The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (50 page)

Well, I’ve certainly had a lot more experiences since your first book of
Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories
came out, way back in 1999. So yes, I can give you a few more stories and, mind you, these are from a doctor’s point of view, of course. One that knocked me for six was an amazing story of survival stemming from an accident that happened in the Carnarvon National Park, which is in south-eastern Queensland, sort of, north-east of Charleville. It’s near a place called Injune.

Okay, it was a week day, about midday, when I got a call on the HF radio from a ranger feller out in the Carnarvon National Park. He said that he’d been driving around the park and he’d come across an accident. A utility vehicle was down in a roadside drain with the male driver slumped over the steering wheel. The driver was unconscious. Because there were no other vehicles about, the feller that reported the accident assumed it’d been a single-vehicle accident. So I advised him what to do until we got up there. I also requested that I be met at the nearest airstrip, at an ETA (estimated time of arrival) to be advised, and for them to be prepared to take us, in one of their vehicles, out to the accident site. The driver chap was still in the car at this time and he still remained slumped over the steering wheel.

So we flew up to the Carnarvon National Park and landed at the Mount Moffatt airstrip, where the Parks
people met us in a vehicle. They then took us from there, with all our equipment, up to where they’d found the vehicle. Upon arrival at the scene of the accident my suspicions were immediately aroused because, firstly, there were no skid marks and, secondly, there was no sign of there being any damage to the vehicle. When we got the feller out of his vehicle, my primary assessment suggested that he was in some sort of shock. At that stage I didn’t know which sort of shock it was. Anyway, I got a large bore intravenous cannula into him and gave him a couple of litres of fluid fairly quickly, and this improved his situation somewhat. I then did a secondary survey, which is a head-to-toe survey, of his wellbeing. Things did not look good: his face had been badly pushed in; his chest was a bit suspect. I estimated that his belly was full of blood, and he had bilateral mid-shaft of femurs, with both sticking out at right angles. That’s his thigh bone. He also had a fractured forearm.

By that stage I’d resuscitated him and he was able to talk to us, just a little, and he managed to inform us as to what had happened. As it turned out, there was just him and his dog and he’d been cutting down a tree for firewood in the National Park, which was illegal — though that was the least of our concerns at that stage. While he was cutting a tree, it had fallen on him, trapping him underneath it. So that’s when he had sustained all these injuries I’ve just described. Then, somehow — and I don’t know how — he’d worked his way out from underneath the tree. His ute was parked across the flat and he must’ve crawled his way over to the ute, a distance of a couple of hundred yards. He then put the dog in the back of his utility vehicle
and made sure the dog was safe, then he somehow managed to get himself in the front of the vehicle. How he managed to do this, in his condition, I would not have a clue.

He then drove the vehicle — it was a manual — to a nearby homestead, where he knew there was a telephone. When he arrived at the homestead he couldn’t raise anyone. Nobody was at home. So he went back out onto the road where he had obviously at some stage just passed out from the loss of blood. That’s when he put his vehicle in the roadside ditch, which was where the ranger feller had come across him, slumped over the steering wheel.

So we stabilised him as best we could. Then we put him onto the back of a vehicle and they took him over a very, very rough road, back to the aeroplane. And, you wouldn’t believe this, but the whole way back to the aeroplane he cracked jokes like nobody’s business and I’m sure it wasn’t just from the happy juice I’d administered to him.

Anyway, we put him in the aeroplane and we took him down to Royal Brisbane Hospital. He had a laparotomy that night — that’s opening up his belly — and basically they found that he had a ruptured liver as well as all the other injuries I’ve previously described.

I’m afraid I didn’t follow up on the dog because I had my hands full, assessing and stabilising the patient. But as far as I was concerned I’d have to say ‘Hats off’ to this feller. Because let’s focus on the injuries that he would’ve sustained when the tree fell on him. As a summary: his face had been quite severely damaged. He had a fractured forearm. He had bilateral mid-shaft
of femurs; in other words both sides of his femurs were broken at right angles, which meant that they were sticking out at right angles. He had a belly full of blood, which later on proved to be from a ruptured liver. His chest was suspect at the time, possibly from the blood in the belly pushing up to the diaphragm. I wasn’t sure how, at that early stage, but he was still able to maintain his respiratory drive okay, so I didn’t have to ventilate him.

Now considering his condition I ask you, with all those injuries, first of all, how did he get out from under the tree? Then how did he manage to crawl the couple of hundred yards across the ground to his ute? Following that, how did he manage to get into the ute and then drive the vehicle to the homestead, keeping in mind that it was a manual drive?

In my time as a doctor, it’s one of the greatest survival stories that I have known. And the people at the Royal Brisbane Hospital, they put him back together and he could walk again after all that. In fact, I last saw him walking down the street in Injune.

What you’ve got to take into consideration is that it’s not just the vast distances we in the Royal Flying Doctor Service have to cover, but also the many, many miles that some of our constituents have to travel to get anywhere. Now this notion of distance may seem inconceivable for someone who is living in a city, where all the amenities are so close. But that’s not the way it is out there, in the more isolated areas. For example, take the time we had to cancel a medical clinic — at short notice — from out of our operations at Port Augusta. This was a few years ago now so I can’t quite remember where the clinic was originally going to be held and nor can I remember what the exact reason was as to why we had to cancel it. It could’ve been due to bad weather, which is the most likely reason, or it may have even been aircraft or crew unavailability. Those things happen sometimes. But anyway, the issue was that we were forced to cancel the clinic, and as soon as that decision had been made we let everyone know.

Then shortly after we notified everyone of the cancellation I got a call from a woman who used to attend this particular clinic, whenever the need arose. ‘I’ve just arrived at our front gate and my husband’s called to say that you’ve cancelled the medical clinic,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not exactly sure but I can find out and radio you back, if you like.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s no need for that but I would’ve liked to have known a little bit earlier.’

Now, if you lived in the city your normal reaction would be to say, ‘Well, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem; just turn around and go back inside your house.’ Because if you do live in the city and you’ve walked out the door and you’ve just arrived at your front gate and your husband’s called out to tell you that the doctor’s now unavailable, then you’d just turn around and go back inside, wouldn’t you? It’s that easy.

Anyhow, this woman, she said to me, ‘Yeah well, I guess that I’ll just have to turn around and go back home now, but it seems to be an enormous waste of time.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I sincerely apologise but it’s still only nine o’clock in the morning.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it may still only be nine o’clock in the morning but I’ve already travelled well over 60 kilometres, along a dirt track, and that’s just from my back door to the front gate of our property.’

And that put it into some sort of perspective. You know, because of the distances that some of these people have to travel — just to reach their own front gate — a cancellation like that is not a simple thing.

So you have to admire people like that, particularly the women. Take our Consumer Network Group. It’s a wonderful way of engaging with the actual people we serve. It’s made up of predominantly females and we get together every now and then for face-to-face meetings to discuss how the RFDS can better serve its constituents. We’re actually reinvigorating it now,
which is very exciting, because you get everyone talking about things like the services they’re receiving, and the frequency they get them, and the freedom of access and, you know, things like: are we meeting their requirements? Can we do it better? Is there something else we should be looking at?

Now, I’m not saying that we can always rectify all these matters because, as you may be able to imagine, there are huge logistical problems in servicing such vast areas of this continent. Like I said about that woman before — it’s not like she could simply just turn around and go back home and get on with her day as if nothing had happened.

And so, when I get to talk to the many people that go to these Consumer Network Group meetings, I’m always reminded of that John Williamson song, ‘Woman on the Land’. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard it or not. It goes something like, ‘So I propose a toast to the mothers that we know. Proud to be the better half who really run the show… To our hero — the woman on the land.’ It’s a magnificent song. Anyhow, I learned the words for one particular Consumer Network Group meeting because, you know, the last thing we want is for our constituents to reach a point where they’re just a recorded number. They’re more than that. They’re people. They’re human beings. And those women, and in actual fact everyone we serve, they are the real heroes of the outback.

Of course, it’s not just the Royal Flying Doctor Service who supports them. There are many other organisations involved. And also, of course, the people themselves are also extremely supportive of each other, perhaps sometimes a little too over zealously.
There’s one occasion that always tickles me: I remember when I was with one of the doctors during a phone-in medical session. They used to happen over the air, twice daily. The first session was at eight o’clock in the morning, before the School of the Air program started, and the second was at four o’clock in the afternoon, after School of the Air had finished. They were timed that way because the mums were often fairly busy, not just supervising their children during their classes but also helping run the property, as well as attending to the normal ‘womanly’ chores of washing, cooking, cleaning, plus the multitude of other tasks they take on. Like I said, real heroes of the outback.

Now, what you’ve got to appreciate is that these medical sessions were open sessions. Anyone could listen in, and they quite often did. It was an easy way for everyone to find out how everyone else was going. So this time the doctor opened the radio and initially he registered who was out there. Then once everyone was registered, he went back to the first person. He gave her call sign and the lady replied with, ‘I’m just a bit concerned about little Johnny.’

‘Oh yes,’ replied the doctor, ‘can you tell me his symptoms?’

‘Well, Doctor, he’s got such and such.’ And she described little Johnny’s symptoms.

Then before the doctor could even answer, one of the lady’s neighbours cut in, over the radio, and said, ‘Oh, I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him.’

And I thought that that showed the real essence of the bush: you know, how even if these people are hundreds of miles apart, they’re not only comfortable
talking about their own personal issues to a doctor, while everyone else was listening in, but they were also willing to put in their sixpence worth if they thought they could help each other out.

I’ve just been reading your second book of Flying Doctor stories —
More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories
— and in that book there’s one particular story called ‘Blown Away’. Now you’re not going to believe this but I was the pilot that was mentioned in that story and in actual fact, over my time in the Royal Flying Doctor Service, it’s one of my all-time favourite stories as well. So, would you like to hear the story from the pilot’s side of the event?

If you don’t mind, I’ve sort of written bits and pieces of it down and I’d like to read it to you more or less as I’ve written it. So, okay, here goes.

One of my favourite stories happened not long after I started with the Flying Doctor Service. So that must’ve been about 1990 or thereabouts. Anyway, I was working at Port Hedland at the time and we received a call from a family who were driving along the Canning Stock Route.

Now, I’m presuming here that everyone knows where the Canning Stock Route is. If not, I’d just like to relate a brief overview because it will give the readers a clearer picture of the desolation of the situation. The Canning is an old stock route that runs a distance of 1820 kilometres along a series of wells through the central deserts of Western Australia, from Halls Creek, in the north, right down to near Wiluna, which is just west of Meekatharra. I’m not sure what it’s like today, but originally there were supposed to
be something like fifty-one wells, or watering points, along the length of the stock route. Then over the stock route’s historic period, from when the track was being surveyed and then during the following years when droving was taking place, the records tell us that there were something like ten murders, a number of inflicted woundings and several deaths from internal complications of — and I quote — ‘unknown origin’. These murders, woundings and deaths from unknown origins involved both white and indigenous people.

Also there were and still are countless sand ridges. And I’ll quote again here — ‘According to Dr J. S. Bard, over one particular section of 470 miles, some 730 sand ridges lay along the stock route, containing enough material to cover the country evenly with sand to a depth of three feet. The biggest sand ridges are between Wells 41 and 42. When formed they are approximately a mile apart, averaging sixty feet in height, with a base of about 320 feet.’

So, if you can calculate that back to the figures we use these days, that might just give you some idea as to what the country out there is like. And while droving no longer takes place along the Canning these days, it’s a favourite journey-cum-adventure for many four-wheel drivers.

Anyhow, these people were camped near Well 33, which was right out, oh, it’s probably only about 200 kilometres from the Northern Territory border. So it’s fairly well east. And they were travelling in convoy with another couple, who were also in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Anyhow, their young daughter, who was about nine or ten years old, climbed about the only tree that was out in that part of the desert and
the branch broke and she fell down and broke what I believe was her arm. In your story, the storyteller thought that she’d fractured one of her thighs. So I stand corrected on that point. Mind you, it was a long time ago.

Now, as luck would have it, they were reasonably close to an old airstrip. The only trouble was that the strip hadn’t been used for a very long time. Now, I’m trying to remember just what the name of that particular strip was. No, sorry, I can’t remember just offhand. Anyway, it was overgrown with short, low bushes, maybe up to something like a metre high. So, as I said, it hadn’t been used for a fair while.

We got the call the night before we went out there and, of course, naturally there were no landing lights on the strip out there or anything so we had to wait until first light to head off. At that point of time, with the airstrip being so overgrown, it was impossible for us to land anyway. But all through the night these people and their other companions worked by their car headlights, clearing the bushes with shovels and spades and what-not.

Then I flew out of our Port Hedland base just before first light in an attempt to arrive at the remote airstrip just on first light. When I arrived, the strip still looked pretty rough but it looked landable so I was willing to give it a try. These people, they’d set up a fire with the smoke to show me the wind direction. Anyhow, I landed the plane on this makeshift strip and we successfully picked up the little girl and her mother and took them back to Port Hedland, where the little girl received further necessary treatment. So that was a very satisfying retrieval.

I think that the people were from Victoria somewhere, and later on we got a lovely letter back from the little girl thanking us for what we did. Then along with her letter the girl’s parents sent some lovely photos of, you know, the girl lying in the back of the car and the airstrip before they cleared it and then after they’d cleared it and also of the aeroplane coming in to land. But it must’ve been a hell of a job to clear the airstrip, which had to be about 1000 metres long. I mean, that’s quite a lot of work they did, and, as I said, they worked all night.

But in her letter the little girl also told us how her broken limb had healed and how that everything was now fine, thanks to us. And that really warms your heart. So, there’s just another side of that story — ‘Blown Away’ — that you related in your book
More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories
, and really, as I said, it is one of my very favourites.