The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (33 page)

My story goes back to January 1959, when I was a nineteen-year-older, fresh out of teachers’ college in Perth and I took up my first appointment in the little school at Coonana. For those that don’t know, and I guess there’d be many, Coonana’s a small railway siding township out along the Transcontinental Railway Line, approximately a couple of hundred miles east of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia.

Up until that stage in Coonana, if you had a medical emergency and needed to get to Kalgoorlie, the only thing you could do was to catch the Fast Goods train. The passenger train wouldn’t stop, only the Fast Goods train would stop. There were a number of drawbacks with that, the main one being that the Fast Goods only came through occasionally and even then it took four hours to get into Kalgoorlie; so, for a critically injured person, that could well be too late.

Anyhow I was just getting settled there and I was fossicking around trying to sort out what was what, when I uncovered a metal box. I guess it would’ve been about 2 feet by 2 feet and when you opened it up it created more compartments. I soon found out that it was an old Royal Flying Doctor Service medical chest, and that there were all sorts of medicines in it, which were all out of date. Then also, just sitting there was this unusable old wireless.

So, I got in contact with the RFDS people and they came out and they set the wireless up so that we could
now use it and they replaced the medicine chest with a complete batch of new medicines. I got the job of being their contact so if someone was crook I’d ring the Flying Doctor base in Kalgoorlie and explain what was wrong with the sick person and they’d tell me the number of the medicine to take out of the box and I’d dispense it.

Now, when I first arrived at Coonana, most of the people who were out there were refugees from countries like Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and whatever European countries. In fact, no one spoke much English, apart from me, which made things a little bit difficult at times, especially with teaching. But I got the idea that now we had an operational wireless I could use it as a teaching aid for the twenty or so children who hadn’t heard much spoken English. So in the mornings, when the chat sessions were on, I’d get the kids involved. Our call sign was ‘8 BAKER TARE’ and the kids used to get on the radio and they’d call through and chat and we also sent telegrams and received messages from people out along the trans-line. And that worked very well indeed.

Then one day a Commonwealth Railways bulldozer — or grader — came through Coonana. The driver was out there cleaning up the edges of the track and so, when I was talking to him, I said, ‘Hey, what’d be the chances of you putting an airstrip in here?’

And typical, he didn’t consult anybody, all he said was, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll give it a go.’

So he got stuck into it and he graded an airstrip out the back of the school. Then after he’d finished I got all the kids together and in an emu fashion we walked up and back the thing, at least twenty times, to pick up
any sticks, glass, tin or anything else that could cause a problem with respect to the aeroplane’s landing. So now we were in the situation that, if there was an emergency, the RFDS plane could be in and out from Kalgoorlie well within an hour and a half, which was a far cry from an irregular four-hour train trip.

When I told the Flying Doctor people that we now had an operational airstrip they put us on their monthly clinic run. And you can just imagine the huge excitement of the twenty or so kids when the first plane landed. Because, even though they didn’t grade the strip, they felt that they were virtually responsible for establishing it. Oh, they were over the moon.

The RFDS held their clinics in my office where the mothers or whoever came in to see the Flying Doctor. The other thing was that, with the clinic, the pregnant women out there could now have the opportunity to be checked by a doctor.

Also, another thing, once we’d established the airstrip, other planes, like crop dusters and people like that, started to use Coonana as a stepping stone to other places out along the trans-line: say, from Kalgoorlie to Coonana, then Coonana to Rawlinna and so forth. And of course, that was absolutely wonderful for the kids because even though some of them had seen aeroplanes in Europe, they could now get close to them and see inside of them, and they just loved that.

I was also entrusted by the RFDS people to collect the 10 shillings per year levy off all the people out there. Now, I don’t know if you’ve got it over in South Australia, but in Western Australia, if you pay ‘x’ amount per year to St John’s Ambulance then you get free use of the ambulance, if you ever need it. But if you
don’t pay that then, if you need to use an ambulance, you have to pay the full price per kilometerage. Well that was the same with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. If you paid the ten shillings per year you could be carted to wherever for free. So if you had to be flown from Coonana to Kalgoorlie then from Kalgoorlie on to Perth, it was all free, apart from the ten shillings per annum, of course.

And that caused some hardship because, it’s got to be remembered that the people out there at Coonana, in those days, did not see much money because, even though there were a couple of Australian families living there by then, the vast majority were still the refugees coming out from Europe. And those refugees were heavily in debt to the Commonwealth Railways because when they first arrived they had nothing but the job.

So the Commonwealth Railways supplied them with furniture, clothing, bedding, their food, and when they got their pay, not only did the Taxation Department take their bit out but the Commonwealth Railways took their slug as well. So they’d get their pay envelope and it’d state that they now only owed the Commonwealth Railways another £540, or whatever it was. For many, the only cash they got was Child Endowment and that’s what they used when it came to paying their levy to cover themselves for the Flying Doctor.

So yes, they were very difficult times for many of those people, and I remember one family saying, ‘No, we just can’t afford it and, anyway, we don’t use the Flying Doctor Service.’

But Murphy’s law: guess which family had to use the Flying Doctor. It was them.

Anyway, that was the establishment of the RFDS in Coonana. As I said, it started with the discovery of an outdated medical chest and a disused wireless, sitting idle in the school house. And of course, when they were sorted out it opened up communications for the children. Then the opportunity came along with the arrival of the grader and the kids helping prepare the airstrip so they had a great feeling of ownership and pride in being involved, as well. Add to that John Flynn’s ideology of placing a Mantle of Safety over the people in the bush, plus the huge contribution by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and that’s what happened in that small community. And to those people at Coonana, it was absolutely unreal.

I was born on 3 October 1950 and I got into strife on the Christmas morning of 1951, so I was too young to remember what actually happened. But I’ve heard all about it, of course, and I’ve still got the scars on my lungs. We were at Canopus Station, which is between Renmark and Burra, in South Australia. Later on, Dad sold Canopus to a bloke called Bill Snell, then Bill sold it to the South Australian Government and it was absorbed into a massive national park, the Danggali Conservation Park.

But right from the time I was born, I had an incredible bond with my father. Incredible! Oh, as a kid, I used to go everywhere with him. I was like his shadow. Anyhow, that Christmas morning, when I was about thirteen or fourteen months old, my dad was cleaning out the bath with power kerosene. Power kero was what we used to get rid of the greasy marks and stuff that had built up from the old dam water we washed in. And the kerosene was in this container — a tin — but he left it on the floor when he went off to do something else. Then I crawled along and, next thing, Mum heard the sound of an empty tin hit the ground and, when I started coughing and going on, she realised that her little boy had helped himself to the kerosene.

I don’t know how much I drank but it was enough to be absorbed into my lungs, which started the coughing. Then, after that I became unconscious fairly
quickly. But my father thought it was all his fault and he got really upset and he started to panic and he wanted to put me in the car and head straight off for Renmark. I think Renmark was something like 56 miles from Canopus, but it was just a dirt and sand track in those days, with fifty gates or something that had to be opened and shut along the way. So you know what a trip like that would’ve been like for a very sick little boy.

Anyhow, Mum said we weren’t going anywhere. She reckoned I’d die if I was moved. So then they settled me down the best they could and they waited for the Flying Doctor to come on air. See, at a certain time of the morning the Flying Doctor Service kept the channel clear and if anybody had any issues they’d be able to get on the communications radio and talk to the doctor. But, because it was Christmas Day, it just happened to be the only time of the year that the Flying Doctor base wasn’t open for their usual morning doctor’s session.

I think the Canopus call sign in those days was something like ‘ABS 6-CANOPUS’ and you’d get on the radio and say, ‘ABS 6-CANOPUS calling Broken Hill, calling Flying Doctor.’

So that’s what they did, and they just kept calling and calling but they couldn’t raise anyone at the Flying Doctor base in Broken Hill. To make things even more difficult we didn’t have any 240-volt electricity coming into the house. All we had was 32-volt power and the radio for the Flying Doctor; it ran on a 12-volt battery. And of course, with all this continual calling and calling, our transceiver used a lot of power which, in turn, kept old Butch Batty busy, running batteries
backwards and forwards from the outside generator room and swapping them over.

Just to give a bit of background: Butch was a real identity of the district. He was a former clown who was working with Dad in those days. He used to call Dad ‘The Engineer’. But poor old Butch was an alcoholic and every now and again when we’d have to take him into town to see the doctor or get his glasses fixed or something he’d get on the grog, then he’d come back out home and dry out.

Mum said that, on one particular occasion, they went to get Butch from the pub and when they got him outside there was a little feller — a young kid — selling newspapers and Butch just put his hand in his pocket, dug out what was left of his money and gave it all to the kid.

And Mum said, ‘Oh Butch,’ she said, ‘what’d you do that for? That’s all the money you’ve got left.’

‘Missus,’ he said, ‘the poor little feller was battlin’.’

See, old Butch reckoned that he didn’t need the money back in the bush so he just gave it all to the boy. Anyway, that’s just a bit about Butch, and when I was unconscious after drinking the kero, he spent all his time swapping the batteries over so that we could stay on the transceiver calling Broken Hill. Actually, it was my mum who was on the radio, doing all the calling because, apparently, my father was nursing me. So things were pretty desperate.

Now, I’m not too sure how it works, though I think whenever you made an emergency call into the Flying Doctor’s base it used to light up an instrument panel. But it wasn’t until after the doctor had had his Christmas lunch and come back out to the base that
he saw the emergency light was on. So he jumped straight on the radio and said, ‘Where’s the station calling the Flying Doctor?’

And Mum was back in a flash, saying it was her and, as I said, there was my dear old dad, the man I had this incredible bond with, at his wit’s end, cradling me in his arms.
This is interesting. As I just mentioned that, the emotion’s all just rushed up in me. Sorry about that
. So, yeah, well, and, well, then Mum hooked into the doctor and the doctor told her what to do. I don’t know exactly what the instructions were but he told her what particular medications to give to me from out of our Flying Doctor’s medical chest. And he also confirmed that, you know, my mother had done the right thing by me and to just continue to nurse me through it gently and, along with the medication, I’d be okay; I’d survive, which I did. And to this day I’ve still got scars on my left lung and whenever I have an X-ray I’ve always got to explain to the people that I got a scarred lung from that particular experience with the kero.

So I mean, they didn’t have to fly me out or anything but there were plenty of times when the Flying Doctor did fly out to Canopus. In those days, when I was growing up, the doctor was Dr Huxtable and Vic Cover was the pilot. I’ve got photos of the family and all of us standing by the Flying Doctor’s plane because Mum and Dad used to put on so many different fundraisers, especially after my stuff happened. I’ve even got cuttings from the newspaper in at Renmark where, you know, they wrote that Canopus Station raised something like £2500 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

For the fundraisers, Dad and Mum ran a woolshed dance every year plus a cricket match. I remember when we’d get up early and Dad would drive us into Renmark to get the ice and lots of ice-cream for the kids, which was in those big old canvas bags. And he’d bring home a heap of kegs of beer for the adults and they’d set up the kegs under a shady thing they called a bow shed. Basically, a bow shed was just a few sticks with some green mallee laid over the top of it, and that was the pub. And for the cricket match, Dad actually poured a concrete wicket out in the middle of the airstrip and, to this very day, I reckon I could just about walk you out to it, blindfolded.

Also, I remember how Mum used to get cardboard tea packets and she’d cut them straight through the middle with a sharp knife and pour the tea out into another container. All year long she’d save these empty tea packet halves. Then before we had a fundraiser she’d cover them all with leftover Christmas paper or whatever coloured paper she could get — or we’d both do it, me and her — and she’d make little handles and attach them to the boxes, then she’d fill them with homemade lollies, coconut rough and all that stuff, and all the kids that came along would get a couple of packets of lollies. Everything was free. I didn’t see any money changing hands so they must’ve paid through the gate or something to raise the amounts of money they did.

Now, I’ve just remembered another story I was told. It was when Mum was pregnant with me. The airstrip was just off the side of the house and, anyhow, on one occasion the Flying Doctor flew out to Canopus Station to give my elders, Andy, Wally and Marion, smallpox
injections or something like that. So they landed and then the crew came over to the house and the nurse said, ‘Okay, who’s gonna be first?’

And my brother Wally, who was always the cheeky one, he raced forward, looking real tough, and he said, ‘Oh, me, me, me, I’ll be first.’

‘Okay,’ the nurse said, ‘pull down your pants.’

Then the nurse got the needle out and started to get it ready for the injection. But when Wally saw the size of the needle, oh, he was off like a shot and he bolted through the scrub and they chased him everywhere, trying to catch him. But he was too quick and they all got tired, so then they decided that they’d get him later on, when he turned up back home again.

Anyhow, Andy was the eldest bloke so he got his needle, then Marion got hers. But young Wally was a pretty wise young feller and he hid out in the bush until he saw the Flying Doctor plane take off before he decided to come back home again. I must add at this juncture that Wally could also make up a pretty good story when the need arose because, when he eventually turned up later in the afternoon, he snuck in home, pretending he had a sore bottom and he announced, ‘I’ve already had my needle so I don’t need another one.’

‘How’s that?’ everyone asked.

And Wally replied, ‘I went and sat on a porcupine!’