Great Australian Ambos Stories

By Bill Marsh

Yeah, while some of my stories are quite gory, others can be very enlightening. Though, in hindsight, the best outcomes are when the patient pulls through. It's then that you know you've done your job, and you get a bit of a buzz out of that.

Put the sirens on and get ready to hit the road, because fact is stranger than fiction in this fabulous Australia-wide collection of ambos stories from bestselling author Bill 'Swampy' Marsh.

Rural and remote ambulance drivers and paramedics are a dedicated and gutsy bunch who work tirelessly to care for their communities, often in isolated and inhospitable conditions, with few resources but plenty of experience, courage and care. Ambos deal with it all: car crashes, delivering babies, snake bites, heart attacks, lost bushwalkers, drug overdoses - even the occasional crook camel. One thing they are never short of is a story or two to tell.

This memorable and eye-opening collection of real-life accounts of professionals and volunteers alike racing by road, air and water to save people in strife is by turns, poignant, bizarre, heartbreaking and hilarious.

Bill 'Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer and performer of stories, songs and plays. He spent most of his youth in rural south-western NSW and now lives in Adelaide. Swampy is one of ABC books' bestselling authors of Australian stories; this is his twenty-second book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460711385

Bill Marsh

Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

Book preview

Introduction – Kind Donation

For each of my ‘Great Australian’ stories, I spend around three or four months of the year out on the road, interviewing people and giving ‘Meet the Author’ performances. When I was working on Great Australian Outback Police Stories, on one particular tour, I covered something like ten thousand kilometres, over a six-week period.

On these trips, to save on expenses, I camp wherever I can. I cart along an Esky to store the basics and I have a small Engel fridge to keep perishables cool. So they’re pretty rough-andtumble sorts of adventures. But I love meeting the people and hearing of their experiences. And I think they appreciate the fact that someone is willing to drive all that way, just to sit down and have a yarn with them. And so, to help keep the wheels on the road, as I said, along the way I do ‘Meet the Author’ performances, where I sell my books and CDs.

On one journey, I gave an afternoon tea performance at a retirement village. Now, not being the type who pins tickets on himself, these shows are quite well received; particularly among the older folk who can relate to the stories I tell from my books and the songs I sing about my travels. Then, for a bit of added entertainment, I perform three ‘well worn’ magic tricks.

When I arrived at this place, I introduced myself to the administration officer of the complex. She was quite a curt young woman who obviously had better things to do than hang around with a blow in like me. So she handballed me over to a couple of the residents: one being the president of the complex’s social club and the other its secretary. To give you some idea, the president would’ve been in her late seventies or early eighties. Though, being as well-groomed and dressed as she was, from a distance she might’ve easily been mistaken for someone ten years younger.

Her sidekick, the secretary, would’ve been in his early to mid-seventies and was still quite sprightly – you could say, even cocky. He was also well dressed, but in a bush sort of way, with a yellow cowboy-style shirt, moleskin pants, riding boots and an Akubra hat that we both remarked was the same style as the one I wear. At first I assumed they were husband and wife. But when they led me to the entertainment area, I was introduced to the president’s husband: a tall, gaunt, sickly sort of bloke, who struggled around with the aid of a walking stick.

‘This’s where you’ll do your performance,’ said the president. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Yes, fine,’ I said.

Not long after I’d set up, the residents started to shuffle in. I’d say there would’ve been about thirty in all. A few could walk unaided, others were using walking frames – Zimmer frames. Some were in mobility scooters – ‘gofers’ as they’re known in South Australia. A couple were in wheelchairs and the rest used walking sticks, just like the president’s husband.

Once they’d settled I began. For every performance, it’s pretty much the same tried and tested routine. I introduce myself by saying how I grew up in a little town in the southwest of New South Wales by the name of Beckom. Beckom only had a population of sixty-four, with just fifteen of us kids in the primary school and no library that I can remember. Then I go on to explain how there were only three books in our household – a collection of Banjo Paterson’s poems, a collection of Henry Lawson’s short stories and the Bible – a fact that caused Dad to boast that we were one of the best-read families in the district. By this stage I’ve established my bush credentials and the cultural isolation I grew up in and, with me being such a poor student, how amazed I am that I’ve become the writer of some thirty books.

After a few yarns and a magic trick – the disappearing hanky – it was time for the residents’ afternoon tea. So, while they shuffled into line to attack the cakes and lamingtons, curried egg and ham and cheese sandwiches, and Jatz biscuits with a small block of cheese and a pickled onion impaled into them, via a toothpick, all to be washed down by a cup of piping hot tea or instant coffee, I decided to take the opportunity to go to the toilet.

‘Excuse me,’ I asked the president, ‘could you please tell me where the toilet is?’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’ And she led me through the side doors and down the hall. Following close behind us was the secretary feller, who was having a laugh about how he was now off to wash his hands after holding Mum’s unwashed magic disappearing hanky.

‘Here it is, just on your left,’ said the president.

‘Thanks.’

Just as I was about to go into the toilet, I noticed that the president and the secretary had slipped into the disabled toilet – together. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought. I just went and did what I had to do and, by the time I’d found my way back to the entertainment area, the residents had wolfed down their afternoon tea and were getting re-seated, eager for me to continue. When I was set, I looked over to the back of the entertainment area to get the all-okay nod from the president. And that’s when I noticed how she was looking a bit dishevelled; like her previously perfectly made up hair was a bit askew and her blouse wasn’t quite tucked in properly: just little things like that.

Anyhow, after I received her nod, I began the second half with a song that I’d written about Tom Kruse, the legendary mailman of the 1950s. Tom used to do the one-thousand-kilometre return trip mail run from Marree to Birdsville in an old Leyland Badger. That was in the days when the Birdsville Track was nothing but dirt and sand.

Not long after I started the song, a heated discussion broke out down the back, between the president and her husband, the wobbly feller with the walking stick. And it got to such a point where I was thinking about stopping the show. Now, I’ve been in some tricky situations during my performing career. I remembered the time when I was in a folk band; we were running a bush dance in an old folk’s community centre and, mid-brownjug-polka, one of the oldies collapsed on the dance floor.

To me it looked like he was gone for all money so, while someone went to ring an ambulance, we asked if they wanted us to continue or not. ‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ they said. ‘He’s still breathing.’ So, after they’d dragged the poor bloke over to the side of the hall and propped him up beside the exit, there to wait until the ambos arrived, we struck up the band again and the oldies got stuck back into it – Heel and toe. Heel and toe. So with that incident in mind, plus buoyed on by the old entertainer’s motto of ‘The Show Must Go On’, I continued singing. But then, just as I entered the last verse of my song, the husband got to his feet and shouted out at the top of his voice, ‘Hey you, Stumpy or whatever they call yer, what’s with havin’ yer way with me wife!’

Well, that stopped me in my tracks. Completely. Worse still, the audience that I had virtually eating out of my hand started glaring at me in a none-too-friendly manner. Then, while I was wondering what to do next, the husband began hobbling toward me, waving his walking stick in an aggressive manner, accusing me of having sex with his wife.

Now, I’m not a dobber – you know, one of those people who goes around telling on other people. But, as I was desperately looking around for help, I noticed that the secretary – the feller with the yellow shirt, the moleskins, the riding boots and the Akubra hat like mine – was looking pretty sheepish. And that’s when the penny dropped. So, just as the president’s husband was about to take a swipe at me, I called out, ‘It wasn’t me. It was him!’ To which the husband turned around and shouted, ‘So it was you Bob! You bloody lying cheating little bastard!’

And with one swipe of his walking stick, he felled Bob with a sickening blow to his forehead. Next thing there’s a crush of wheelchairs and walking frames and people with walking sticks gathering around Bob in an attempt to try and stop the president’s husband from finishing him off. Amongst all this mayhem, someone from the staff arrived, along with a couple of ambos who immediately got to it, treating Bob. When I looked around to see what the president wanted me to do, there was no trace of her. She’d already scarpered off. So I worked my way over to the most senior of the ambos. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ I asked, to which the reply was, ‘No thanks. You’ve done enough bloody damage already. So if I was you, I’d piss off out of here, and quick.’

This was obviously not the time to protest my innocence, so I did what he told me to do. I frantically packed up my gear, snuck out of the place, chucked everything into my vehicle and I was out of there. It wasn’t until I was fifty or so kilometres down the road, it struck me that I’d left all my books and CDs back on the table. But after what the ambo had said, I wasn’t game enough to go back to get them. So I arrived back home a bit worse for wear, particularly in an economic sense. Then a couple of weeks later, I received a card in the mail. It was from the administrative officer of the retirement village. It read: Thank you for your kind donation of books and CDs.

Footnote – Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh still continues to do author performances throughout Australia. For more information and booking inquiries, visit www.billswampymarsh.com

A Helluva Result

I’m out on the road at the moment, mate, so if you’re okay with having a chat over the speakerphone, that’s okay by me. Now, I’ve got lots of ambulance stories somewhere up there in my brain; all you’ll have to do is press the right buttons for them to come out. Oh, the only other thing is that I’m waiting on an important call from the St John Ambulance office manager down in Perth, so if I drop you like a hot cake that’ll be the reason.

Okay then, I grew up in the West Australian wheatbelt, at a place called Kulin, which is a tad under three hundred k’s out from Perth. Back then, Kulin would’ve had a population of around three hundred and it probably hasn’t changed much since. So that’s where I did my first seven years of schooling, then I went to a private school in Perth called Wesley College. Then, after I’d come back to Kulin, I joined St John. That was in 1987 when I would’ve been . . . gee, I’ll have to work that one out. Let’s see: I was born in 1966 and I’m now fifty-five so, without a calculator, that would’ve made me around twenty or so.

Those days, out in country Western Australia, all you basically needed to join the ambulance was to have your first aid certificate. That’s how long ago it was. So I did my first aid certificate and, as I got more interest in it, I went on to do all the higher levels to becoming an ambulance officer. As far as ambos went, back then, Kulin would’ve had – 1, 2, 3, 4 – probably half a dozen volunteers and we just had the one ambulance. That was a Ford F100 Mark 2. Mind you, these days I’ve actually gained the dubious record of having driven the Mark 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, which is the current model. So I’ve driven every last damn one of them.

But we didn’t use the Mark 1 too much because it was already fairly old. The one we used the most was the Mark 2. It was also fairly basic with a couple of old trundle stretchers that didn’t fold down or anything. So we had to lift the patients up by hand. Like, they’d be literally lying flat on their backs, just three or four inches off the ground, and we’d have to lift them up and put them in the ambulance. These days Occupational Health and Safety would have a coronary if they saw what we were doing. Still, with nothing better, we had no option. Then we only had the one oxygen cylinder, which meant that if we’d run out, we’d run out.

Both the Mark 1 and Mark 2 didn’t have much headroom. Both were very tight, so there wasn’t much space to put stuff in. As well as that, the Mark 1’s air conditioning was pretty crap and it drove as rough as guts. You know how us ambos take it in turns: while one drives, the other one’s in the back with the patient? When we were teaching the new ones, we’d get them to do resus – resuscitation – on a manikin while they were being driven along a corrugated and potholed road. That’d not only test them out, but it’d give them a damn good idea just how badly amplified it was in the back during a real-life situation. Oh, now it’s all starting to come back. With the Mark 2, you could hang another couple of stretchers above the bottom two. I mean, other than it being a helluva job to get someone right up that high in the first place, once you got underway and the ambulance started rolling around a bit, they’d be there, swinging in the breeze. So if there wasn’t too much wrong with them when they’d started out, they’d be crook with motion sickness by the time we got them to the hospital or wherever.

As far as callouts went, in those earlier days we got everything from medical cases to prangs. There were no defibrillators so, if we had to resus someone, we just did it the old way, the best we could. But I tell you, as far as survivability goes, a defibrillator’s definitely the way to go. I reckon the earliest ones might’ve come to the metro areas in the late 1980s, early ’90s, then in the country we probably got our first one in the late ’90s. But oh, they’re a real lifesaver. My oath. They’re a helluva thing. They do just about everything these days. But the cost, blimey. We got a new one just the other day and it cost $32,000. Fair dinkum, $32,000. So you wouldn’t want to drop the damn thing would you?

As for memories, there was the time me and my offsider picked up this lady from the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Perth. Now, to me, this lady looked like she was into her eighties. So she looked very old, plus she was skin and bone and she was obviously in a lot of pain. Even just to touch her caused great discomfort. And she was also very photophobic – like she couldn’t stand the light – so she wore sunglasses. Anyhow, we were taking her home as palliative. That’s how unwell she was. So we picked her up and when we slid her onto the stretcher, we could see that we’d hurt her. When we apologised, she was very gracious about it. ‘That’s okay,’ she replied in a very weak voice. ‘I know you have to do what you have to do.’

Then once she was in the ambulance, we took her around to this address. When we pulled up at the house, a very nice young lady, who was probably in her mid-sixties, came out to meet us. So we assumed we’d brought the mother home to the daughter. Anyhow, we backed up and we took the sick old lady inside, on the stretcher, and we set her up in a bedroom. ‘Is everything okay?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘thank you very much.’

After we’d had a bit of a chat we left them to it. Then, as we were walking back out to the ambulance, my offsider said, ‘Did you get that?’

I said, ‘No. What?’

She said, ‘That wasn’t the mother we brought home. That was the daughter we brought home and the younger looking woman was the mother.’

Well, you could’ve blown me down with a feather. The lady who looked like she was in her eighties was the flaming daughter. So there you go. She had some sort of oddball obscure disease that I’ve never seen before or since. So that’s one story that comes to mind. Now, I could probably go on about all the gory prangs I’ve attended but, to me, some of those more personal ones are the ones that’ve stuck with me. Though, as far as prangs go, I remember going to one well out in the bush. We were heading down the road when we saw these lights shining through the night. The thing was, they were a good yard or so up in the air. So we’re like, What the hell’s going on here?

As it turned out, this gentleman must’ve been travelling at a fair rate of knots because his ute had literally taken off and he’d almost completely wrapped the damn thing up in a tree. So much so that he’d almost broken the ute into two. Like, when we eventually extricated it, the wheels were a foot off the ground at either end. It was like a boomerang, and so, needless to say, that particular gentleman didn’t survive.

Now, I don’t want to get stuck on those sorts of bad accidents but, about ten years ago, we were called to a really bad one. The person concerned was a young lady, in her early twenties, who was from overseas and she’d been working locally. When we got there we took one look and thought, Hello, here we go. This isn’t gonna turn out well.

To put it bluntly, this young lady – for the sake of the story let’s call her Bronwyn – had been thrown out of the vehicle and she’d landed in a heap. To give you some idea, her foot was pointing 180 degrees from the direction it should’ve been pointing. Her leg was all twisted around. She had a compromised lung. She had long bone fractures. She had broken ribs. She had facial fractures. You name it, she had it. Essentially, she was a bag of bones.

Anyway, we did the best we could, considering the mess she was in and how hampered we were with having to treat her out on the side of a bush track. I mean, to be honest, we reckoned she would’ve struggled, even if she’d had the prang out on the front lawns of the Royal Perth Hospital, with all the top medicos right at hand. Anyway, as soon as I saw the gravity of the situation, I got on the phone and asked about getting the rescue helicopter out. ‘No,’ they said, ‘it’s just been tasked for another job.’

So I rang the Royal Flying Doctor Service. As it happened, the RFDS plane was out on the tarmac, revving up for take-off from Kalgoorlie to go out on a clinic run. Anyhow, we caught it just in the nick of time and they taxied back to the terminal and organised a full medical team. It was going to take them an hour and a half to get to Kondinin, which was the nearest town with both a hospital and an airstrip. So we loaded Bronwyn into the ambulance and we headed off to Kondinin Hospital to meet up with the RFDS. And like, at the best of times you’re flat out seeing a doctor at Kondinin. But as luck would have it, when we arrived at emergency, an ex-RFDS doctor was there, doing a locum. Then, when the RFDS plane landed, we not only had their flight doctor plus a flight nurse and all their gear but, you wouldn’t believe it, the local Kondinin doctor stuck his head in as well. Anyhow, the consensus amongst everyone was, ‘Well, we’ve done the best we can here.’

With that prognosis, we put Bronwyn and the whole RFDS crew in the back of the ambulance and we took them up to the airstrip. As we’re putting her in the plane, the police turned up. They were obviously there from a coronial point of view; you know, to see if they were going to end up with a death on their hands or not. Anyhow, one of them asked me, ‘Do you reckon she’ll live?’

I said, ‘I don’t know, but let me put it this way: a lot more work will have to be done if she’s going to survive.’ I mean, back when we had Bronwyn in the ambulance, her systolic blood pressure was so low that she was staring, glassy-eyed, out into vacant space. And at that stage, with nothing else I could do in a medical sense, just as a comforting gesture, I’d started stroking her forehead. And so, as I was waving the plane off, I was thinking, Well, she’ll even be lucky to make it to Perth.

Anyhow, Bronwyn ended up spending months in hospitals, with surgery after surgery, and she somehow survived. At one time, I was in Perth, and so I decided to go and visit her. At that stage, she was in Shenton Park Annexe, which is where they put people with long-term recovery and spinal injuries. When I introduced myself I said, ‘Do you remember me?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you another doctor?’

I said, ‘No, I was with you after your accident, on the side of the road, and I put you in the ambulance and we got you to hospital, then onto the Flying Doctor plane.’ But she was still looking at me, trying to work out where I came into the picture. Then I added, ‘By any chance would you remember someone stroking your forehead?’

And her eyes lit up. ‘Yes I do!’ she said.

I said, ‘Well, that was me.’

So yeah, and I still get emotional just thinking about it. It was a fantastic result. A helluva result in fact, and from such a gentle gesture as stroking her forehead, at that particular time, she remembered it. So anyway, we talked for a while and I filled in the gaps of her story. Then she said, ‘Do you want to have a look at all my injuries?’

Then she showed me all the bits and pieces where they’d patched her back up. So she was a very lucky young lady because we all thought she was gone for all money. It was only lucky that so many planets had lined up for her on that day. Like, we’d caught the RFDS plane just before they’d taken off from Kalgoorlie to do a clinic run. They managed to get a full medical team to the tarmac. We ended up with the three doctors at Kondinin Hospital, plus a number of other emergency people to give us a hand. Then there was all the expert care she’d received on her arrival in Perth. So, all in all, that’s been a real highlight for me as a volunteer ambo.

Footnote 1 – Progeria or Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome is an extremely rare progressive genetic disorder, beginning in childhood, that results in the dramatic, rapid appearance of aging. Progeria is also known as the ‘Benjamin Button disease’ after the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, which resulted in the film of the same title. The disease affects people of all sexes and races. Though progeria doesn’t affect a younger person’s intelligence or brain development, they’re usually more open to contracting diseases that you’d expect to see in people fifty years or older, such as bone loss, hardening of the arteries and heart disease. There is currently no known cure.

Footnote 2 – At last reports Bronwyn was going well and has now married. Mentally she’s as sharp as a tack, and the only physical sign resulting from the accident is that she walks with a slight limp.

A Lucky Man

My name is pronounced Keren – with an ‘e’ – but it’s spelt Karen – with an ‘a’. That came about when they spelt Keren wrong on my birth certificate. But Mum wouldn’t go back to change it because they’d also mistakenly written her down as being younger than what she was. And so, ‘Blow you,’ she said. ‘Your name doesn’t matter, just as long as we all learn to pronounce your name as Keren.’ And that was it. Yeah, so that was a little bit of a different start to life.

My family originally came from Canada and England. My brothers and sisters were born over in England and, when we came to Australia, my dad got a job in Queensland. And that’s where I was born. Then from Queensland, we moved over to Western Australia where Dad worked for Dampier Iron Ore as an instrument technician. So these days my home base is roughly an hour’s drive from Perth, going north on the Great Northern Highway.

I got into the ambulance-medic side of things via the mining industry. I kind of started at the bottom and, by doing lots of different courses, I worked my way up to becoming an amboparamedic. With being on a mine site I also became part of their emergency response crew, which included having to do courses in things like vertical rope rescue, confined space rescue, firefighting and everything else that came with it.

With the mining, most of my memories are of working long stretched-out hours, often going out to an emergency in the early evening and still going strong the next day. There were the usual accidents, the heart attacks, the unconscious patients, heat strokes. Oh, lots of things. See, with mining, everyone thinks that the workers are fit and healthy. But even though they do have to pass an initial medical examination, some of them may still be working on the mine site ten or fifteen years later. And of course, during that timeframe, they might’ve put on a lot of weight and/or they might’ve started getting high blood pressure and/or high cholesterol. Or they might’ve even had a cardiac event and, for fear of losing their job, they’ve not bothered to declare it. And these things do happen. Too right they do, and so, as an ambo, you mightn’t find out till it’s all too late.

There was a guy who turned up one day saying that he wasn’t feeling too well. So I asked him, ‘What’ve you been doing? Have you recently arrived at the mine site or have you just come off your R & R?’ Which is their rest break.

He goes, ‘Well, I’ve just come back from R & R two or three days ago.’

I said, ‘Anything unusual? Did you eat anything unusual? Did you do anything unusual?’

‘No, no. Nothing unusual.’

I said, ‘Well, do you feel physically sick? Like, have you got the runs or anything?’

‘No, no. I just feel a bit off.’

So then I started asking him the standard questions. ‘Have you got any past medical history that may be relevant?’

‘No, no. I’m pretty fit and healthy.’

‘Okay. So are you on any medications?’

‘No, no. I don’t take any medications.’

Now, this particular site was in an extremely hot and remote region, so I tended to have a lot of people crashing with dehydration. I said, ‘Well, maybe you’re just heat affected. So how about you go back in your room and take it easy