No time to be bored in dusty outback Queensland town

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34127, 13 April 1976, Page 6

No time to be bored in dusty outback Queensland town

Suburban housewives often ask Wendy Thomas how on earth she fills in her time at the tiny outback township of Birdsville in the south-west corner of Queensland. Her answer is: the days are never long enough. She is the local police officer’s wife and in Birdsville that entails helping with weather observations for transmission to Alice Springs — seven times a day if Senior Constable G. A. Thomas happens to be away on duty in his vast “beat.”

Tourists call at the police station for advice on the state of the roads in the district, which extends into the treacherous Simpson Desert. Wendy Thomas needs to have correct information for drivers at her fingertips when her husband is out. The Thomases also have the agency for the Bank of New South Wales, which gives Wendy several hours work a week. And she has three children under seven to care for with few modern facilities for running a home. All wives in the area, which spreads for hundreds of miles, are expected to listen to the two-way, bat-tery-operated “transceiver” to pick up emergency calls for help, requests for the flying doctor service at Charleville, or for telegrams. For short periods during the day wives can have their own chat session. (There are no telephones in this part of Australia). “These sessions are not so much friendly, over-the-fence chats, but more to keep track of tourists’ movements in the outback and to give local news,” Wendy Thomas said in Christchurch yesterday. Hence everyone in Birdsville and the outlying cattle stations knows what is happening to everyone else (sometimes before it happens it is said. But everyone rallies around in times of stress. In such an isolated community as Birdsville there is no fish and chip shop to provide a quick meal when Wendy Thomas is up to her eyebrows in chores. Food has to be ordered in vast quantities — stuff that keps. “Perishables,” as she calls them, are flown in on order from Brisbane and are delivered on Saturdays at

the local airstrip by a T.A.A. Friendship, when it touches down for half an hour on its “Kangaroo Hop” to Alice Springs. In the small community of 25 white Australians and nearly 60 Aborigines, Wendy Thomas and her friends pitch in to do the catering for any such functions as a gymkhana or a social. She makes all the clothes for her children and herself.

But Mrs Thomas, a former Brisbane schoolteacher, has no complaints about living in the drab-looking, desert-type township. She enjoys it. No time to be bored. And she is enjoying the four-weeks’ camping tour of New Zealand she is doing with her husband as a complete change of scenery. It is all a matter of adapting to Birdsville to become part of its way of life. For instance, it did not take her long to get used to driving 440 miles by station wagon to Mount Isa (the nearest town) to go shopping or to get a hairdo. "We have a happy social life,” Wendy Thomas said. “We visit cattle stations, just to call, have a barbecue or a party. There’s an outdoor cinema every Saturday night, for which you take your own seats.” The highlight of the year is the race meeting in September when light aircraft land on the red dirt airstrip behind the pub like a flock of birds from many parts of Australia.

The Birdsville pub has very limited accommodation, but it does a mighty bar trade during race weekend. -Outback people learn to cope with any emergency, including sickness. The Birdsville Presbyterian mission hospital has only about six beds, but all the families in the township and on the outlying stations have their medical kits. If anyone becomes ill someone will radio for a doctor on their “transceiver” and get instructions on the numbered medication to use in the meantime and report progress. In serious cases a doctor will fly in from Charleville, about 550 miles from Birdsville, and take a patient to hospital. “If we cannot do any more we all at least send the patient a ‘get well’ card,” Wendy Thomas said. And that is typical of Birdsville, an Australian outback community that cares about its neighbours.