The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (56 page)

You know, I’ve been involved in a lot of things up in the gas fields at Moomba and, actually there’s not too many funny stories that come out of there. Tragedies aren’t good for a book but here’s one that has a lighter side to it. It’s all hooked into the Flying Doctor Service, and it’s probably a case where we did people more of a dis-service than a service, though, it was a sort of humorous dis-service.

I hadn’t been at Moomba all that long and what happened was that in about the early 1990s, up in the far north of South Australia, it was one of those very rare times when Lake Eyre was flooded, okay. And when Lake Eyre floods a lot of tourists like to go out there and have a look because it’s such an amazing sight, what with all the wildlife and that. Anyhow, all these tourist people, to get a closer look, what they do is they charter aeroplane flights out from places like William Creek or Port Augusta or Leigh Creek and they go out and fly over the lake.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Lake Eyre in flood but it’s a fantastic experience. And what happens is that when it floods, in most places it’s still only got about 2 foot of water in it, and because it’s so salty, on a really calm day when you fly over the lake, it’s like flying over a mirror. It’s like an optical illusion. You could be flying at 100 feet and you look down and it seems like you’re at 30 000 feet, and if you’ve got clouds above you, you’ll also get that
cloud reflection off Lake Eyre. It’s quite phenomenal.

The other thing that’s unusual about Lake Eyre is that it’s below sea level, right, so when you’re flying a plane over it, it’s difficult to gauge exactly how high you are. Because in a case like that, when the aeroplane’s altimeter tells you that you’re at true ground level, you could actually be something like 100 feet off the ground. Add to that the mirror imagery that I was talking about and you’ll understand why most pilots are a bit wary about flying too low over Lake Eyre.

So, now to the story. There was one particular charter flight full of oldies — what you’d call ‘snow birds’ — and the charter pilot took these snow birds over the lake and of course they all wanted to have a real good, close look. The pilot, for whatever reason, mustn’t have been paying too much attention as to how high the plane was off the deck and he got a bit low and he ploughed right into the middle of Lake Eyre. Fortunately nobody was hurt, apart from the pilot’s ego getting bruised, that is. Anyway, the plane sort of bounced along the water and — chung — it ground to a halt. Then what happened was that the plane’s emergency global positioning alert system went off and that’s when we were asked to go and do a search and rescue to look for this plane. As soon as we got the story we thought, ‘Okay, it’s highly likely that it’s one of those scenic flights, you know, over Lake Eyre.’

Anyway, we take off in the helicopter and we fly out to Lake Eyre. Now, after the plane had come to a stop, all these snow birds had managed to get themselves out of the plane. As I said, nobody was hurt but they were all very wet, you see, and it was a pretty cold
day with a bit of wind, so they were cold and wet and miserable. So these oldies, they came up with an idea to help increase their chances of being found and so they took most of their wet clothes off and they placed them down on the wing of the plane in such a way that they wrote the word ‘HELP’. That not only let anyone flying overhead know that they were in trouble but it also helped to dry their clothes out, you see.

So we picked up the signal — the emergency alarm — on the helicopter and we sort of tracked them by the signal until we saw them. They were just this dot in the middle of Lake Eyre. Then the helicopter pilot said, ‘Look, I can’t land in water.’ So he said, ‘We’ll fly over to reassure them that we know where they are and then we’ll head to the nearest station property and sort things out from there.’

‘Righto,’ I said. ‘No worries.’

So we flew in on the helicopter and this’s where we did these poor old snow birds a bit of a dis-service, right. We flew in on the helicopter, nice and close until we could see that they were waving at us and they could see that we were waving back. We just wanted to reassure them that they’d been seen. But then, as we pulled away in the helicopter, we created this huge updraft and the updraft just lifted all their clothes up in the air and scattered them back into the water. So their clothes had almost dried but now they’re all wet again. And they weren’t too happy about it either because they’re now shaking their fists at us, the poor buggers.

Anyhow, we contacted the people at the nearest station, which was Muloorina Station, just on the edge of Lake Eyre, and when we arrived there they had some flat bottom boats; they’re like punts. So
we basically got some four-wheel drives and we got as close to the ditched aeroplane as we could, which was about probably 2 or 3 kilometres. Then we put these flat bottom boats in the water and we sort of walked them out to the aeroplane. Then we piled all these cold, wet and miserable snow birds into these boats and then we walked them back in relays to the shore. From there we got them in the four-wheel drives and took them back to Muloorina Station. Then, the next day, a couple of planes flew in to pick them all up.

But the odd thing about it was, when we first went to Muloorina Station to sort out how we were going to rescue the snow birds, two aeroplanes landed almost simultaneously. One was the RFDS plane from Port Augusta, who’d been asked to come up just in case we needed back-up, and right behind that was the Channel 9 news plane from Adelaide. Now, how on earth they found out about the accident so fast, I would not have a clue.

But anyway, the Channel 9 plane landed and it was really funny because here we are, out on an outback station, you know, and it’d been a bit of a tough day, so everybody’s a bit rough around the gills and looking tardy, and the lady from the Channel 9 news crew steps out of their plane, and she’s immaculately dressed. Perfect. She looked like she’d just walked right out of a page of a fashion magazine. She’d put her lippy on and changed her dress and everything and then she started running around wanting to interview everybody. And, you know, we’re saying, ‘Look, excuse me, can’t you see that we’re a little bit busy trying to coordinate a rescue here?’

But it astounded me just how quickly the news crew flew up from Adelaide, to land at this station in an attempt to get the story. But in the end the news people turned out to be okay, really. You know, we were all still there at last light, and after they’d got their story they stayed on at the station with the rest of us, and we all bunked down in the shearers’ quarters together, and then they let their hair down. So a good night was had by all.

We were flying from Alice Springs up to the Barkly Tablelands one time, travelling up there to do some routine medical clinics. I was the pilot and, back in those days, they didn’t have telephones out on any of these station properties. Their only communication was by radio. Anyway, the people from this particular cattle station called in to the Alice Springs Flying Doctor Service base and said that they had an Aboriginal stockman out there who had a severe toothache. So we were flying along and of course we always listened to these sessions because at times you get diversions and so forth.

Anyway, as luck would have it, we were due to be flying over this particular property within about fifteen minutes and we always carried dental gear on the plane with us, just in case. So the doctor got on our radio and said, ‘Look, we’re on our way up to the Barkly Tablelands but if you bring him out to the airstrip, we’ll drop in there in a few minutes, pull the tooth out real quick, then we’ll be on our way again.’

So the station people did that. They came out with the biggest, toughest Aboriginal stockman you would ever see and we just opened the back door of the aeroplane and sat him on the floor of the plane, with his feet hanging outside. That was just about the right height for the doctor to get a good grip on a tooth. Then, after we propped up the stockman, the doctor started to get prepared. He decided not to use a
needle because it looked like a pretty straightforward extraction and, anyway, we didn’t have the time. As you can imagine, with all this going on, it looked a real sight so I decided to take a photograph of the scene. And I was just taking the photo when it all got a bit too much for the big, tough stockman and he passed out.

‘Quick, Neil,’ the doctor called out, ‘grab his head and I’ll pull the tooth out while he’s unconscious.’

So I grabbed the stockman’s head as firmly as I could and held it while the doctor got stuck into it. The only trouble was that the extraction proved to be more difficult than he’d first thought it might be and so he had to push and pull it this way and that until, finally — pop — and the tooth came out. Then just after the doctor had extracted the tooth, the stockman began to revive and when he fully came around he found that his aching tooth had disappeared. So he was happy. We were happy. Everyone was happy. Then we just said ‘Goodbye’ and we jumped back into the plane and we continued on our way, up to the Barkly Tablelands.

So that’s just one little story. But, I must say, I liked the Aborigines. And out in some of those old mission and community places, like Papunya and Yuendumu, I took to the old blokes in particular. In fact, I even tried to learn a little bit of the local language and I used to try and talk to the old blokes while the doctors and nurses were running their clinics and taking a look at the crookies — the sick ones. So I met some very interesting characters. I remember there was one old Aboriginal bloke at Areyonga, who’d apparently been there with Lasseter, when Lasseter went missing out in the Petermann Ranges area, near the eastern border
of central Western Australia. And this old fella told me that it’s all just a big myth because Lasseter didn’t find any gold. In fact, there was no gold out there at all.

And another old bloke, he took a very keen liking to me, probably because I’d taken an effort to learn the language, and I was talking to him one day and he said, ‘Ah, Captain we go for a drive.’

‘Oh, right-o,’ I said.

So we hopped in a vehicle and we went for this drive, and we go out onto the flat plains. They’re dead flat and, anyway, away in the distance there’s some rocks sticking up about 20 foot or so, out of the plain. So we drive over there to these rocks, and in amongst them there’s this big cave and we go into the cave and, believe me, it’s just a mass of native art. It was absolutely amazing. Stunning. And he just took me there as a favour because he liked me. He trusted me.

And that same old fella, he made me a set of boots that the kadaitcha men wear. Now, so that the kadaitcha men can’t be tracked, these boots, they’re made out of human hair and emu feathers and blood and stuff. You know the kadaitcha man, don’t you? He’s the spirit man, the magic man, the one that points the bone. Anyway, this old fella made me these kadaitcha boots and he told me that they’d ward away the evil spirits. So I took them home, and my wife — at that time — she said, ‘I’m not gonna to have those smelly things in the house.’ And she burnt them. And I reckon that’s probably one of the reasons why she’s now my ex-wife, because things were never the same after that and so maybe…just maybe…the evil spirits got to her after she burnt the boots.

But talking about the kadaitcha men and their magic: we flew out to Papunya Aboriginal Community one day and they’d had a lot of babies dying there. The story was that the kadaitcha man was around, trying to pick out who was behind all the bad medicine that was causing the babies to die. Then, of course, once the kadaitcha man decides who the culprit is, the bloke wakes up with a spear through him, and everything gets back to normal.

Anyway, I don’t know what had caused the first few deaths of the babies but because all the Aborigines were so fearful of this kadaitcha man, none of them were game enough to come out of their wurlies or huts. So, by the time we arrived, with everyone being too scared to come out of their wurlies, all these kids had by then begun to suffer from dehydration and so forth. And, over time, until the kadaitcha man found out who was causing all the bad medicine, I think we brought something like about seventeen of these dehydrated kids back into Alice Springs where they could be cared for.

But the Aborigines there were fairly primitive back in those days, back in the ’50s and early ’60s. Mostly, they still lived by their old ways of thinking. For their birth control, they’d ‘whistle-cock’ the men. Whistle-cocking’s when they make an insertion in the penis and that was their form of birth control: to ‘whistle-cock’ them.

Oh, I could go on forever with the experiences I had when I was flying out of Alice Springs. I’ve even got photos of initiation ceremonies, because one time I got an old black fella and I lent him the camera. I mean, he was a terrible photographer but he took all
these photos for me and, you know, there wouldn’t be too many photographs like that in existence. And, anyhow, when they do these initiation ceremonies, part of it is to do the circumcision. And in the old days they used to get two fairly sharp stones and they’d rub them together and cut the foreskin off. By doing it that way, when they removed the foreskin it sort of sealed off the blood vessels, which was supposed to stop the bleeding.

The only trouble was that they didn’t necessarily keep these circumcision stones very clean. Now, I didn’t actually see this myself but my predecessor was there when it happened. The doctor at that time was a pom, a chap by the name of Edgar Emerson. Even in the middle of summer, when it was as hot as hell, old Edgar still wore his tweeds and his coat, with the patches on and stuff, and he always wore a tie.

Anyway, my predecessor told me that there was this Aboriginal stockman up at Alexandria Downs Station and, see, the male Aborigines can’t get married until they’ve been initiated and circumcised. So this Aboriginal stockman was in his mid to late twenties and he comes in to see old Edgar and he had a shocking infection in his penis from where they circumcised him. My predecessor reckoned that it was an awful sight, because this fella’s penis had swollen up to about 3 inches round and it’d gone all purple, with pus running out of it everywhere. Anyway, old Edgar took one look at it and he said, ‘Oh, good Lord, he’s going to lose it.’

And the Aboriginal fella — the one with the infected penis — said to Edgar, ‘Oh, yer should’a seen it when it was real crook, Doc.’

As I said, I didn’t witness that one, thankfully. That was told to me by my predecessor. But, of course, that was the old ways because later on they started using razor blades for circumcision. And they were pretty smart about it too, because what they’d do was they’d carry out the circumcisions just before the Flying Doctor was about to come around on a routine medical visit. Then, when the doctor arrived, the first thing he’d be met with was a line-up of young Aboriginal blokes, all waiting to have their penis cleaned up.