The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (32 page)

I guess these two stories are about communication in its different forms. The first one is, perhaps, more rightly about miscommunication. It’s about a young bloke who was a ringer cum jackeroo at Nappa Merrie Station. Nappa Merrie’s out in the channel country, over on the south-western Queensland, north-eastern South Australian border. The Cooper runs through the property. That’s where the Burke and Wills monument is and The Dig Tree.

Anyway, history aside, this young feller had been on a holiday to Brisbane where he’d befriended a young woman. He was obviously very serious about her because, after he came back to Nappa Merrie, he then made up his mind to return to Brisbane, with the express purpose of meeting the young girl’s father and discussing future plans with regard to marriage or whatever. The only trouble was that, when they met, the young woman’s father wasn’t at all impressed with the young lad. What’s more he told him in no uncertain terms that the only way the romance had any chance to continue was, as he said, ‘over my dead body’.

The young ringer had then returned to Nappa Merrie in quite a distraught state. Then, one night, when he was feeling particularly lonely, he gave the girl a ring. But, as luck would have it, the young girl’s father answered the telephone and was rather blunt with the ringer. In fact, he told the young lad something along the lines of: Go away and slash his
wrist. Which, of course, the young ringer did. He did exactly that.

It was at that stage I received the call to say the young ringer had cut his wrists and I advised them what to do to try and arrest the haemorrhage, until I got down there. We flew out from Charleville and, when I got down there to Nappa Merrie and went to the small room where the young ringer was, it looked like he’d done a pretty good job of it. There was blood all over the place.

To begin with, I resuscitated him. Next up, I had to examine the wound to see what sort of damage he’d done to himself. And it was while I was doing the examination that I felt a strange sensation running up my legs, and when I looked down I discovered that the floor was covered with meat ants. Now, I don’t know what attracted them, whether it was the smell of the blood, or what, but these meat ants had decided to crawl up my legs, which was not very comfortable, I can tell you. Anyway, I then had to get rid of them before I could fix the feller up.

Well, the young ringer survived, though I don’t know what happened to him after that, though I don’t presume his romance with the young woman from Brisbane went any further.

The second story, and perhaps a more humorous one, also deals with communication; though, more rightly, this time you could describe it as non-communication.

I was called to a motor bike accident about a couple of hundred kilometres west of Thargomindah, again in south-western Queensland. This feller, he was a middle-aged Japanese bloke and he was riding a big
motor bike. I can’t remember what sort of bike it was, nor what size, but it was a big bike.

Anyhow, he’d had this accident and, of course, he couldn’t speak any English, and me, in my ignorance, couldn’t speak any Japanese. What’s more we didn’t have access to telephone or radio, to get an interpreter or anything like that. Not out there. But I soon found out that we did seem to have one word in common, and that was the word ‘okay’. We both knew the meaning of ‘okay’. Well, I presumed he understood the term ‘okay’ because as I was diagnosing him, I’d do something and ask him, ‘Okay?’

To which he’d reply with an, ‘Okay.’

Anyway, this Japanese bloke had suffered, amongst other things, a fractured pelvis. In fact, his pelvis was in quite bad shape. So having diagnosed him and resuscitated him there were then certain procedures I had to perform before he was considered fit enough to be loaded on the Pilatus PC 12 and be flown back to the hospital. And these were quite invasive sorts of procedures. In fact, they were not the sort you’d expect to have to do, out in the middle of the bush, including, amongst other things, the insertion of a tube into his bladder plus a physical rectal examination.

Of course, everything was done with an ‘okay’. And everything was going ‘okay’ until we came to the rectal examination. Then as I began my examination I looked at him and asked, ‘Okay?’

To which he sort of winced a little, but still replied, ‘Okay.’ Though, this time I noted that his ‘okay’ was not spoken in a very convincing manner.

Anyway, he got the appropriate treatment whether he liked it or not. Then we got him into the plane
and we took him to Toowoomba, where he began his pathway to recovery, before being sent home to Japan.

But now, thinking back, I’m not sure just how much he actually understood about the procedures I did on him, nor why I had to do them. So I have the feeling that, by the time he’d returned to Japan, he was convinced that these rough Australian doctors were anything but okay.

At the time of this story, my wife, Gail, and I we were teachers up at One Arm Point. Mind you, we’re still with the Eduction Department. I’m now a District Director in Geraldton and a lot of the area that I’m responsible for goes into the outback from Geraldton. So I have a large spread of responsibility. Gail is now a school principal. So we’ve moved on in thirty years, but we still have a strong link with the north-west of Western Australia.

Now, One Arm Point is an Aboriginal community about 200 to 240 kilometres north of Broome, on the Dampier Peninsula. The Aboriginals there — the Bardi people — had once lived on Sunday Island, which is probably about 10 to 15 kilometres off the mainland. But then, for a number of reasons, their community on Sunday Island folded so they moved into Derby.

But the tribe really suffered in Derby from drink and unemployment and eventually, after quite a number of years, some of the Elders decided that they’d like to return to their land. Now, setting up a community back on Sunday Island was impractical. That was out of the question, so they got a lease on the mainland as close as possible to Sunday Island, which is where One Arm Point is now. On a map, it’s at the tip of the point that goes north-eastish from Broome, as well as north-westish from Derby. Cape Leveque is just near by. That’s where there’s a lighthouse.

So in 1975 Gail and I were asked by the Superintendent for the Kimberley to go to One Arm Point and open the school, which we did. By that stage, the Aboriginal community had only been going for a year or two and we were the first teachers to go there. We were young. I’d been teaching for seven years and Gail had been teaching for six. So we were pretty inexperienced really, and we were certainly inexperienced as far as Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal people were concerned. But we said, ‘Yes.’ And we bought ourselves a Nissan four-wheel drive and headed off.

When we arrived we had no house and there was no school to teach in. We taught under a tree and we lived in a caravan. I must say that it was quite a cultural shock really, but for all that it was to prove to be a wonderful experience.

Anyway, we’d only been at One Arm Point for two or three weeks when a cyclone came through. And that was another experience, I can tell you. Oh, there was a lot of rain and a lot of wind, that sort of thing. It knocked down a lot of trees and it really put the road in terrible condition. We had the only four-wheel drive vehicle at the community and were the only ones who could get through when the road was that bad. Then, at about two or three o’clock one morning, there came this bang…bang…bang on the side of our caravan and, when we opened the door, a white guy, Brian Carter — he’s married to an Aboriginal person there — said, ‘Would you mind taking one of the young women to Lombadina, she’s in labour.’

Now, because One Arm Point was so new, it had no medical facilities. Oh, there was a very short airstrip there, but it couldn’t take the Flying Doctor aircraft,
certainly not at night time. So basically, there was nothing at One Arm Point while Lombadina — the Catholic Mission about 30 to 40 kilometres south — had a serviceable airstrip, plus it had lay missionaries, and that included a nurse.

So Gail and I got ourselves dressed and we jumped into the Nissan and headed off around to the camp where this young woman was in labour. We pulled up there and her mother and her mother-in-law and a couple of other people carried her out on a mattress and put her in the back of our vehicle. She didn’t look too well, at all. Then the mother and mother-in-law got in the back with her and we headed off to Lombadina. It was still dark. Thankfully, the high winds had passed by then, but there was still a fair bit of rain around and the road was, as I said, in a terrible condition.

Anyway, we’d been driving for, I don’t know, about fifteen minutes or so, when we heard a lot of cries from the young lady in the back. And all of a sudden, one of the older women lent over and said, ‘The baby’s come. The baby’s come. Will you stop? Can you get me a razor blade?’

Well, you know, we didn’t have a razor blade lying around in the vehicle, but Gail hunted around and she did find a pair of scissors in the glove box. So they used this pair of scissors to cut the baby’s umbilical cord then they said, ‘Oh, can you give us some string?’

Well, we didn’t have any string either, nor fishing line. I mean, we just weren’t prepared for an event like this. But anyway, we did have some old carpet in the back of the Nissan so we pulled a thread out of the carpet and they used that to tie the baby’s cord. So then we continued on to Lombadina, with the newly
born baby, the mum and the two new grandmothers, all in the back.

We eventually arrived in Lombadina Mission at about sun-up and we got the lay missionary out of bed. She was a lovely girl. She came out and took the mother and baby inside, into their clinic there, and tended to her. At the same time she got on the radio and called the Flying Doctor who gave us an estimated time of the plane’s arrival at about seven o’clock in the morning. We then headed out to the Lombadina airstrip, again using our vehicle as the ambulance, and the RFDS plane landed and they took the baby and the mum. After the plane had taken off, the grandparents returned to One Arm Point with us.

But the baby was tiny. I think it only weighed about 2 pounds. It was quite premature. Now unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a happy ending because, I don’t know if it had anything to do with the baby being so premature or whether the cyclone had anything to do with it or not but we found out that the baby died about a week later. So yes, it didn’t make it. But that was the story.

I’m a doctor at the RFDS base here in Kalgoorlie and I have two experiences that you may want to hear about. The first one: I can’t remember the exact details, but the guy was a Driller’s Assistant for an exploration outfit. He was with a small team of men who, I think, were drilling for gold. Anyhow, they were doing some drilling just over 200 kilometres southwest of Kalgoorlie. If you can imagine, they were in line roughly between Norseman and a place called Lake Johnston. So they were west of Norseman, and it was about four hours’ drive, on an unborn track, from where they were working to the nearest airstrip at Lake Johnston.

Now, from what I remember, the phone call came into the Kalgoorlie RFDS base at around three o’clock of an afternoon, in November 2004. The first-aider from the drilling company rang to say that they’d just heard about an accident that’d happened about four hours out bush from where the company was. It was all a bit scratchy and second-hand but, from what I could gather, apparently these guys were out drilling and the drill rig struck a tree and a tree branch fell down on this twenty-six-year-old guy and pinned him under it. The first-aider said that they had a lot of gear out there so they were quite confident they could get the tree off the guy but, due to the injuries he’d sustained, they didn’t know if they could get him out to the nearest airstrip at Lake Johnston.

Eventually we got in communication with the accident site and when I spoke to them it sounded like the guy had some pretty serious injuries. He had a very nasty open-fractured leg, abdominal injuries and probably some chest injuries, as well as possible spinal injuries.

The next set of problems we faced were, first, how we could get to him and, second, if we got there, how to get him out. One option was to get the exploration company people to drive an ambulance out to the guy, pick him up, do their best and bring him down to Lake Johnston where we could fly in to meet them. But, as the first-aider had said, they weren’t sure that, with his injuries, he’d survive the four-hour, four-wheel-drive trek from the accident site to Lake Johnston, over some pretty rough ground.

The only other option was for us to fly down to Lake Johnston, hop into a four-wheel drive and go out to meet him, assess his injuries and then, somehow, take it from there. That was all guesswork and, of course, that again meant he’d still eventually have to be transported the four hours over some pretty rugged ground to Lake Johnston.

Anyway, we eventually decided to fly out to Lake Johnston while the mines people headed off in an ambulance to try and get to the accident site.

Now, yet another problem was the available light. Naturally it’s far better for a rescue operation like that to happen in the daylight, but we were rapidly running out of daylight. And the guys from the exploration company reckoned it’d take them at least six hours to get out to the accident site, pick the guy up, then drive him over to Lake Johnston in the dark. They’d then, of
course, have to put out kerosene flares or set up car headlights for us to land.

So we were in an extremely difficult situation, with this guy’s life in the balance and daylight running out. But then, just as we were in the process of packing our aircraft, we heard a flight of Navy helicopters coming into Kalgoorlie. As it turned out they were on their way from Perth, back to Nowra, in New South Wales, and were stopping overnight to refuel. So after they landed, I went over and had a talk to one of their commanding officers and within about twenty minutes they’d received permission to help us out. So we loaded up a Navy Seahawk helicopter and they flew myself and the Flight Nurse straight out to the accident.

It probably took us just under an hour to fly down there and we landed in a clearing right next to where the accident had happened. The ambulance had just arrived by then and they already had the guy on a stretcher and had given him a little bit of pain relief. So we took over and stabilised him, loaded him onto the helicopter and flew him back to Kalgoorlie in the Navy helicopter. Then from Kalgoorlie we put him into a RFDS fixed-wing aircraft, the Pilatus PC 12, and took him through to one of the trauma centres in Perth.

And he survived. Mind you, he ended up with quite a lot of injuries, including spine injuries, and he spent quite a time in hospital but he survived and now he’s okay. So he was one very lucky feller.

The other incident happened quite recently, and he was a lucky feller, too. We do clinic flights out of Kalgoorlie to the remote stations and roadhouses, and
one of these stations is Madura Plains Station, which is just north of the Eyre Highway. I’d actually been there the day before to run a clinic and we were on our way back along the Transcontinental Railway Line. I think we were at Cocklebiddy, which is a roadhouse along the way, and we got a call from the manager at Madura Plains Station to say that they’d been mustering and a jackeroo had failed to call in on the radio. So they went looking for him in the mustering plane and they eventually spotted him, lying on the ground next to his motor bike, and it looked like he was unconscious.

Then about a quarter of an hour later some of the other musterers were directed to him by the mustering plane and they rang to confirm that, ‘Yeah, this guy’s come off his motor bike. He’s hit his head and appears to be unconscious and it looks like he’s been fitting.’

Luckily we were only about half an hour away in the clinic plane so, yeah, they wanted us to come and get him. Now, when we do clinics, we only use a small charter plane. We can’t carry patients with us. We just carry all the basic medical gear for the more minor medical first-aid treatments and pain relief and things like that. But the Flying Doctor plane, the Pilatus PC 12, you know, it’s fitted out like an ambulance, with all the proper aero-medical outfit. So the RFDS in Kalgoorlie decided to send that out as well.

Anyway, the pilot and I, we landed at Madura Plains Station in the clinic plane and we jumped in a four-wheel drive and then it was probably a pretty good fifty-minute drive out to the scene of the accident. When we arrived there we stabilised the injured jackeroo and we packed him up, put him in the back
of the ute, and by the time we got him back to the airstrip at Madura Plains Station — which took about two and a half hours in total — the PC 12 had arrived with a doctor and nurse on board and they took over and flew him to Kalgoorlie Hospital. So he was one lucky feller, too.