The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (53 page)

Well, it stirs me up a bit just thinking about some of the things I could tell you, especially about the Aboriginal people. But stories like this must be told. They must get out there. Now, don’t get me wrong — and I want to make this very clear — this isn’t your usual Flying Doctor story. This is not a story like that. In actual fact, the only connection this story has to the RFDS is that it was told to me by two nursing sisters, Brenda Preston and Barbara Struck, who at the time were in charge of the Australian Inland Mission Hospital at Birdsville, up near the South Australian-Queensland border.

Now, I guess you’d know that the Australian Inland Mission [AIM] was the precursor of the Royal Flying Doctor Service in as much as John Flynn was the driving force behind the AIM setting up care facilities and hospitals in remote areas and sending trained nurses out to work in them. Then the Flying Doctor Service was later formed, more or less to support those services of the AIM, plus, of course, any of the other outback support organisations. That’s how the RFDS came about.

Anyhow, the AIM Hospital in Birdsville was opened in 1923, and two women by the names of Grace Francis and Catherine Boyd became the first nursing sisters there. It then became their responsibility to provide what was the only community-based health services in that area. And, mind you, it was an area that covered
something like 1000 square kilometres. So it was quite vast. What’s more, these two women were also responsible for acute first-response emergency care, general outpatients, home and community nursing services, health education and promotion. They also gave advice on public health matters, as well as providing pharmaceutical supplies, basic radiography, administration — the lot — plus they were also, at various times, called upon to provide veterinarian and dental assistance.

Now, my first contact with the actual township of Birdsville didn’t happen until much later, in the early 1960s, which by then was when the two nursing sisters, Brenda Preston and Barbara Struck, were in charge of Birdsville’s AIM Hospital. At that time I was running the administration for a French mob called the Compagnie Générale de Géophysique, and we were part of a seismic survey party that was constructing a road across the Simpson Desert. That road, or track really, was known as the French Line. Anyhow, Nursing Sisters Preston and Struck became my first port of call for back-up medical support when we were working through that area. So basically I had an office in a caravan out in the desert, and if anybody got sick or was injured I’d take them into the Birdsville Hospital. By that stage, in 1963, the population of Birdsville consisted of eight whites and sixty-three blacks.

Anyhow, I got on very well with these two nursing sisters and they told me some amazing stories, and one of those stories was about an old Aboriginal man called Mintulee, or Joe the Rainmaker as he became known. And I believe that this is a very special story
and, like I said, it’s one that must be told. But, first, to give you a bit of background. As a young man, Mintulee, as he was originally known, was among just a handful of survivors of an 1888 massacre that was conducted by the Queensland Native Police (QNP). That massacre occurred at a permanent waterhole, at a place called Kaliduwarry, which is on the Eyre Creek. The policeman who organised the massacre was a feller called Sub-Inspector Robert Little and, apparently, what had led to the police attack was the killing of a station cook near Durrie, on the Diamantina River.

Now, that particular massacre by the QNP was timed to wreak the maximum effect on some two hundred to three hundred young Aborigines who were known to be assembling there at Kaliduwarry. As to just why they were there was that on a regular basis great gatherings of Aboriginal youth were held and these gatherings attracted eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty-year-old Aborigines from as far away as St Vincent Gulf to the south, and the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north. These occasions or gatherings were known as ‘Warrthampa ceremonies’ and they were held to celebrate the sexual maturity of those Aboriginal youths who were sent to represent their hordes or, as we would call them, tribes. To explain a little further: see, the Aborigines lived in quite small communities that consisted of around thirty people and there were up to eight of those smaller communities within the larger horde. That’s how it worked.

But of course to get two or three hundred natives congregated all together in the one spot provided the perfect opportunity for the Queensland Native Police, because they could just burst in and kill the lot of
them. You know, some pastoralist might’ve simply got in touch and said, ‘Hey, they’re all gathering out near our place.’ So then the QNP came out and of course they were armed with rifles and so forth and so they just went in and, at Kaliduwarry, they hacked to death something like 200 innocent souls. And like so many of these atrocities — and there’s no doubting that there have been a great many throughout white history in Australia — the official description of such an event was of it being merely ‘a disturbance’. So then it was a case of, ‘Oh, wonderful. Job well done, chaps’, and all the records were destroyed.

And I know I’m getting off the track a bit here but to me that’s one of the things that us white Australians are really saying ‘Sorry’ for. It’s not simply for just the taking of the Aboriginal children — ‘the stolen generation’, as it’s been called. It’s also for all the massacres, the murders and the poisonings of the waterholes that have occurred over time. And, believe you me, there are many horrific stories that have been completely blotted out from our history.

Anyhow, that’s just some of the background. So this Mintulee, or Joe the Rainmaker as he later became known, and about four or five of his Wangkangurru mates managed to escape the vengeance party at Kaliduwarry that had been led by this Sub-Inspector Robert Little, and they limped back into the desert. The story follows on that a year later Sub-Inspector Robert Little was said to have fallen from his horse in Birdsville and died of a broken neck. He was subsequently buried in the Birdsville Cemetery — and I’ll tell you more about that later at the end of this story.

So then more than ten years passed before Mintulee and what remained of his Wangkangurru horde finally emerged from the southern Simpson Desert to make camp by the Diamantina River, within sight of the township of Birdsville. Like so many of the other native refugees they were attracted by the number of white settlers and their promises of ‘keep’ in return for work. But of all the Lake Eyre hordes, to the best of my knowledge the Wangkangurru were the last of the Aboriginal peoples to have direct contact with Europeans and, in doing so, they were also the last to relax their own ways in favour of white man’s culture. So it must’ve been a pretty big shock that after all those years of living in freedom, no sooner had Mintulee arrived out of the desert and set up camp by the Diamantina River than he was placed in the care of the local Protector of Aborigines and given a number. Henceforth Mintulee was known by his white protectors simply as ‘J11’.

Now, how he then got the name of Joe the Rainmaker was that a feller by the name of George Farwell solemnly declared that Joe had told him how he’d once made the Diamantina come down in flood. And with Birdsville’s annual rainfall hovering around the 5-inch mark — that’s if it was lucky — Joe felt duty-bound to relieve all droughts with his well-prepared rainmaking rituals…in return, of course, for a few shillings for his successes. In her book
From City to the Sandhills of Birdsville
, Mona Henry, who was herself also a Birdsville AIM nursing sister from around 1950, actually wrote of Joe’s rainmaking requirements, and I quote: ‘In bygone days it was human blood, but, in these civilised times, he [Joe the Rainmaker] had to be
content with animal blood. Emu feathers, if available, built into a mound over the rainstone, helped bring success to the ceremony. When he was ready he would sing the tribal rainsong and, like Gandhi, was fast to bring results. Rainmakers must be good weather prophets, as I have yet to hear of one dying of starvation. When sufficient rain had fallen, Joe would visit the settlers to collect his fees.’

Anyhow, one time during the early 1960s, when I was visiting Birdsville, Nursing Sisters Preston and Struck went on to tell me about the last days of white treatment for Joe the Rainmaker. By that stage he was quite old — well into his nineties — and even though he was dying in at the AIM Hospital, Joe remained adamant that he wanted to return to his people and await his end, in as natural a manner as possible. But as was the way in those days he was strapped down to his hospital bed for his own good and safety. Then, after he’d been held in his bed for three days, he eventually persuaded the two nurses to release him from the hospital. That they did and so Joe the Rainmaker returned to his camp on the banks of the Diamantina and he positioned himself under a tree, where he could have a good view of everything that was going on. You know, he could see the piccaninnies running around and he was able to see the women going out digging and the men going out hunting and when they’d come back in they’d all see him under the tree.

And the two nursing sisters told me that Joe the Rainmaker survived under that tree for six months. He didn’t eat much food and he only asked for water, yet being among his adopted horde and seeing them
go about their lives, and being visited constantly by anyone coming and going about the camp, he was kept happy and was fulfilled until the day he died. And isn’t that such a great lesson for us more modern-day white Australians, where we tend to stick our aging grandparents or whoever in some God-forsaken nursing home and try to forget about them? Anyhow, as it turned out Joe the Rainmaker ended up living to be ninety-five years of age and he died in the September of 1955.

And here’s the nice twist to the story: see, what they did was, when Joe the Rainmaker died, Joe was buried only about a foot away from Queensland Native Police Sub-Inspector Robert Little’s grave and in doing so, in silent retribution to the perpetrator of the Kaliduwarry massacre, they laid Joe with his feet on a slight incline towards the head of Little’s grave. That’s how I first saw their site in 1963, then, a few years later, when I went back to Birdsville, I saw, they’d erected a headstone on Joe’s grave and the white cross that had been on Sub-Inspector Robert Little’s grave was missing. And that’s the story, pretty much as it was told to me by the two Australian Inland Mission nursing sisters, Brenda Preston and Barbara Struck.

What greatly helped me during my time as a pilot with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland was the fact that already having been a farmer and earth moving contractor, I could actually relate well to the people on the land and had an appreciation of the demands of their lifestyle. Also what came in very handy was my many years of remote area flying, and that gave me the experience and ability to access the roads, paddocks, clay flats and bush strips, with regard to the capabilities of both the aircraft and myself, as a pilot.

That being said, flying still threw up many challenges, especially before the introduction of GPS (Global Positioning System). One such case occurred at Laura, a small remote Cape York location west of Cooktown. Laura held a number of festivals, the two major ones being the Laura Festival, which was a big indigenous dance festival, and then there was the local Laura Races. And of course from time to time there would be a few flare-ups, or altercations, at these festivals, which meant that medical attention or even an evacuation was required.

There was one time I remember being called to Laura on a very wet and foggy night to evacuate a local who was thought to have broken his neck in a horse accident. I flew out there with a female doctor and on our arrival Laura was shrouded in stratus cloud. So, with severely limited visibility, before coming below lowest safe altitude I got in contact with Percy Trezise.
Percy was a local identity and I knew that he’d flown his own aircraft to Laura to attend that particular festival. He was a former TAA captain who by this time had done a lot of flying throughout Cape York. Now, because I knew that Percy had his aircraft at Laura, I wanted to speak to him on the radio and ask him if he’d let me know when I was over the top of the strip.

Anyhow, I got in radio contact with Percy and while I was getting directions I circled for about fifteen minutes without being able to see anything. Not a thing. All the while, the female doctor on board had the headphones on and so she was listening in on our conversation. And because of the tone of Percy’s and my discussion, plus our obvious lack of visibility, I think the poor doctor might’ve started to get a bit concerned about the situation, because at one stage she decided that just maybe the patient didn’t have a broken neck after all and perhaps the evacuation could wait until the following morning!

Still, I’d been to Laura hundreds of times before and, knowing the area as well as I did, I assured the doctor not to worry because, with Percy’s help, I felt confident of being able to carry out a safe landing. Now, I’m not sure if she was all that convinced about my ability but I went ahead anyway and carried out a let-down safely in heavy cloud. I then advised Percy that when I thought I was on final approach I’d put on my landing lights and he could inform me as to exactly where I was in relation to the airstrip. I then continued descent and, much to the relief of the doctor, all went according to plan. With Percy’s help we had no trouble landing and, later on, the take-off to evacuate the injured person also went without a problem.

Now, while we’re talking about the festivals out at Laura, another sort of funny thing happened. On an earlier occasion we’d been called out there at night to evacuate Cecil, an Aboriginal employee of Susan and Tom Shepherd. Susan and Tom were from Artemis Station. Cecil had gone off to the festival and had, unfortunately for him, got into a ‘blue’ — a fight — and his stomach had been cut open quite badly with a broken bottle. We’d been advised that there was — and I quote — ‘already a doctor on the scene’. Apparently this doctor had been attending the festival and we were assured that he’d look after Cecil until our arrival.

So we flew out there to Laura. The only trouble was that when we arrived it turned out that the doctor who we’d been assured was already on the scene, looking after Cecil, was actually an eye specialist, who I attended regularly. Of course, this injury of Cecil’s was a little out of the ordinary to what he usually dealt with on a daily basis. So I think the eye specialist was just as glad as poor old Cecil was to hear the throb of our noisy engines in the distance. And all went well with our landing and take-off on that occasion.

But another time when I had a bit of a mix-up was during an election and, naturally, the people of Cape York Peninsula had to make sure they exercised their right to vote, along with the rest of us. To that end Susan Shepherd loaded up her ute with people from her property to go into Laura for voting day. The trip in went without incident and everyone cast their vote. But then on their return journey an altercation occurred between one of the indigenous women and her bloke. I’m not sure what it was about, whether it was of a personal or political nature, but without thinking
of the consequences, mid-altercation, this woman simply picked up her port — suitcase — and stepped off the back of the ute. Now, unfortunately, the ute was travelling along at over 60 kilometres per hour and so the woman suffered quite severe head injuries.

Anyhow, that night I received a call from the RFDS doctor to say we were needed to evacuate this injured woman from Kimba Station — Kimba being the nearest station to where the accident had occurred. So we took off in the Queen Air and headed out to Kimba. Being set among thick scrub as it was, I knew Kimba Station would be difficult to locate, especially at night. But, as was standard practice, I was fully expecting to be guided to the remote property by some car lights lining the strip, awaiting our arrival.

On this occasion, for some reason or other that I’ve forgotten, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t see anything at all. But then after flying around for a while in the dark I finally saw some lights on the ground and so I headed in that direction. When I arrived over the property, there were still no car lights to greet me so, by using the Queen Air’s landing lights, I picked out the strip near the house and landed there safely. A vehicle soon arrived on the scene and out popped a very surprised family. I looked at them. They looked at me.

‘This isn’t Kimba Station, is it?’ I said.

‘No,’ came the reply. ‘This is Violet Vale Station.’

Anyhow, they were able to give me directions and about half an hour later we landed safely at Kimba Station and the evacuation took place without further confusion.