The real flying doctor: SA’s Magnus Badger recalls snake bites, bull attacks and landing by kerosene lamp
Former Royal Flying Doctor Service pilot Magnus Badger has revealed how a TV show inspired his 30-year career of dramatic rescues and outback romance.
For three decades South Australian pilot Magnus Badger’s real life read like the script of a television show.
In fact, it was outback office days like his, as a captain with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, that genuinely inspired scenes in the popular series, RFDS, filmed in part at the Port Augusta RFDS Base and the Flinders Ranges.
And aptly, it was an earlier production – the 1985 miniseries The Flying Doctors, starring Andrew McFarlane and Peter O’Brien – that moved him to take on the job in the first place, after several years flying tourists at Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges, ferrying miners to remote sites and delivering by air cash to banks across SA.
“I used to watch (the original TV series) and thought ‘oh yeah, that’d be a good idea’ … it just started from there,” the pilot who notched up about 14,500 hours with the emergency aeromedical service says.
Today, as a new first-time granddad, Badger, who with medico wife Elaine Powell divides his time between Goowla and Adelaide, omits one cheeky reference to an additional early appeal of the role – the “nice nurses”.
“Often you’re on the plane, everyone’s got headsets on and you’re just talking between each other – there’d be a nurse and sometimes a doctor, too – and you just sort of strike up a talking relationship; you sort of talk to them, show them around – ask them out,” he says in his uniquely good-humoured rustic vernacular.
“People do hook up … and can hook up over something horrible happening, you know, they go to the pub (in the aftermath) and stuff happens.
“You formed a very close bond with those you worked with, especially if you’d been through any sort of traumatic thing, such as someone dying.”
Ultimately, it was Dr Powell, a UK doctor trained in emergency medicine who arrived for a job with the RFDS, planning to stay a year – two at most – that won his heart with the couple marrying 12 years ago; the good doctor saying her now husband “grew on her”.
The proud dad and Prince Alfred College old scholar also shares a “lovely daughter”, Sally, with his first wife, a former RFDS nurse.
Badger, who at 65 is retired but still flying his own plane, joined the RFDS in Broken Hill in 1988, thriving in the “breathtaking, crisp scenery”, diversity of work and characters he met. He describes night landings on rough strips as short as 900m as challenging, so too dodging local wildlife.
“You’d have to be on your game; it’s pitch black out there, especially when there is no moon ... we’d talk (to the station owners) on the UHF (radio) about 10 minutes before we were due to land ... they’d get the runway lit up with kerosene lanterns and also run up and down a few times to push any kangaroos off,” he says, adding he still hit “one or two”.
“I also hit an emu once … it was resting on the side of the runway and when I touched down it jumped up and ran straight into the aeroplane.”
He recalls one night shift that included a flight to Wilcannia, back to Broken Hill, on to Alice Springs and then to Adelaide before returning to Broken Hill.
“The adrenaline kept you going (on those long nights),” he says.
He refers to the toughness, resilience and congeniality of bush folk who “don’t make a fuss, don’t (ring the doctor) unless there’s a real emergency”.
Thankfully, Badger says, shifts in workplace practices – such as wearing helmets – mean there are fewer “terrible” call-outs than there once were.
“The graziers used to just tear around with no helmets while mustering … that has changed which is a good thing,” he says.
And did he have any babies delivered mid-flight? “One lady went into labour on the flight but we were able to get landed at Broken Hill ... she had the baby on the plane but we were on the ground,” he says.
Still, given the nature of his work, he has a trove of notable workday memories.
“Yeah, there’s always memorable moments,” he says in his delightful drawl.
One that remains vivid is a call-out to a wool classer who had a big king brown snake latch onto his toe, while he and the shearers were celebrating “cut out” which happens when shearing on the property has finished.
“They’d set up a fire away from the woolshed and were having a few drinks,” he says.
“The dogs were over by the shed and started jumping up and down and barking ... a snake slithered out, went straight across to this guy, and it just latched onto his big toe and wouldn’t let go – you know, for some reason, shearers always seem to wear thongs.
“It had a full lot of venom and just pumped it into him and he was very sick, (by the time we arrived) his eyelids were going down and he was starting to go into paralysis ... I saw him a couple of years later and his toe was still black.”
He tells, too, of a stockman who had the “side of his face ripped out” by a bull’s horns and a man “badly mashed up” when caught in a rock-crushing machine that was turned on while he was inside servicing it; incredibly, both men, treated by RFDS medicos, recovered.
He admits there are memories of burns victims and horror car accidents that are hard to forget, including a “devastating” one in which young female friends died when their vehicle collided head on with another while passing a truck in “a cloud of dust”.
Regrettably, he recalls too much alcohol-fuelled violence, including stabbings, in remote communities. “When you’re working in the emergency services, you see just lots of really dumb stuff happening,” he says, telling how his RFDS team were once dispatched to a “TV antenna” up someone’s nose and a woman with a toilet seat melted onto her bottom.
If the life of Magnus Badger – the ideal moniker for a main character – was made into a movie, it’d be spellbinding viewing brimming with bush adventure, mateship and love.
‘… all I could see was dust and dirt.’
As a young doctor training in emergency medicine in the UK, Elaine Powell couldn’t have imagined she’d one day work – and fall in love – in the Australian Outback.
But an advertisement for a doctor with the Royal Flying Doctor Service caught her eye and the adventure seeking 33-year-old decided to apply after spending several years working as a GP in busy hospitals in her home city of Norwich.
“I just liked the idea of it really … I thought it would be interesting and different and it kind of matched my emergency medicine training,” she says.
Still, she wasn’t prepared for the “dust and dirt” that awaited her.
“I arrived in December, so I went from the UK in winter to Broken Hill in summer,” she laughs.
“I just remember flying in … looking out the window and thinking, ‘Oh there’s not much here’; ‘Oh my goodness, we are quite a long way from anywhere’ … all I could see was dust and dirt.
“I do remember the first dust storm that came into Broken Hill … I just thought, ‘God, this is like being in some kind of weird disaster movie’.”
But she found once she got oriented and started to understand the logistics of “trying to work out where people are and how to get to them”, she thrived, learning, too, to “talk about the weather a lot”.
“You’ve done the medical stuff, the harder part was coming to terms with the fact it was just you, the nurse, the pilot and whoever else was on the ground from the property (to help) … you can’t just call the anaesthetist, you can’t call someone to help you if you’re in a difficult situation,” she says.
“There are also lots of extra things to think about when you’ve got someone up in an aeroplane compared to when you’re trying to deal with (a medical incident) on the ground … you’ve got to improvise a little bit which is kind of a bit daunting when you first start.”
Dr Powell recalls one of her first RFDS call-outs was to a bad car accident in which four patients had been ferried to a nearby pub.
“It was really unusual for me … to walk into a situation where you’ve got all the people in the pub … you have to adjust how you’re thinking because normally you’re in an emergency department,” she says.
“But everyone works together … (in) the outback people just have that acceptance and are quite stoic as well.”
Dr Powell, who has worked as a locum and travel doctor since leaving Broken Hill, reflects on her time at the RFDS as the “best of my life”.
“I think for me, I wasn’t ever too homesick because it was so different, it was exciting … you’re seeing so many different things, every day something different is happening,” the 51-year-old says.
