Free The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories by Bill Marsh

kilometres north-east of Mount Isa, 150 kilometres south of Normanton and 250 kilometres north-west of Julia Creek. In other words, it’s out there in the middle of nowhere.
    But back to the story: what had happened was an elderly lady was driving along with two young teenagers in a Holden station wagon and they’d left the road, gone into a creek and run smack-bang into a tree. The kids were okay but the woman had suffered head injuries. Apparently, the station wagon wasn’t too badly off but, when the teenagers had attempted to reverse it out of the creek, the vehicle got bogged in the bulldust.
    Now I don’t know if you’ve been bogged in bulldust or not but I can tell you that it’s worse than beingbogged in mud. So, there they were, stuck up to the axles. They couldn’t go forward. They couldn’t go backwards. So they called for help.
    On this type of flight we usually carry a Flight Nurse with us but on this occasion, with three people being stuck out there, it was decided that only the doctor and I should go along. So, with me being the pilot, I fired up the Beechcraft Queen Air and we headed out to Prospect Station which was about an hour and a half’s flying time away.
    When we reached our destination, we circled low over the homestead only to find that it’d been abandoned. The upshot of that was if we landed at Prospect there’d be no one to drive us out to the accident scene. And as the doctor stated, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to carry a stretcher for eight kilometres. Not under these conditions. It could well be the end of us.’
    Still, I did a couple of dummy runs over the airstrip just in case. It was littered with ant hills so Prospect Station was out of the question, anyway. Our next best option was Esmeralda Station which was about 30 or 40 kilometres east of Prospect. More to the point, it was further away from the accident scene but, with little choice, we flew on.
    When we arrived at Esmeralda Station there didn’t look like there was much life in the homestead either. Still, the airstrip was in a much better condition so I put the Queen Air down and we waited in the hope that someone would come out and pick us up. Which didn’t happen. So we wandered through the low scrub and sweltering heat, up and over the maze of dirt tracks and hills until we finally came upon the homestead.
    ‘Is anybody there?’ we called.
    Not a sound. Esmeralda homestead had also been deserted.
    So there we were, about 50 kilometres from the accident scene, with no transport. What’s more, because of all the scrub, there was no way we could have flown back and landed any nearer to the bogged vehicle. So we hunted through the homestead and the outbuildings and there we stumbled across an old Toyota LandCruiser.
    Now it was obvious that the vehicle hadn’t been used for some time. For starters, it was about thirty years old. It was covered in a thick coating of dust. It was rusted. The tyres were perished. But, to our surprise, the keys had been left in the ignition. So we gave it a go and after a bit of pushing and shoving and mucking about we managed to get the old Toyota started. The only problem was that we didn’t have a clue how much fuel was in the vehicle because none of the gauges worked.
    With no fuel tanks in sight, that left us with a big worry, a big worry indeed.
    ‘Will we chance it or won’t we?’ was the sixty-four million dollar question.
    ‘Well, we’ve come this far, and it is an emergency,’ echoed the answer.
    So we decided to give it a shot.
    As I said, there was a maze of tracks around the place, all going off in different directions. No signs, of course. What’s more, because of the terrain, hilly and low gidgee scrub, we couldn’t see for any great distance to get a decent bearing. Anyway, we followed something that resembled a once well-used track and somehow we ended up out on the main dirt road. Don’t ask me how. I wouldn’t have a clue. But we did.
    There we