WOMAN FLYING DOCTOR

Evening Star, Issue 22975, 4 June 1938, Page 21

WOMAN FLYING DOCTOR

BIS BUSH PRACTICE From the old mining town of Croydon, in Queensland, as far north as Koolatah, stretches the (practice of Dr Jean White, Australia's first flying woman doctor, who has just completed her first year's medical work in the outback. Completing her medical course at Melbourne University, she gained experience at the Melbourne General, Adelaide Women's, and Sydney Children’s Hospitals before joining the Australian Inland Mission. t “ Although I am just starting on my first holiday, I am already wishing to be back there again,” said Dr White on her arrival from Brisbane. “ I love the life, and I feel as though I am really accomplishing something.” Dr White thinks nothing of flying hundreds of miles to attend a patient, and, if necessary, fly the case back to her hospital at Croydon, or on to Clonenrry several hundred miles away, if an operation is needed. But by regulations regarding the use of the Qantas plane she is restricted from flying at night. She always makes an early start as soon as the instruments can be seen—the “ small daybreak ” start is the description the blacks give to her dawn flights. “ Most of my emergency calls are due to accidents, and frequently broken legs and arms want setting. Sometimes there are urgent appendix cases, and other times patients have to be flown back to the hospital for 1 X-ray treatment,” said Dr White. “ The hospital at Croydon has about eight beds and is in charge of Matron J. Hulbert, who has been stationed there for about two years.” Dr White’s Fox Moth, which is piloted by Pilot C. Swaffiold, is always in readiness to fly off into the bush when a call for help comes over the air. It has stretcher accommodation and is equipped with a wireless sot weighing about 431 b, which can both send and receive messages. “We sometimes use it in the air, but reception is usually poor because of the engine noise. As soon as wo arrive anywhere the first thing we do is to send back,a message to Cloncnrry to tell of our safe arrival,” said Dr White. As the country in her area is very heavily wooded. Dr White said that they usually follow the coastline as far as possible, and do not cut across country until it is necessary. “We have to be our own weather prophets, and I am becoming quite an expert in picking the clouds which mean bad flying weather,” she said. “The laiiding grounds are being improved now, and at Delta Downs we can land right at the front door of the radio _ centre. A new landing ground has just been completed at Mitchell Downs, and wo were the first people to land there. The natives held a special corroboree. and they spent a long while practising imitations of the whirr of the propeller.