew the Englishman back to Moomba and, amazingly, he wasn’t too badly exposed. His feet
were really blistered and he had a bit of sunburn. But, you know, in the scheme of things, he wasn’t too bad, though he did keep saying how hungry he was, which you could understand. So when we arrived back at Moomba, of course, all his clothes were shredded and as we walked into the Health Centre I threw him a pair of overalls and said, ‘Look mate, just put these on and we’ll go and get you something to eat.’

And he went, ‘Oh great because, like, I’m really hungry, you know.’

Well, he threw the overalls on and I took him over to the Moomba mess hall. Now, the Moomba mess hall is this great big, gigantic dining room, which can cater for about four hundred workers, right, and the food’s phenomenal. You can get just about anything. You know, this is around lunchtime and there’s salads and sandwiches and four different sorts of hot meals and there’s an ice-cream machine there, and desserts. It’s like a huge buffet at a hotel. So we go into this mess room and this guy, well, here he is, an hour and a half earlier he thought he was going to die from starvation and now he walks into this food fest.

‘Can I have anything I want?’ he said.

I said, ‘Go for it mate, you’re the one that hasn’t eaten for days.’

So he grabbed a plate and he piled it full of T-bone steaks, right. And I’ve never seen a guy go through three T-bone steaks so quick in my life. He just wolfed them down. And he’d just finished this enormous meal, right, and he turned to me and he said, ‘Oh, cripes, I’ve just forgotten. I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat in ten years.’ Then he added, ‘But I tell you what, that was the best meal I’ve ever had in my life.’

I suppose you could say that I actually started with the Flying Doctor Service back in 1987 when I was working with the Division of Child Health out at Charleville, in south-western Queensland. At that stage the nurses from Child Health were seconded across to the RFDS as flight nurses. From Charleville I moved back to Innisfail, in far northern Queensland, which is where I was born. And then in 1991 the structure changed within the Division of Child Health and we were employed by the RFDS. So since ’91 I’ve been a Senior Flight Nurse, here in Cairns.

The area we cover is, well, we go right up to Torres Strait, then west out to Georgetown, and down south to just north-west of Townsville. So it’s a fair area. And the daily structure, if there is a structure — and that’s the beauty of the job because there isn’t much of a structure — is that in the Cairns, Charleville and Mount Isa RFDS bases we help the doctor run the general clinics as well as on-call work. So we’ll be on a four-week roster doing clinic work and also, because we’ve all got child health experience as well, we go out and set up a ‘Well Baby Clinic’ — that’s like a child health clinic. You know how, when you’re in the city, you go and take your baby in to be weighed and to get advice and all that sort of stuff, well, that’s what we do on the Well Baby Clinic.

The other thing is that, when you’re on your four-week roster, you’re on day call or night call so you have to stay in town and you, virtually, wait — just
in case there’s an emergency or whatever. Basically, it’s a twelve-hour shift and so you know when you’re going to work but, if there’s an emergency, you don’t quite know when you’re going to come home from work. That’s about the only catch, really.

But there’s many, many happy stories. I suppose delivering a baby while you’re in the air and then having to tell the pilot we’ve got an extra one on board still gives me a thrill. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary, really. It just happens. But I was thinking about some other types of stories and I remembered once when I was working out of the Charleville base. This doesn’t have anything to do with the delivering of babies. I guess it’s really more just a comedy of errors, which, in turn, caused Bill McConnell not to be a happy pilot on this particular occasion.

Bill was an old and wise and very experienced pilot who’d been flying around out in the bush for years. Anyway, a seismic crew was out there in the outback somewhere looking for oil and they radioed through one night to say that one of them had been bitten by a snake and they thought he was going to die. So it was an emergency.

On this occasion there was Bill, a doctor and myself who headed out to this place to evacuate the bloke. Now, because we didn’t normally go there — it was an airstrip that Bill didn’t really know too well — he wanted everything prepared for our arrival. To that end, Bill gave them instructions about lighting flares along the strip to help guide him down and he also asked for a small fire to be lit so that, when he saw the white smoke, he could judge wind direction, which would help with his landing the aeroplane.

As I said, it was night, but when we got out to where Bill thought the strip was, there’s nothing there. No flares. No fire. Nothing. So we’re circling round and round, trying to figure out what’s going on. What was even more baffling was that Bill had also prearranged a channel to talk to these seismic blokes on and now we’d lost complete contact with them on the radio. So we’re flying round and round and round until finally another voice comes over our radio and says, ‘Well, they had a bit of an accident on their way out to the airstrip. They run into a tree and their radio’s out.’

Nobody had been hurt in the accident, thankfully, and we were told that they’d soon be out at the airstrip waiting for us.

‘Okay, then,’ we said. So we flew around for a while longer and then, ‘Yes, there’s the strip and they’re there but the flares are pretty dull and I can’t see any white smoke.’

Anyhow, being an emergency, Bill decided to go ahead and land anyway. Then on final approach we realised that, instead of lighting a small fire to produce a thin wisp of white smoke, they’d basically built this huge bonfire and stacked it with old rubber tyres. So, instead of white smoke, there’s this huge plume of black smoke blowing right across the strip, which, of course, made Bill’s job of landing the aeroplane extremely difficult because he could hardly see the airstrip at all.

But as I said, it was an emergency so with Bill muttering curses at the seismic blokes’ stupidity, he decided to continue with the landing. Down we came on final with me up the front, trying to help poor Bill negotiate his way through all this black smoke. Then
just as we are about to put down, one of the seismic blokes decides that he’d better take a memento of the occasion. So we’re only about 10 or 15 foot off the ground when — Flash! — Bill’s just about night-blinded by the flashlight of a camera. That was immediately followed by some very colourful and derogatory language coming from our pilot punctuated with, ‘Just hang on!’

Considering all the circumstances of a strange strip, the darkness of both the night and the smoke, plus being blinded by flashlight, Bill did a great landing. Though, by now, he’s not in a very cheery mood at all. So he gets out to have a bit of a go at these blokes and it was a Kiwi who’d been bitten. And I hate snakes. Anyhow, these blokes came over and they hand me a jar. ‘Here it is,’ they said.

‘Here it is, what?’ I replied.

‘Here’s the snake that bit him.’

And I just tossed the jar over to Bill, screamed with fright and ran back to hide in the aircraft. When Bill took a look at the snake he grunted, ‘It’s a child’s python. That won’t kill yer. It’s non-venomous. It wouldn’t kill a fly.’ Then he walked off shaking his head at all the unnecessary trouble they’d put us through. I can tell you, he was not a happy pilot at all.

So, with me hiding in the aircraft and Bill having walked off, the doctor was left to manage the situation by himself. Anyhow, we ended up evacuating the bloke. I think, being a Kiwi and there not being any snakes in New Zealand, he was a bit traumatised just by being bitten by one anyway.