The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (43 page)

But the people from Balgo must’ve heard our plane flying around because, as we passed over again, we saw some cars coming out to the airport. They hadn’t got our message. No message at all. Nobody knew. They just heard the drone of our Queen Air so they thought they’d better come and see what was going on. You know, when the RFDS plane has been your lifeline for so long, it’s such a distinctive sound. You never forget it.

Now, back in those days, Balgo used to own Kingfisher Air and they had a plane sitting on the airstrip. So their pilot got in his aircraft and he was able to speak to our pilot. ‘What’s your problem?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ replied our pilot, ‘we’ve only got one engine. We’re being blown around all over the place and I can’t see the approach to the airstrip because of the driving rain.’

Then our pilot asked if they could park two cars with their headlights on at the approach to the airstrip so at least he could see where he was supposed to come down. So they did that and we were eventually able to land. And, oh, we were just so grateful when we finally touched down, just so relieved. Actually, we were all in a heap — a complete mess — absolutely spent.

But, you know, the wind was so bad that the windsock on their strip was blowing horizontal. So you really had to give it to our pilot. I mean, to keep his cool through all that and to make the right decisions, and get us all there in one piece. Well, as I said, you really had to give it to him.

So, we then unloaded the two little kids and the Balgo Hospital staff had to get up out of their beds and look after them overnight. We also stayed at Balgo that night, of course. Then the next day the RFDS sent out the little Beechcraft Baron and we brought the little boy back to Derby with us, in that. From memory, I think he’d started to regain consciousness by then. But we didn’t take the older girl. She was okay by then. So yeah, they survived, no problem.

But something really scary: first thing on that following morning, before the Beechcraft Baron arrived to take us back to Derby, our pilot went out to try and start up the Queen Air and — you wouldn’t believe it — but neither of the two engines would start. Not even the one that we flew in on would work. They’d both gone. And afterwards, when they had the investigation about it, apparently they found out that the driving rain had somehow gone in under the cowl — you know, the hooding around the engine — and it ended up wetting the magnetos, which put the engines out. And so that was the cause. That’s what they said.

So, you know, if we would’ve continued on towards Derby, well, who knows what might’ve happened. And that’s the experience that made me think, ‘Well, it must be about time to hang up your wings. You’ve been at it for a fair while now and I think somebody’s trying to tell you something.’

And not long after that I finished up with the RFDS. Actually, what also helped make the decision easier was that I got married. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve also got someone else to consider now.’

So that was it for me. There was no more flying.

New Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories
is based on stories told to Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh by:

Rhonda Anstee

Bob Balmain

Rod Bishop

Paul Brady

Chris Carter

Donna Cattanach

Jane Clemson

Ruth Cook

Dave Crommelin

Heather Curtin

Phil and Sue Darby

Sarah Fenton

Richard Fewster and Ann Ruston

Norton Gill

Jack Goldsmith

David Hansford

Wal ‘Dusty’ Harkness

David and Christine Harris

Robina Jeffs

Ruth Ko

Margaret Loveday

John Lynch

Susan Markwell

Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh

David McInnes

Ian ‘Mac’ McKechnie

Barbara Meredith

Kevin Murphy

Shirley Norris

Stephen Penberthy

Peter Phillips

Bill Rawson

Cheryl Russ

Chris Smith

Howard William Steer

Kim Tyrie

Esther Veldstra

Nick Watling

Margaret Wheatley

Margaret Worth

To Howard William Steer
— with many thanks for all your help and great spirit
www.howardsteerart.com.au

On a number of occasions people have mentioned that while they’ve greatly enjoyed the collected stories of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), there’s never been the one story that gives a brief overview as to just how the RFDS came into being. For me, history isn’t just a list of dates that relate to a sequence of events. I had enough of that back in school. But since then I’ve developed a great interest in the many and varied characters who have been involved in the making of our history: people like the shearers and the drovers, those who have worked and travelled on our railways, those who live and work in little outback towns and pubs.

The RFDS has been, and still is, full of people who are prepared to take on the huge challenges that working our outback regions presents, and for the betterment of all. As one person I interviewed for
More Great Flying Doctor Stories
said, those who are involved in the Flying Doctor Service, ‘on a daily basis…put their lives on the line for people who are complete strangers to them. They don’t care who these people are or what their nationality is, or what religion they are. And it doesn’t matter [that] those very same people probably wouldn’t take a similar risk for them. In fact, they wouldn’t even realise the risk. What’s more, the RFDS do it for free.’

So where did this amazing organisation have its origins? Who were the driving forces behind its conception? What sort of characters were they? Well,
to begin at the beginning, the Reverend John Flynn was the person who had the dream of creating a spiritual and medical ‘Mantle of Safety’ for all remote and outback people, regardless of colour, race or creed. And what a large dream it was. As Hudson Fysh, the co-founder of Qantas, once wrote of John Flynn: ‘Flynn the Dreamer…who saw a vision of a Flying Doctor well before the days of practical flying, but kept it firmly fixed in his mind’.

John Flynn was born in the late 1880s, at a place called Moliagul in central-western Victoria. He went to a few primary schools, one of which had the rather uninviting name of Snake Valley. In 1898 he matriculated from high school; then, to help pay his way through his further education, he became what was called a ‘pupil-teacher’ with the Victorian Education Department. Following that he began training for the ministry. His time at theological college was broken up by two important events that ignited his passion for the bush and its people; the first being the couple of periods he spent on a shearers’ mission and stemming from those experiences was the publication of his
Bushman’s Companion
.

After being ordained in 1911 John Flynn volunteered to go to the Smith of Dunesk Mission, at Beltana, in the remote northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Dunesk had been established by the Presbyterian Church and was located in a parish that covered a vast area of the South Australian inland that extended over to the railhead at Oodnadatta. Oodnadatta was situated along the original old Ghan railway line and at that time it had a floating population of around a hundred or so.
Many were Aboriginal, plus there were the Afghan traders — hence the term ‘the Ghan’. Oodnadatta also happens to be one of the hottest places in Australia, with temperatures of over 50° celsius having been recorded.

Anyway, that’s where the mission had placed a nursing sister and where it had also planned to build a nursing hostel, and it was under Flynn’s guidance that the Oodnadatta Nursing Hostel was opened in late 1911. The following year the Church asked Flynn to survey the Northern Territory region and after he handed in a couple of reports — one on the needs of Aborigines and the other on the needs of white settlers — the Presbyterian General Assembly appointed him as superintendent of what was to be named the Australian Inland Mission (AIM). In doing so the South Australian, Western Australian and Queensland Assemblies transferred their remote areas into Flynn’s care. So the AIM was officially established and it commenced operations out of Oodnadatta with just the one hostel, the one nursing sister, the one Padre and a ‘fleet’ of five camels. It began, as it has continued, ‘without preference for nationality or creed’, and was based on the idea of a remote areas network of nursing hostels and hospitals, all working in conjunction with a Patrol Padre.

By 1918, and despite World War I, John Flynn had managed to establish Patrol Padres out of Port Hedland and Broome in Western Australia, Pine Creek in the Northern Territory and Cloncurry in Queensland. He’d also appointed nursing sisters to Port Hedland and Halls Creek in Western Australia, and to Maranboy and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

Flynn’s commitment to the AIM was absolute. He even involved himself in the design of the nursing hostels, along with the architects, engineers and the local people. His aim was to make sure that each building suited its own particular regional climatic conditions and the availability of local building material. The large stone building of the Alice Springs Hostel is such an example. He helped design it in such a way that it was cooled via a tunnel under the ground floor, where wet bags filtered the dust, and then the cooled air was drawn, by convection, through the hostel wards. Then as the air heated up it rose to the lantern roof from where it was expelled. Wide verandahs also provided extra cooling.

Another of Flynn’s passions was his magazine,
The Inlander
.
The Inlander
was used to spread the word to a wider Australian public. This was where he first mentioned his idea of a ‘Mantle of Safety’. The magazine also promoted his fight for a ‘brighter bush’ with his photographs, documents, statistics, maps and articles telling of the needs of the outback people. He also wrote about inland Australia’s potential for development and about how it could only reach its full potential by providing for the women and children. He didn’t overlook the Aborigines either. And, mind you, there weren’t too many people around back then who were as outspoken or knowledgeable as Flynn was on the subject. In fact, one particular issue of a 1915
Inlander
was pretty much entirely devoted to the plight of the ‘fringe-dwellers’ and described how their situation was ‘a blot on Australia’. He went on to say, ‘We who so cheerfully sent a cheque for £100 000 to Belgium to help a people pushed out of their own inheritance
by foreigners…surely we must just as cheerfully do something for those whom we clean-handed people have dispossessed in the interests of superior culture.’

The next part of Flynn’s overall strategy of a Mantle of Safety was focused on the possibility of radio communications between doctor and patient and the idea of a ‘Flying Doctor’. In Flynn’s mind the two had to work hand-in-hand. Even as early as 1925 he said that ‘the practicability of the Flying Doctor proposal depends almost entirely on the widespread adoption of wireless by bush residents’.

To that end, in late May 1925, Flynn and a returned soldier and radio technician by the name of George Towns took delivery of a specially designed Dodge Buckboard that was to be used for the first inland experiments in radio transmission. They picked the vehicle up in Adelaide and drove to Alice Springs via Beltana, Innamincka, Birdsville, Marree and Oodnadatta, doing test transmissions as they went. Interestingly enough, they used a pulley drive from the jacked-up back wheel of the Dodge to generate electricity for radio transmission.

The following year the ever-persuasive Flynn talked a man called Alfred Traeger into going to Alice Springs to conduct further experiments. Alf Traeger was to become another vital link in the development of the Flying Doctor Service. Alf was born near Dimboola, Victoria, back in the late 1800s. I guess if he lived today Alf Traeger might be considered a bit of a geek. He was once described as ‘a curious, patient, precise child, who, at twelve, made a telephone receiver and transmitted between the toolshed and his house’. So it seems his pathway in life was set very early on.

After his parents had moved to South Australia, Alf attended Balaklava Public School and the Martin Luther School before going to a technical high school. He then studied mechanical and electrical engineering before being employed by the Metropolitan Tramways Trust and the Postmaster-General’s Department. When World War I started he tried to enlist but was refused on the grounds of his Germanic heritage, this is even though his grandparents had been naturalised. For Alf, not to be able to serve his country was one of his bitter disappointments.

Instead, Alf threw himself into his work and it wasn’t long after he’d obtained an amateur operator’s licence and built his first pedal transmitter-receiver that he formed Traeger Transceivers Pty Ltd. That’s when John Flynn arrived on the scene and employed Alf to help him out. After a brief outback tour where it’s said that despite the severe heat Alf always wore a dark suit and braces, he returned to Adelaide to start developing a transceiver for the Flying Doctor network.

Flynn’s basic outline to Traeger was simple: these radio sets had to be cheap, durable, small and easy to operate. So by using bicycle pedals to drive the generator, Alf found that a person could comfortably achieve 20 watts at a pressure of about 300 volts. He then enclosed the generator’s fly-wheel and gears in a metal housing, with the pedals outside, and added a cast base so that the whole contraption could be screwed to the floor beneath a table. Traeger built the transceiver into a box, and set up a master switch to separate the crystal controller transmitter from the receiver. To put it more simply, Traeger’s wireless was basically a pedal-operated generator, which provided
power for a transceiver. But as simple as it seems, once the first pedal sets came on the market in the late 1920s they created a communications revolution, especially throughout the remote inland.

While Traeger was working on his pedal wireless, Flynn had been busy on the second part of his overall strategy, and that was to try to set up an aerial medical service. Some say that Flynn’s original vision of a ‘Flying Doctor’ had been inspired by a letter from a Lieutenant John Clifford Peel — or just Clifford Peel, as he preferred to be known. Now, going back to around 1912, a then eighteen-year-old Clifford Peel had read a book John Flynn had written, titled
Northern Territory and Central Australia: A Call to the Church
. Apparently the book captured Peel’s interest in the work Flynn was doing and the problems he faced of being able to cover the huge distances he needed to, to create his Mantle of Safety. The book got Peel thinking about the logistics of how aerial care could be provided to the people in the remote areas of Australia.

Then, later on, after World War I began, Peel trained as a pilot at Laverton in Victoria. The story goes that he wrote to Flynn with some of the thoughts he had on the practicalities of using aeroplanes within the AIM. Now, keep it in mind that, back then, aeroplanes were a relatively new invention and, to the vast majority of people, it would seem bonkers to jump into a basic wooden frame with a bit of canvas stretched over it and go flying into the vast unknown of outback Australia. But the idea excited Flynn. He wanted more information, which in turn produced Peel’s much recorded reply of November 1917. At the time the letter was written, Peel was sailing from Melbourne to the
United Kingdom, on his way to begin his life as a wartime airman. In part, it read: