The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (42 page)

My name is Alex Hargans and I had my ninety-third birthday two weeks ago. These days I’m aching a bit with osteoporosis but I’m still going to have a new hip put in in a few months’ time and the doctor told me that I’ll be the oldest person he’s ever performed that sort of operation on. So there you go.

But what I want to talk about is that, in the previous Flying Doctors book, there was a story titled ‘A Piece o’ Piss’. It was all about a big head-on accident, involving an elderly couple, out on the dirt road between Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing, up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. I believe it was told by a friend of Penny Ende’s, who’s the nursing wife of the Flying Doctor pilot who attended that accident. The pilot’s name was Jan Ende. Well, that story was about me and my wife, Edna, and I’d like to tell my side of things because, to this day, I truly believe that if it hadn’t been for the flying skills of Jan Ende, the RFDS pilot, I wouldn’t be alive.

Okay then, here we go. Well, back in 1973, the wife, Edna, and I decided that we’d like to go on a big outback trip in my fairly new V8 Fairmont. So we left our home, here in Bathurst, which is in the central east of New South Wales, and we headed up into southwestern Queensland, to Charleville, then on to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame at Longreach, before getting on to the Barkly Highway, which came out just above
Tennant Creek. That’s where you’ll find the memorial to John Flynn, these days.

From there we headed north along the Stuart Highway to Darwin. We fossicked around there for a while then we drove back down to Katherine and took the Victoria Highway across into northern Western Australia before heading south, down the Great Northern Highway to Halls Creek.

Mind you, I don’t know why they call them highways because they’re not up to scratch as far as highways go. Back then, most of them weren’t much more than poorly graded, corrugated, gravel roads, with lots of potholes which were overflowing with that very fine dusty dirt they describe as bulldust. I might add that they’re not too wide either so when you come across one of those huge cattle tucks, or road trains as they’re known, you’ve got to be extremely careful, as I was to find out.

Anyhow, our aim was to go and have a look at the tourist resort place of Broome, over on the west coast, then return to Halls Creek and go across the Tanami Track to Alice Springs, then back home again to Bathurst.

Well, we were on our way to Broome and we’d pulled up for petrol at Halls Creek and I was talking to the owner of the place there and he said, ‘Do you mind if I give you a bit of free advice?’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘I’m always interested in a bit of free advice.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘from here on a lot of road trains use this road and there’s also a lot of bulldust and these fellers know the track like the back of their hand so they don’t slow down in the bulldust and there’s been
a few accidents lately involving people from the east coast who stop and wait for the dust to clear before they move on. And while they’ve stopped they’ve been hit by someone coming up from behind them. So my advice to you is,’ he said, ‘whatever you do, don’t stop. If you come across one of these road trains just slow down a bit, but don’t stop.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks for that.’

And so we headed off towards Fitzroy Crossing. Then along the way we saw one of the big road trains coming toward us and it was drafting up a huge cloud of bulldust. So I switched on my headlights and I slowed down and kept well over to my left, off near the edge of the road.

Well, the bloke at the petrol station had been right because the bulldust that the road train kicked up was so thick I could only see about two car lengths in front of me.

Anyway, just as the prime mover had almost passed us, I caught this flash of a nickel-plated bumper bar coming straight at me, overtaking the road train in all the dust. It turned out to be a feller driving an old Holden and we found out later that he was towing a great big trailer with no brakes on. He also didn’t have his headlights on. My estimate would be that he must’ve been doing at least 100 kilometres per hour and we were probably doing about 40. So the closing time was pretty brief.

Even so, I think I managed to get my foot on the brake. Though that didn’t do much good because, when we collided, the engine of the Fairmont got knocked back under the seat and my right hip got displaced about 6 inches. Most of the damage was done to the
driver’s side of my vehicle, so I was pinned in the car. I couldn’t move at all. I had the dash up under my chin, with one knee threaded up through the steering wheel. Still, I managed to say to Edna, ‘Could you get out and undo the bolts underneath the seat so that I can get the seat back?’

And even though, due to the impact of the seatbelt, Edna had a number of broken ribs, she still managed to get out of the car on her side, the passenger’s side. Anyway, she went and had a bit of a look around, then she came back and said, ‘Look, the back of the car’s broken and the tyres are flat, and it’s on the ground.’

Now, because his truck had kicked up so much bulldust, the first driver hadn’t seen a thing and so he’d kept on driving. So there I was, stuck there, out on this pretty lonely stretch of road and, I can assure you, it was very painful.

Another thing that really, really frightened me was that I always carried my spare petrol on the roof-rack of the Fairmont, in a couple of those spitfire wind tanks. And when the collision occurred, the roof-rack kept going and petrol went everywhere. So all the while I was trapped inside the car, and I couldn’t move, there was this strong smell of petrol around the place. And my immediate thought was that: ‘If somebody decides to light a fag to steady their nerves, then I’m well and truly done for.’

So I said to Edna, ‘Go and see the people in the other car and tell them not to strike a match.’

And Edna went over to speak to them, but I think the driver of the old Holden had a fractured skull and a ruptured spleen or something so he wasn’t too
interested in lighting up a fag at that stage. And the two women that were with him, they both had broken arms, so even if they wanted a fag — they couldn’t light a match because they couldn’t use their arms.

Then after a little while a drilling rig team came along. I forget how many vehicles they were travelling in but they were in a bit of a convoy and they stopped and chucked a big hook through where the windscreen used to be and they pulled the dash away from me. Then finally, they got my knee out from under the steering wheel and dragged me out through the back window of the Fairmont.

The next thing, a PMG (Postmaster-General) bloke came along and he had a two-way radio, so he got on to that and he sent out a call. Now, I may be a little bit wrong here but I think that the manager of Christmas Creek Station heard this call and then he came out with a tall antenna on the back of his utility and it was he that actually called the Flying Doctor base in Derby. And naturally the RFDS said they’d fly out as soon as humanly possible.

And the rest of the story is pretty much as it was written up in ‘A Piece o’ Piss’. You know, about how the drilling rig people and the PMG bloke, along with the Manager from Christmas Creek Station, they blocked off a section of the road and everyone who stopped got out of their vehicles and helped knock down the ant hills and clear the stones and stuff off a straight section of the road so that the RFDS plane could land.

Then Jan Ende flew out with the doctor and a flight nurse and he managed to put down the Queen Air aeroplane on that rough bit of straight road. And then came the other real scary bit with our dodgy
escape out of there. Because, in reality, the bit of road Jan had to take off along was far too short for the type of aeroplane he was flying, particularly with its increased passenger weight. So he really had to gun the Queen Air to get it back in the air again and he just made it because, in doing so, the propellers shredded the shrubbery as he inched the plane off the ground.

Both the vehicles were written off, of course, and I never saw my fairly new V8 Fairmont again. Anyhow, Jan and I have kept in touch ever since the accident. Incidentally, he’s coming over in August, so I’ll probably see him again then.

I’ve since lost my mate, Edna. I lost her about three years ago now and had she lived for another couple of months, we would’ve been married for sixty-nine years. And, you know, life’s pretty lonely without Edna — real lonely, in fact. And we never had a row, not over all that time. Never a row, and we did everything together, everything that is, apart from the five years and sixty-five days I was serving in the Air Force during the war.

But there’s a little bit of a twist to the story about that accident and it’s one that I haven’t really mentioned too much before. It’s got to do with the generosity of humanity. Because, see, Edna and I, we were married back in 1934, in the Depression era. We had a very basic wedding, at the Methodist Manse in Bathurst, with just a couple of witnesses. There were no bridal bouquets or any of that sort of stuff, just a vow and a kiss and that sealed it for life. We were married, and that was it.

As you might know, things were very bad in 1934, you know, with the Depression going on.
Unemployment was rife and so times were tough. Actually, I remember when Edna used to go shopping with just sixpence in her purse — yes, just sixpence — and she’d buy threepence worth of soup bones and threepence worth of soup vegetables, and she’d make up a huge pot of soup and we’d try and string that out.

Anyhow, the way the dole worked in those days was that if you weren’t resident in a town, you could only get the dole once. So the people that were on the dole had to line up outside the police station and get interrogated by the cops. You know, they’d ask, ‘Why did you lose your last job?’ and ‘Where was your last job?’ All that sort of stuff, and some of them were quite strict about it. And so, about lunchtime, fellers who were down and out would come around and they’d say to Edna, ‘Missus, I’ll cut you a barrow load of wood in exchange fer a feed.’

And Edna, being Edna, would always reply with, ‘Oh, there’s no need for you to cut wood for us, but you’re welcome to stay for a feed.’

‘Oh, thank you, Missus,’ they’d say. ‘Thank you very much.’

When that happened, Edna would just add an extra cup of water into the soup pot so there was enough to go around.

So that was away back, during the Depression era, in the 1930s. Then in 1973, after we had the accident out on the Halls Creek to Fitzroy Crossing road, whilst Edna and I were recovering in the Derby Hospital — and I must say that they treated us extremely well up there — I got a letter from one of the down-andout blokes that’d visited us a few times during the Depression. And in the letter he wrote, ‘I don’t know
how you’re fixed for money, but I read about your accident. I remember your kindness to me, the meals that I had at your place and I’m enclosing $20, just in case you’re a bit short.’

So, wasn’t that fantastic? And he was a Scotchman, too.

There’s one really memorable trip that sticks in my mind. That was back on 9 February 1981 and I guess it turned out to be one of the main reasons why I gave flying up, in the end.

Of course, I’d been flying for a long time before then. Actually, I first joined the RFDS as a flight nurse back in 1976. That was up here, in Derby. Then after two years of constant flying, I just wanted a break and go overseas for three months with some friends. I already had six weeks’ holiday due to me, then I wanted to add to that another six weeks’ leave without pay. Anyhow, the Health Department, in Perth, who administered all those sorts of things — and from a long, long way down south, I may add — well, they just said, ‘You can’t do that. We won’t give you leave without pay.’

So, then I resigned and I decided to take a whole year off. And when I was finishing up, the lady down in Perth who did the interviewing and the hiring of people for the Health Department, she said, ‘Don’t worry, when you come back, just give me a call and I’m sure we can do something for you.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ I said and off I went and had a wonderful year of travel.

Then when I returned from overseas I went to stay in my parents’ house at Mareeba, in far north Queensland, and it was a desperate case of, ‘Well, seeing I’ve got no money left, I’d better get a job.’

So, I wrote to the lady in Perth telling her that I was back in Australia and was enquiring about another position. I also explained that I wasn’t available for about three or four weeks because my parents had gone on holidays and I’d promised to look after their house and garden. Next thing I know, a telegram arrives from Perth saying, ‘Come immediately. We’ve got a position available at the Port Hedland RFDS base.’

Then I had to telegram back to say, ‘Look, as I stated in my letter, I’m not available. I can’t do anything for another three weeks.’

Anyhow, so then I thought they’d naturally go ahead and give the position to someone else. But when my parents returned home, the position was still available so I went to Port Hedland. But I didn’t like it that much because Hedland was all emergency stuff. They didn’t fly clinics out of Hedland whereas they did out of Derby and it was the clinic work — the people-contact — that I used to enjoy so much. I mean, you know, the emergency stuff was also in Derby and you had to do it, but I didn’t thrive on it, if you understand what I mean. Anyhow, I did four months in Port Hedland and then, when a position came vacant up at Derby, I jumped at it. So yeah, in all I’d done my first two years with the RFDS in Derby, took a year off, and then I started up there again in 1979. And I was very pleased about that.

But the constant flying does tend to wear you down after a while, and it was a couple of years later, on 9 February 1981, when we got the call from Balgo Aboriginal Community. By then we’d increased our RFDS fleet in Derby. We now had two pilots and two
aeroplanes — a Queen Air and a Beechcraft Baron — though, mind you, we still had just the two flight nurses. But that’s the way it went in those days, and so I was one of the flight nurses.

Anyway, the other flight nurse plus a doctor and one of the pilots had already been down at Balgo in the Queen Air aeroplane earlier that day, running a clinic. And while they were there the doctor had attended to a young Aboriginal girl — a nine-year-old — who’d apparently shown some tablets to her mother and said, ‘I’ve just eaten some of these.’

The little girl was a bit slow, you know, retarded. I guess that these days they’d say she was ‘disabled’. So the doctor gave the girl some medicine to make her vomit, which she did and, sure enough, the tablets came out. She was still a little bit drowsy, but the doctor thought, ‘Well, at least she’s got it all out of her system. She should be okay, now.’

Then after they’d finished the clinic at Balgo, they jumped back into the Queen Air and headed back to Derby. But unbeknown to everybody, the little girl had also fed some of the tablets to a four-year-old boy. I forget now, but I think it might’ve been her baby brother. Now, the four-year-old had gone to bed earlier that afternoon and when his mum had tried to wake him around five o’clock, he wouldn’t stir. He was right out of it, and that’s when we got the call in at our Derby base.

By this stage, the Queen Air that had been out at Balgo was about due back in Derby. So, with the Queen Air being faster than our second aircraft, the Beechcraft Baron, they said, ‘Well, as soon as the Queen Air arrives we’ll refuel it and send it
straight back out there again to pick up this deeply unconscious little boy.’

So the pilot, myself and a doctor — a paediatrician — arrived at the Derby airstrip ready to go to Balgo. The Queen Air landed and, while they were refuelling it, the two pilots exchanged conversation about the weather. Being February it was wet season so, you know, there was a lot of lightning about and storms and it was pretty blowy and very wet. But from all reports, apparently, at that stage, Balgo, itself, was okay.

Anyway, we took off into this driving rain. It was horizontal rain. Very bad weather. Terrible. We were being buffeted all around the place. But we kept on going and going, and after a while, to me, it seemed that we were taking much longer than expected. Normally, it used to take us around two and a half hours to get out to Balgo in the Beechcraft Baron and here we were in the Queen Air, a faster aircraft, and we’d already been in the air for that long.

Now the pilot we had with us was one of our older pilots. Mind you, he was also a very excellent pilot. He’d flown in Vietnam and places like that, so he’d had a lot of experience. Anyway, we kept flying and flying and I was thinking, ‘Gosh, it’s taking a long time.’

So in the end, I went up front and I said to the pilot, ‘Where are we? Surely we should nearly be there by now.’

‘I know we should. It’s out there somewhere,’ he said, ‘but I can’t see the lights.’ Normally, when Balgo knew we were coming at night, they’d put on their big basketball court lights. ‘Perhaps we can’t see them because the rain’s so heavy between us and them,’ the pilot added.

‘Oh, okay,’ I said and I went and sat back down.

Then, sure enough, much to my relief the lights of Balgo finally came into view. And oddly enough, while it was still raining where we were, when we got over Balgo, there was no rain at all. None at all. Though, mind you, there was still a savage wind.

Anyway, the pilot managed that alright and we landed safely and were met at the airstrip. Then the doctor and I, we were taken straight into the Balgo Clinic to stabilise the child, the little boy. First thing was to put up a drip in case we needed to give him IV (intravenous) drugs. I think the doctor’s main concern was that, because the boy was unconscious, he might fit — you know, have a seizure — and the doctor just wanted to have a line in, just in case.

So we sorted out the little four-year-old boy. Then the doctor took a look at the nine-year-old girl and because she was still very drowsy he decided that it’d be better if we took both the children back to Derby with us. We had two stretchers so we laid the children down on those in the Queen Air. We placed the little boy — who was our main concern — with his head to the door of the aeroplane just in case the doctor needed to intubate him; you know, to breathe for him if he should stop breathing, which is always a danger when you’ve had an overdose of drugs. But the little boy seemed to be alright. We had the drip up and he was breathing by himself, though he was still right out to it. So the paediatrician’s sitting over there. I’m here, the baby boy’s just over there and then the older one, the girl, she was right behind me on her stretcher, and she was alright. You could rouse her but she was still very dopey.

By the time we’d got them both settled in the Queen Air the rain had started to come in again and there was also still a very strong wind blowing. But we took off alright, it was about nine o’clock at night, and I’m busy down the back, you know, taking obs and everything on the children.

Then we were only about fifteen or twenty minutes out of Balgo, on our way back to Derby, and, you know, when you’ve flown a lot you tend to get accustomed to the monotonous drone of the engine. Well we’d levelled out at about 6000 feet and I heard this funny noise in one of the engines. I don’t know how to describe it except that it was, like, it just wasn’t normal. Anyhow I’m still busy with the children but when I hear this odd noise I look up at the pilot and there he is, he’s sitting there in the cockpit, with these little half glasses on and he’s peering over them at his controls.

So I said to the paediatrician, ‘I think there’s something wrong with that engine. Can you hear it?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t.’

But you know, as I said, when you fly a lot, you just know these things. Anyhow, because I wasn’t backward in coming forward, and I wanted to know what was happening, I went up to the pilot and I tapped him on the shoulder and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

And he was a really slow talker. ‘Oh,’ he drawled, ‘I’m having trouble with the port engine.’ He said, ‘It’s running a bit hot.’

Still and all, he didn’t really seem all that worried so I just said something like, ‘Oh, okay,’ then I went back and sat down.

‘What’s up?’ the doctor asked.

‘The pilot’s having trouble with one of the engines.’

And just as I said it, I was gripped by that fleeting fear of, ‘Hey, we could be in big, big trouble here. Someone’s got to know about this because if we go down away out here in the Kimberley, nobody will even know what’s happened.’

Anyhow there was a radio at the back of the co-pilot’s seat, which the nurse could use, so I used that to try and get in touch with Balgo. But there was no answer there. Then there’s the red button — the emergency button — it’s the same one the station people use in an emergency to get in contact with their nearest RFDS base. By this stage the pilot was talking to someone over his radio, but with all the racket going on with the wind and the rain and everything — I wasn’t sure whether he was alerting anyone or not. But we were really limping, so I thought, ‘Well, this is an emergency.’

So I pressed the emergency button and the wife of the Base Manager at Derby come over the radio and I said, ‘You know how we just had to go to Balgo and pick up these two children?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’re on our way back to Derby and we’ve run into difficulty. We’re having trouble with one of the engines in the Queen Air and I just think you ought to know.’

And the wife of the Base Manager said, ‘Thanks very much for that information. We’ll stand by if you need us.’

Then just as I’d replaced the radio, the pilot turned around to me and said, ‘I’m going to have to close the port engine down.’

Well, from then on we were just so worried that something very serious was about to happen. And it
was so dark outside the Queen Air that I couldn’t see a thing, and I’m thinking, ‘Here we are in this big plane, which is now about to start flying on just the one engine, it’s pitch black outside, it’s raining, it’s extremely windy, and if we’re only travelling on one engine then it’ll take at least two hours to get back to Derby.’

We were still flying at 6000 feet at that stage, but when the pilot shut the engine down I took a look over his shoulder and I could see the altimeter in free-fall. From 6000 feet it dropped down to 5000 feet and there he was, the pilot, trying to steady the thing. Then it fell from 5000 feet down to 4000 feet, down to 3000 feet, and we eventually pulled up at 2000 feet. From experience, I knew that the lowest safe flying level was 1000 feet and that was because of the mountains that were around us — the ‘jump-ups’, as they were known.

Then it suddenly hit me, ‘How will we ever make it?’

So I’m desperately trying to work out just how long it was going to take us to get back to Derby, on one engine and in these horrific conditions. Now, my maths was never that good but whatever way I tried to figure it out, the result always ended up as being an extremely frightening prospect, indeed. An impossible equation. And, you know, it was one of those times when your whole life sort of flashes before you and I came to the conclusion, well, like, I’m not quite ready to go just yet.

And it was about then that the pilot turned around and said, ‘I think we’ll try and get back to Balgo. It’s not as far.’

‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘what a good idea.’

So he turned the Queen Air around and we started to head back to Balgo. But by that stage we were
already twenty minutes out and I knew that they only left the basketball court lights and the airstrip lights on for twenty minutes after a plane left. And that meant, by the time we got back there, all the lights would be out and we wouldn’t be able to find the place. So I tried to raise Balgo again on the radio to tell them, you know, ‘Hey, switch the lights back on. We’re in big trouble here and we have to come back.’

But again, there wasn’t an answer. So I continued trying and trying to get on to Balgo and still, nothing, nothing, nothing. Then I realised that the staff in the clinic there would’ve probably been so pleased to have seen the two children fly out that they would’ve said, ‘Oh well, they’re safe now so, with it being such a rotten night, we may as well just pack up and go home and go to bed.’

Then, for the first time that night, luck was with us because as we got closer to Balgo we could just make out the lights from the basketball court. Thankfully, someone must’ve forgotten to switch them off. What’s more, when we got closer, the airstrip lights were still on. And, well, I just couldn’t believe it.

Still, there remained the huge problem of trying to land the Queen Air on just the one engine, and in these terrible conditions. It was sheeting rain and you know how, when the pilots prepare to land, they fly across the airstrip then go around to line up so that the airstrip’s right there in front of them. Well our pilot went around once, then twice, then three times and so on until he reached his eighth attempt and he still couldn’t line up the airstrip to his satisfaction. He’d either lose sight of the airstrip lights in the pelting rain or the driving wind would blow the plane too far this
way or too far that way, and by now I’m thinking, We’re never going to make it.