Bill Marsh - Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories

Contents

BILL SWAMPY MARSH is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. He spent most of his youth in rural south-western New South Wales. Bill was forced to give up any idea he had of a career as a cricketer when a stint at agricultural college was curtailed because of illness, and so began his hobby of writing. After he had backpacked through three continents and worked in the wine industry, his writing hobby blossomed into a career.

His first collection of short stories, Beckom Pop. 64, was published in 1988, his second, Old Yanconian Daze, in 1995 and his third, Looking for Dad, in 1998. During 1999, Bill released Australia, a CD of his songs and stories. That was followed by A Drovers Wife in 2002, Glory, Glory: A Tribute to the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 2008 and Open Roads: The Songs and Stories of Bill Swampy Marsh in 2017. He has written soundtrack songs and music for the television documentaries The Last Mail from Birdsville: The Story of Tom Kruse; Source to Sea The Story of the Murray Riverboats and the German travel documentaries Traumzeit auf dem Stuart Highway, Clinic Flights (Tilpa & Marble Bar), Traumzeit in den Kimberleys and Einsatz von Port Hedland nach Marble Bar.

Bill runs writing workshops throughout Australia and is a teacher of short-story writing within the Adelaide Institute of TAFEs Professional Writing Unit. He has won and judged many nationwide short-story and songwriting competitions and short-film awards.

Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories is part of a very successful series of Great Australian Stories, including Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories (2016), Great Australian Outback Police Stories (2015), Amazing Grace: Stories of Faith and Friendship from Outback Australia (2014), The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories and Great Australian Outback School Stories (2013), Great Australian CWA Stories (2011),New Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories and The ABC Book of Great Aussie Stories for Young People (2010), Great Australian Stories: Outback Towns and Pubs (2009),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). Bills biography Goldie: Adventures in a Vanishing Australia was published in 2008 and his semi-autobiographical collection Swampy: Tall Tales and True from Boyhood and Beyond was published in 2012.

More information about the author can be found at www.billswampymarsh.com

Facebook: Bill Swampy Marsh

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First published in Australia in 2017

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Bill Marsh 2017

The right of Bill Marsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN: 978 0 7333 3316 3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978 1 4607 0212 3 (ebook)

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Marsh, Bill, 1950 author.

Great Australian outback nurses stories / Bill Swampy Marsh.

Rural nurses Australia Anecdotes.

Nurses Australia Anecdotes.

Rural nursing Australia

Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio

Front cover image: Flynn, John, 1880-1951. Sisters E. Coleman, E. A. Hern and J. Gray at Esperance, September 1931.nla.obj-142597476. National Library of Australia.

Dedicated to CareFlight NT, Kakadu National Parks rangers

and the nursing and support staff from Jabiru.

Thanks for saving my life.

Special thanks to senior publisher Brigitta Doyle, and editors Rachel Dennis and Lachlan McLaine, along with the promotions and sales staff at ABC BooksHarperCollins Australia, without whose support these stories may never have seen the light of day; and to my precious support crew of Kath Beauchamp, Craig Langley and Margaret Worth.

Special thanks to Anne-Marie Borchers and CRANAplus for all their help and assistance, and to all those wonderful nurses I met along this journey. You are all just so important.

The stories contained in this book are written from interviews recorded by Bill Swampy Marsh. The contributors are:

Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories is perhaps the toughest book Ive written in the Great Australian Stories collection. During my travels, I was taken into places that were not pleasant. Unfortunately, a number of those places included remote Indigenous communities. This was an eye-opener that many white Australians either try to ignore or dont get to see. Those who do see it, like the nurses, the doctors, the teachers and the administrators, as well as the many, many Indigenous people themselves, are courageous and caring beyond belief and they manage to carry out their work with a hint of that wonderful sense of Aussie humour.

Despite their efforts, in 2016, a remote-area nurse Gayle Woodford was killed in the APY Lands, a ten-year-old girl committed suicide in a remote community out from Derby, WA, and unrest continued in a number of communities where some of these stories are set. In fact, our Aboriginal youth suicide rate remains higher than that of every country in the world bar one Greenland. And while just three per cent of our population is Indigenous, the prison population is nearly twenty-five per cent Indigenous. Added to that, Indigenous life-expectancy is ten per cent lower than that of our non-Indigenous population. A number of nurses I interviewed described the situation in Indigenous communities as being our greatest shame.