The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories Read Free Page A

strange way of going about things but quite often he got so caught up in what he was doing that he didn’t have the time to give me a ring. I mean, he might go out to a station to attend some emergency or other during the morning and end up in Perth later that night, and what’s more have to stay there for a couple of days or more. You just didn’t know what was going to happen. But that’s how the life of a Flying Doctor was, and we adjusted to it.
    A prime example was the time the RFDS pilot Jan Ende flew over from the Derby base with the Flight Sister, Rhonda, to pick up Tony and go out on routine clinics around the area. They’d had a very quiet morning and Jan was flying the plane back to Broome to drop Tony off before heading back to Derby. Anyway, I was listening in on my tranny when I heardan emergency call come through. A major car accident had occurred between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek.
    As it turned out, what had happened was that two elderly couples were travelling in opposite directions, one coming from Darwin, the other going to Darwin. There were four or five people involved altogether. I can’t remember exactly. The road wasn’t in the best of conditions, which was something that I knew for a fact because Tony and I had recently travelled over that stretch and we’d smashed the cross member of our vehicle. That’s how rough it was. It was dirt, of course, corrugated, with lots of potholes and bulldust.
    Anyway, one of the cars had been stuck behind a road train for a fair distance. Then when they reached the only straight stretch between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek the driver thought, ‘Well, it’s now or never.’ He put his headlights on, pulled out to overtake the road train and, wham, drove straight into an oncoming car.
    Of course, with so much dust about, the truck driver didn’t even notice what had happened and he continued on his way. It was only when a couple of blokes from the Department of Main Roads came along that the accident was discovered. Now, luckily, there was a radio in the Main Roads vehicle and that’s when the Flying Doctor base at Derby was alerted.
    So there I was, sitting in Broome listening to this drama unfolding over my tranny. I could hear the base talking. I could hear Jan and Tony in the plane. The manager from Christmas Creek Station had also arrived at the scene and I could hear him talking. They were all in contact.
    It was a chilling experience, I can tell you. But the thing that I was most concerned about was just how Jan thought he was going to put the plane down on that rough and relatively short stretch of road. What’s more, the plane he was flying was a Queen Air, and a Queen Air needed about 3000 feet of straight strip to land and take off.
    So I was getting quite worried listening to all this drama. Terribly worried, to be honest. So much so that it eventually got the better of me, and that’s when I rang Jan’s wife, Penny, who was a flight nurse sister back at the base, to see how she was bearing up.
    ‘Well,’ she said, as cool as a cucumber, ‘there’s nothing I can do about it. The best we can do is just hope.’
    By that stage, some details had been radioed through about the condition of the accident victims and Jan flew the Queen Air on to Broome so that Tony could pick up whatever medical supplies he thought might be required. Meanwhile, the manager from Christmas Creek Station and the Main Roads people had blocked the ends of the straight section of road and, as vehicles were forced to stop, they got the people out to help knock down ant hills and clear the stones off the road in preparation for the plane to land.
    So Tony picked up the medical supplies from Broome and they flew out to the accident scene. When they arrived Jan did a low pass-over, to check the situation out. Things didn’t look good. One of the vehicles had its engine smashed back into the driver’s compartment. The other wasn’t much better off. What’s