The Wheelbarrow And The Flying Doctor

We watched the sky eagerly. Where was that darn aircraft? The flying doctor always came, didn't they? It was dusk and they wouldn't be able to land in another half hour. I was propped up in a wheelbarrow on the edge of the dirt airstrip at Bulman Station, my right leg bandaged and bloody and starting to hurt.

Bulman station is a huge, wild cattle ranch on the Southern tip of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. It's an Aboriginal run property and we had the rights to shoot wild buffalo there and butcher them for pet meat.

There were few roads and fewer fences in Bulman, and if you travelled for 4 hours or so through the bush, you could find wild buffalo that had never seen a human before. They were easy prey, they weren't in the least bit afraid of us. We didn't go there often, because it was hard travel, much of it on the faint remnants of old tracks. It was easy to get bushed.

But this time we bit the bullet and went out there, two Toyotas, 5 of us and within half an hour of getting to a distant waterhole, we had ten big buffalo bulls on the ground. ten of them. We had to hurry - we had to get them boned out and the meat back to the portable chiller back at camp.

Now I have to add that we were good at this. we did this every day, 7 days a week until the wet season set in and we had to head back to civilisation. Our knives were razor sharp and we could completely bone out a big bull in 6 minutes flat - On the ground. But we used to do one or two at a time and then drive and find another one. This time it was ten!

Now there was one cut we did that was quite dangerous. You had to pull the knife through the thick hide of the neck and rip it toward you, so it went to the right of your body. Well, on this particular day, with the pressure on, I got a little careless.

It's weird. You kind of stand there dumbfounded when you do something like that. You think - "This did not happen"- But it's obvious, you just stuck a knife through your leg. Then you feel sick and weak.

I'm only alive today, because the arteries were somewhere other than where I stuck the knife. Ricko drove me back to the station and dropped me at the only place we could find any people, the school- and then went back out to help get the meat in safely - damned if we were going to let it go to waste.

Once the teacher had washed the wound and bound the two pieces of leg back together, we called the flying doctor on the two way radio and arranged to meet them at the airstrip. Trouble is everybody was out hunting or something. There were no cars. And the airstrip was a couple of kilometres away. No other adults to carry me - what were we going to do?

The solution - an old wheelbarrow. The older kids pushing and the younger ones running along side cheering. It must have looked like a scene from Gulliver's Travels, the little people ferrying their captive giant down the road.

Then the flying doctor didn't turn up, they must have had something more urgent, so they sent an ambulance out by road. Sheesh - it was an 8 hour drive on dirt roads.

Another hysterical day in paradise!