The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories by Bill Marsh

Author:Bill Marsh [Marsh, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Travel
ISBN: 9781743099261
Google: 9T-GIvWytv0C
Amazon: B0098BW23K
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Porcupine

I was born on 3 October 1950 and I got into strife on the Christmas morning of 1951, so I was too young to remember what actually happened. But I’ve heard all about it, of course, and I’ve still got the scars on my lungs. We were at Canopus Station, which is between Renmark and Burra, in South Australia. Later on, Dad sold Canopus to a bloke called Bill Snell, then Bill sold it to the South Australian Government and it was absorbed into a massive national park, the Danggali Conservation Park.

But right from the time I was born, I had an incredible bond with my father. Incredible! Oh, as a kid, I used to go everywhere with him. I was like his shadow. Anyhow, that Christmas morning, when I was about thirteen or fourteen months old, my dad was cleaning out the bath with power kerosene. Power kero was what we used to get rid of the greasy marks and stuff that had built up from the old dam water we washed in. And the kerosene was in this container — a tin — but he left it on the floor when he went off to do something else. Then I crawled along and, next thing, Mum heard the sound of an empty tin hit the ground and, when I started coughing and going on, she realised that her little boy had helped himself to the kerosene.

I don’t know how much I drank but it was enough to be absorbed into my lungs, which started the coughing. Then, after that I became unconscious fairly quickly. But my father thought it was all his fault and he got really upset and he started to panic and he wanted to put me in the car and head straight off for Renmark. I think Renmark was something like 56 miles from Canopus, but it was just a dirt and sand track in those days, with fifty gates or something that had to be opened and shut along the way. So you know what a trip like that would’ve been like for a very sick little boy.

Anyhow, Mum said we weren’t going anywhere. She reckoned I’d die if I was moved. So then they settled me down the best they could and they waited for the Flying Doctor to come on air. See, at a certain time of the morning the Flying Doctor Service kept the channel clear and if anybody had any issues they’d be able to get on the communications radio and talk to the doctor. But, because it was Christmas Day, it just happened to be the only time of the year that the Flying Doctor base wasn’t open for their usual morning doctor’s session.

I think the Canopus call sign in those days was something like ‘ABS 6-CANOPUS’ and you’d get on the radio and say, ‘ABS 6-CANOPUS calling Broken Hill, calling Flying Doctor.’

So that’s what they did, and they just kept calling and calling but they couldn’t raise anyone at the Flying Doctor base in Broken Hill.

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