The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (6 page)

Now I might get these couple of blokes into strife here if I mention their real names, so let’s call the pilot ‘Jack’ and the doctor ‘Don’. Anyway, the pilot who’s Jack in this story was the same bloke who taught me to fly. There’s a hint. And the doctor is also well known, especially around these parts. There’s another hint. But I’d better not mention their true names, like I said, just in case.

One night Don got an urgent call to go out to a seismic camp where a chap had reportedly been bitten by a snake. These seismic people were doing the survey work in preparation for oil rigs to move in. There were about thirty or so men in this particular camp.

Jack was a spot-on navigator, one of the best I’ve ever seen. So he stoked up the Navaho and they flew to Quilpy. That way may sound like the long way of going about it, but it’s a far surer way of finding someone out in the never-never than to fly to a known point then bear another heading. It shortens the distance and lessens the error.

So out they flew in the dead of night to find this camp, and when they came across it these seismic blokes were as disorganised as buggery. They were still running around trying to light up the bloody airstrip. So Jack circled the Navaho around for a while until he could get a good sighting of the runway. Then, lo and behold, just as they were about to touch down one of the idiots aimed a spotlight fair in Jack’s eyes, blinding him.

‘The plane musta landed itself,’ Jack has since told me.

Anyway, they landed safely, and when they taxied back to these seismic blokes they discovered that the whole mob of them were as drunk as skunks.

‘Which one of youse is the one that’s been bitten by the snake?’ Don asked.

I don’t know if these blokes were just playing funny-buggers or not but they were so under the weather that they reckoned they’d forgotten which one of them had been bitten. Now this sort of antic didn’t go down too well with either Jack or Don, no way, not even when these idiots grabbed a chap and stripped him off and started looking for a snake bite.

‘Listen,’ said Don, ‘if you buggers aren’t sick in the head now you certainly will be tomorrow.’

And, boy, didn’t he gave them a fair sort of rev. He told them that while he was out here buggerising around there could be an horrific accident somewhere else, a life and death situation, where he was badly needed. And this is what I impress upon people, station people as well. Don’t go calling the Flying Doctor out for a sore toe or a bloody broken thumb or something like that, especially if you can get the patient out in a light aircraft or motor car yourself. The Flying Doctor Service is there for emergency life-threatening complaints. They’re not a bloody flying hospital factory. So, anyway, as you might imagine, both Jack and Don were pretty riled up about this pack of idiots.

Well, Jack was telling me that when he taxied down the other end of the strip to take off, he saw red. So when he turned around, he opened both taps up on the Navaho. And as she gathered speed, there were all
these blokes still drinking and skylarking about on the airstrip, right in the middle of his take-off path.

‘Bugger it,’ he said to Don. ‘I’ll teach these blokes a lesson.’

So he lined them up with the plane and aimed the headlights straight at them. Blinded them just like they’d done to him. They couldn’t see a damn thing. All they could hear was the drone of the Navaho bearing down upon them at a great rate of knots.

Jack reckons that he’s never seen the like of it. There was this mob of drunken seismic blokes, all pushing each other out of the way, hitting the deck, tripping over themselves and diving for cover, left, right and centre, screaming and yelling.

Then as the Navaho roared over the top of them Don yelled out, ‘Break a leg, you bastards, break a leg.’ Then they flew off into the night.

I’m not sure if you should publish this but, just in case you do, I’ll change the people’s names in an attempt to protect the guilty.

My pilot, Joe, and I used to fly around the outback for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in a Dragon DH 84 plane. There wasn’t much to the old Dragons really, seeing that they were made out of little more than wood, rag and string. Still, being built that light gave them one great advantage — and this did happen occasionally. If ever you needed to come in for a crash landing, you could put the plane down between a couple of trees that were close together. Now that’d wipe the wings off but, more importantly, you’d come to a fairly soft and safe halt.

But perhaps something of a more realistic concern was that, if you blew an exhaust gasket in one of the engines, the chances were that it’d catch fire. See, the Dragon had two engines, each with its own separate fuel tank. So if you blew a gasket in one of them, to save going up in flames, what you had to do was to throttle the offending engine right back which, in turn, caused you to lose ground speed. Mind you, it also put a big strain on the working engine and used up a lot of fuel in its tank as well.

Anyway, whenever Joe and I flew across the bottom of the Simpson Desert, we’d track along the Cooper Creek. The reason for that being, given the right season and with enough water about, more often than not there’d be large numbers of ducks along the creek.
So Joe and I would keep an eager eye out and wherever we saw a promising place I’d call up Ted, the radio operator, back at the base.

‘Look, Ted,’ I’d say, ‘I think we’ve blown an exhaust gasket in the starboard engine and we’ll have to put down and take a look at it.’

‘Okay,’ Ted’d say. ‘Please give your location just in case you need us to send someone out to get you.’

Which I’d do. Joe would land on a suitable claypan. Then we’d take a quick look at the exhaust gasket, find that there was nothing wrong, radio Ted back and tell him that we’re okay and we’ll only be delayed for a while, then go and shoot some ducks for dinner.

Anyway, this particular day we were heading across the Simpson Desert at about 5000 feet. That’s about as high as you could get a Dragon to fly in hot weather, and we had a forequarter of beef on board which we’d picked up along the way, legally mind you. And, lo and behold, we blew an exhaust gasket, in real life.

So Joe throttled the engine back and sagged the Dragon down to about 500 feet. Then to lighten the load we chucked the bloody forequarter of beef out and hung the plane in at between 400 and 500 hundred feet.

‘Things don’t look too good,’ Joe said.

‘Okay,’ I said. So I called up the base on the radio. ‘Ted, we’re in a lot of strife out here,’ I said. ‘We’ve blown an exhaust gasket and we might have to put down.’

‘What did you say?’ he asked.

I said, ‘We’ve blown an exhaust gasket and we might have to put down.’

‘Oh righto,’ he replied, all excited, ‘so it’s duck for dinner again, is it?’

Then he went off the air.

A few years ago there was this feller out on a station who’d somehow got his hand caught in a piece of machinery and had lopped off one of his fingers. Amputated it, like.

So we got the call from this feller; pretty laid back about the accident he was. Like most bushies, real laid back. ‘Just lost me finger, doc,’ he said. ‘What do yer reckon I should do about it?’

‘Look,’ said the doctor, ‘just put a bandage around the stump to stop the bleeding. When that’s done get your finger, the missing one, wrap it in a tea towel which is packed with ice and we’ll see if we can attach it when we get out there.’

‘Ah, doc,’ replied the feller, ‘me finger’s pretty well, yer know, stuffed as far as I can see. It don’t look too good at all.’

‘Yeah, that may well be the case,’ said the doctor. ‘But, still and all, grab the finger, put it in a tea towel packed with ice and when we get out there we’ll have a good look at it. Right?’

When we landed at the station where the feller lived, way out it was, he sauntered over to the plane. One hand was bandaged up around the stump and he’s got a tea towel in his other hand. Both the bandage and the tea towel were soaked through with blood. A real mess, it was.

So we got out of the plane. ‘G’day,’ we said. ‘How yer doing?’

And he said, ‘Oh, not real flash.’

Then we asked if we could have a look in the tea towel, just to see how bad the severed finger was.

‘Okay,’ he said.

As I said, this feller had one hand covered in bandage and he was carrying the tea towel containing the severed finger in the other hand, making things a little awkward for him. Most of the ice had melted, which made it even worse. So when he went to pass over the bloodied tea towel it slipped out of his hand. Before we could catch it…plop, it came to land on the dusty ground.

Now, that wasn’t too bad. But with it being a station there were stacks of working dogs around the place. And all these dogs were kelpie-blue heeler crosses and they all looked the same and they all hung around in packs of about ten or twelve, gathered around the place.

What you’ve got to realise at this point is that on these stations they keep their working dogs fairly lean. They don’t like to overfeed them. That way they’ve got more stamina when it comes to mustering the sheep or cattle. Now these dogs can smell a free feed from about a kilometre away, and there was a pack of these kelpie-blue heeler crosses hanging around nearby.

Anyway, just as we were about to lean over and pick up the bloodied tea towel containing the mangled finger, one of the dogs shot out from the pack and started ripping into it, tearing it to shreds. We attempted to take the tea towel from the dog but, in a frenzy of hunger, it let us know in no uncertain terms that there was no way it was going to give it up. It was in no mood to have a free feed taken away from it.

In a flash the dog had munched the tea towel to shreds, then it scampered back into the safety of the pack. So we searched for the severed finger among the shredded tea towel but couldn’t find it, which left us to assume that the dog had swallowed it. The problem was, with a pack of ten or twelve of these dogs looking exactly the same, we had no hope of working out which one had just eaten this poor guy’s finger. Neither did he. He took a look at the tea towel strewn across the ground, then a look at the pack of dogs.

‘Beats me which one it was,’ he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

‘What can we do now?’ we were thinking. ‘Don’t panic. Okay, we can knock these dogs out, open them up one by one. Then, when we find the finger, we can assess the situation and take it from there.’

But the feller must have read our minds. He gave the remnants of the tea towel a bit of a kick with his riding boot and said, ‘Ah, fellers, take me word fer it. The finger was pretty much stuffed anyways. What’s more, there’s no bloody way yer gonna cut open any of my dogs just to look fer me missing finger. I got nine of the buggers left, anyways.’

Mate, my story concerns my sister and my brother-in-law. They’ve since been divorced, but when all this went down they weren’t getting along real well. What’s more, my brother-in-law was spending a hell of a lot of time in the various pubs around the place. He had a forestry business, a forestry business where he was a logger. But at this particular time the weather had been too rough for logging out in the forest so he’d taken his team into Cairns, where they were working in a shed.

Then one day around lunchtime my brother-in-law decided to go off, up into the forest, and check out the site where they’d been logging, just to get some idea of how long it’d be before they could get back out there, like. Now the particular camp he wanted to visit was about 140 miles north of Cairns, out on the Cooktown road, way back in the forest.

Anyway, as was normal with my brother-in-law, he jumped into his vehicle and off he went without telling anyone. And when he got up there, down came the rain like you wouldn’t believe and a flash flood locked him in.

‘Bugger,’ he said, ‘I’ll be stuck up here for days now.’

Then he started thinking that if he didn’t turn up at home or at work for a few days everyone might start thinking the worst. The only problem was that he couldn’t get in touch with anyone because he didn’t have a radio or anything with him. So he went
down to the State Forestry Camp where there was a communications unit. The only trouble was that when he got there, the place was all shut up. So, with no one about, he thought they wouldn’t mind if he broke into the State Forestry building, just to get the message through, like. So he did that. He broke in and got on the two-way radio.

As it turned out, the only people he could get hold of was the Royal Flying Doctor Service. So he explained things to the woman there and asked if she wouldn’t mind giving his wife a ring, just to let her know that he was stuck in the forest and wouldn’t be able to get home for three or four days. The woman who took the message at the Flying Doctor base said that that was fine and, when she’d finished talking to my brother-inlaw, she called my sister.

‘This is the Flying Doctor Service here,’ she said. ‘Your husband’s just been in touch and he wanted us to let you know that he won’t be able to get home for a few days because he’s been rained in, up in the forest.’

As I said, around this particular time my sister and my brother-in-law weren’t seeing eye to eye and, what’s more, he’d been spending a lot of time out on the town drinking and carrying on. So my sister thought that this was just another one of her husband’s elaborate excuses and he’d talked some floozy of a barmaid into ringing through with the message.

Anyway, when the woman from the Flying Doctor Service had finished explaining my brother-in-law’s situation, my sister replied in a very curt fashion, ‘Oh, yes, and tell me, dear, just what hotel are you calling from?’

There were only about sixty people living in Coober Pedy back when my pilot, Vic, and I flew there in the little Dragon DH 84. The main reason for that was they had no water. They didn’t have water over in Andamooka either. Dry old places they were, and pretty wild too, I might add.

I remember the first time we went to Coober Pedy I did thirty-two tooth extractions in the one day. Bloody hard they were too. Some of those people out that way were as tough as nails. You’d have to be, just to live there. I tell you, I had a hell of a bad case of wrist drop the following day. Mind you, there wasn’t even a proper dental chair. In those days all the tooth-pulling and so forth was carried out on a wooden box or a kitchen chair.

Then, after this day of tooth-pulling, Vic and I were getting ready to fly out to Andamooka and there was this chap who was an opal buyer at Coober Pedy. He’s dead now. Funny bugger he was. A big chap. Anyhow, he asked if he could come along to Andamooka with us. The only problem that I could see was that we had an Aboriginal chap on board who had open TB, infectious TB. So I explained the situation to the opal buyer and he was still willing to come along.

‘Yeah, that’s all right by me,’ he said.

Then I looked at Vic. ‘Oh, yeah, suppose so,’ was Vic’s response.

Our first port of call on the way to Andamooka was
a place called Coward Springs which is near the foot of Lake Eyre. Now the population of Coward Springs was focused around the publican and the station master. But, as they say, wherever there’s a station master there’s sure to be a railway station and I wanted to get this chap with the TB organised on a train so that he could go down to a decent hospital and receive the right treatment.

The problem with landing the Dragon at Coward Springs was that the town didn’t have a proper airstrip. So Vic flew over the place and, to his surprise, he saw what he reckoned was a nice stretch of black gravel, perfectly situated alongside the railway line. ‘What luck,’ Vic said. So he put the Dragon down. And, by put down, I mean put down. Once we hit the ground we came to a shuddering halt in about 18 inches of bulldust which had a thin layer of gravel on top.

Anyway, after I got the Aboriginal chap organised to go on the train, we wandered over to the pub for a couple of beers. It was a hot day. When we came back I said to Vic, ‘Well, Vic, any idea how we’re going to get the Dragon out of this bulldust and up in the air?’

The only thing that Vic could come up with was to run the plane up and down the strip a few times in an attempt to blow as much of the bulldust out of the way with the propellers as he could. It seemed to be a reasonable idea to me even though it’d create a bit of a dust storm in town. But the publican and the station master were pretty used to dust storms, living in a place like Coward Springs. So we explained what we were going to do to the opal buyer and he seemed to be okay with it as well.

‘Yeah, that’s all right by me,’ he said.

So all was set.

‘Youse blokes get in the plane, anyway,’ Vic said to the opal buyer and me. ‘You never know, if we get up enough airspeed I might have a go at taking off.’

Now take-off speed in the Dragon was about 70 miles an hour. The old plane travelled at about 80 or 90 miles an hour flat out, I think. So we tore up and down the strip a couple of times and moved some of the bulldust. By that stage, the best Vic had got the plane up to was about 60 miles an hour. The opal buyer was sitting in front of me in one of the canvas seats. Then, on the next go, Vic got the plane up to about 65 miles an hour.

‘There’s a chance we might have a go at this,’ he shouted, ‘so youse blokes make sure that you’re well strapped in, just in case.’

By this stage we’d been there kicking up the dust for almost an hour, using up valuable fuel, and the opal buyer was getting a bit toey. So Vic gave the old Dragon all he had, which still wasn’t quite enough. The tail was up but, instead of hauling off and coming back to have another go at blowing more bulldust out of the way, Vic tried to pull the aeroplane off the ground.

I could see from where I was sitting that we were heading directly towards a creek with some low, dead bushes in it. The opal buyer by this time had gone white with fear. But I could guess what Vic was up to — just the other side of the creek there was a claypan and his idea was to hurdle the creek and hit the claypan where he could get the Dragon up to speed for a decent take-off.

At that point I was in contact with the radio operator back at the base, a chap called Frank Basden. There I was talking away to Frank through the small
microphone radio. It was one of those radios where you had to press a button when you were talking. So I’ve got my finger on the button and I’m saying to Frank, ‘We’re just taking off from Coward Springs, Frank. I’ll call you when we’re in the air’ when all of a sudden up jumps this opal buyer, out of his seat.

That was the last thing we needed, especially as we were about to hurdle the bushes in the creek. See, the Dragon’s a very light aircraft. It’s only made out of wood, canvas and string and you have to have it very well balanced, particularly on take-off, or it’d upset everything, the pilot and all. So I grabbed the opal buyer by the shoulder and dragged him back down into his seat and didn’t I give him a serve or two. ‘Sit down, you stupid so-and-so,’ I said, and then proceeded to call him all the names under the sun.

So that was fine. We got over the creek, hit the claypan, picked up speed, went about 80 yards, got off the deck and up we went, into the sky. When we arrived in Andamooka we said cheerio to the opal buyer and I went about my business.

By the time we got back to base, the incident with the opal buyer was almost forgotten. Then a few weeks later I received a letter from the Postmaster General’s Department which was in charge of the Department of Civil Aviation in Adelaide. What’d apparently happened was that, while I was giving the opal buyer a mouthful, I still had my finger down on the button of the radio microphone. At that point in time the Department of Civil Aviation was monitoring our radio frequency and, boy, they certainly sent a very terse notice concerning my use of obscene language over the national radio network.