John Flynn
A bush parson who spent a decade making the Flying Doctor happen after a stockman died waiting for help
John Flynn was born in 1880 at Moliagul, a gold-mining town in Victoria, and lost his mother when he was two. He worked as a pupil teacher and then studied for the Presbyterian ministry, taking bush parishes where the congregation might be a handful of shearers. In 1912 the church made him superintendent of its new Australian Inland Mission, with a territory covering most of the continent and almost no people in it.
Where he could not put a minister he put a nurse, and over the years the mission built a chain of small nursing hostels in places like Oodnadatta and Halls Creek. But the distances defeated everyone. In 1917 a stockman named Jimmy Darcy was operated on by a postmaster following telegraphed instructions from a doctor in Perth, and died before the doctor could reach him after a journey of more than a week. The same year a young medical student and airman, Clifford Peel, wrote to Flynn suggesting aeroplanes.
Flynn seized on it and then had to wait. Aircraft were unreliable, doctors sceptical, money short, and there was no way for a remote homestead to call for help. He talked, wrote and raised funds for a decade, and backed the engineer Alfred Traeger, whose pedal-powered wireless finally gave the bush a voice.
In May 1928 the Aerial Medical Service made its first flight from Cloncurry in Queensland in a hired Qantas biplane. It became the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Flynn died in 1951 and is buried near Alice Springs.