A WOMAN FLYING DOCTOR

Southland Times, Issue 23502, 7 May 1938, Page 16

A WOMAN FLYING DOCTOR

First To Complete A Year’s Work From the old mining town of Croydon into the York Peninsula as far north as Koolatah an Mitchell 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.

Twelve months ago. Dr White had never flown in an aeroplane, and now she has spent several thousand hours travelling in the cabin of an ambulance plane to visit patients or transport emergency cases. i 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.

“Although I am just starting on my first holiday, I am already wishing to be back there again,” Dr White told The Sydney Morning Herald 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, flying the case back to her hospital at Croydon, or on to Cloncurry, several hundred miles away, if an operation is needed. But, by regulations regarding the use of the Quantas 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 X-ray treatment,” said Dr White. “The hospital at Croydon has about eight beds.” Dr White’s Fox Moth is always in readiness to fly off into the bush when call for help comes over the ajr. It has stretcher accommodation and is equipped with a wireless set weighing about 451 b which can both send and receive messages. “We sometimes use it ip the air, but reception is usually poor because of engine noise. As soon as we arrive anywhere, the first thing we do is send back a message to Cloncurry 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 landing 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 we 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. - * Dr White paid a tribute to the women of the outback, who, as well as helping with the station life, superintend the education of their children. “The children in the north are some of the healthiest I have seen in Australia,” she declared.