Minister And Nurse To Outback

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 2

Minister And Nurse To Outback

Back in the 1920’5, a young Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Flynn, whose parish embraced almost the entire inland of Australia, saw only too vividly the tragic results of people living hundreds of miles from medical help.

As he travelled around on horseback or camel, preaching the Gospel at one lonely homestead after another, he frequently noticed the absence of faces he had seen on earlier visits.

Only a rude wooden cross

bore evidence that the missing person ever lived there. From guarded questions here and there, Flynn would piece together the story of how a sick child had died from some illness without ever seeing a doctor. Often the distraught widower would tell the pastor how his young wife had died in childbirth.

Flynn thus saw the desperate need for doctors and nurses if the settlers in the outback were to live free of fear of sickness.

He took the problem to his

superiors who listened sympathetically but saw little hope of a solution. It would take a regiment of doctors and nurses to look after so few people in such a vast area. Hospitals would have to be built and even then many settlers would still be hundreds of miles from help in times of emergency. Though they did not discourage the young pastor, they saw no solution to the problem. Flynn’s outlook was more determined. He studied and obtained a working know-

ledge of medicine and became the first district nurse of the outback. As time went by he watched with undisguised interest the advent of the commercial aircraft and the radio. Financial Backing In these two inventions he saw the solution to his and his flock’s problem. After a long struggle, he won the financial backing of a wealthy industrialist. With a grant of £lOOO he enlisted the help of a young radio mechanic who spent endless hours working on a primitive transceiver. After many failures and disappointments the two men triumphed by producing what they called a pedal wireless. It was powered from a generator driven by the propelling mechanism of a bicycle. They made their first successful transmission from Alice Springs to Adelaide, a distance of 821 miles.

They then set about improving the set so that even a woman could operate it. Radio Contact Flynn’s idea was that If people living hundreds of miles from medical help could contact a doctor by radio they would have some chance of survival if he could reach them quickly. In theory, the idea worked but in practice it often had tragic sequences. Lack of roads and slow transport systems seldom gave the doctor a chance of reaching severely ill patients before they died.

Disheartened but not beaten, Flynn fought with this transport jinx. The only soiuffion, he reasoned, was the aeroplane. By now his work had become widely known and financial assistance was readily forthcoming. The money enabled him to make a down payment on an aircraft and hire a pilot who flew the first medical mission from Cloncurry in Queensland to an outback settlement where a stockman had been gravely injured. From that day, Flynn never looked back and now the whole of inland Australia is covered by the mantle of the flying doctor.