Sister Pat (Part 3) – Swept Away in the Big Wet

The weather was one of the most formidable challenges Sister Patricia McPherson faced in the Kimberley region of Western Australia when she was a nurse in Fitzroy Crossing. ( See previous installments: ‘Sister Pat’ A legend Of A Nurse (Part 1)  & Becoming Sister Pat (Part 2).

Indeed, the Big Wet of 1966-67 almost took her life.

Two seasons dominated the region. The Dry at its zenith, with its dust and searing heat that drained everyone of all energy by mid-morning and reached temperatures so extreme that her thermometer exploded. The Wet, that lasted around three months, flooded and cut off Fitzroy Crossing from all access outgoing and incoming except for the occasional emergency helicopter. 

The beginning of the Wet made for hazardous trips to the Aboriginal camps across flooded creeks where Pat’s Land Rover would get bogged down. Later, these attempts to get to the camps became impossible as the flooding waters made all routes impassable.  Regular deliveries of supplies and mail were suspended as the people of the Crossing made the best of their isolation. 

“It is a time of enforced inactivity and fraying tempers, of boredom and gambling, of grumbling and irritability for the whites, and walkabout for the Aborigines. It is also a busy time for all hospitals, as the Aborigines tend to get the majority of their illnesses in the Wet time. 

At the onset of a Wet season the Aborigines went walkabout to traditional gathering places where they camped and carried out ceremonies and rituals.

 Stock work on the stations closed down and most pastoralists went south for the Wet, leaving a few old hands as caretakers.” 

THE BIG WET 1966-1967

“It was the Wet season that generally lasts from Christmas Day to the beginning of April. The country was wide and flat, which meant the Fitzroy River which ran through the tiny outpost of Fitzroy Crossing, was no longer a dried up gully as in the Dry season, but had risen to 36 feet (11 metres) and now spread 30 miles (48 kilometres) across the whole flood plain, blocked all road access and split the town into three islands. We nurses were cut off during the Wet and couldn’t get out to the camps to work. Instead, we worked in the (AIM) hospital which was now surrounded by water. 

Fitzroy Crossing during the Wet consisted of five buildings on islands of dry higher ground, each isolated from the other. The AIM (Australian Inland Mission) Hospital, the Post Office and the Police Station were on one, the Mission, school and airstrip on another and the pub/store on the third. The only means of transport was by boat and for the first time, the Public Works Department in Derby had placed a boat (a tinny, a small, open aluminium boat) at the police station to facilitate this. The pub also possessed a tinny. 

A visiting nurse, Gail Henderson had arrived and I had asked Ray Bates from the pub to take us in the tinny to show Gail the Crossing.

As we three drifted off in the tinny from behind the hospital, engrossed in taking photos of the surroundings, we hadn’t noticed that we were drifting toward low-lying thick steel cables attached to pylons erected near the river. The cables, part of a never used public works project, skimmed the river and sent up a curtain of spray around us which I was busy photographing. 

Suddenly, the steel hawsers were upon us and the top two cables were about to hit us in the head. To propel us out of danger, Ray was desperately trying to start the tinny’s motor which had cut out soon after we launched. It wasn’t connecting. I told Ray to get away from the cables, then as a cable whipped over us, Ray catapulted over my head. Astonished, I thought “Gee that was a terrific dive” – not then realising he was caught in the top cable.  Like two giant serpents, cables in the water below the boat ensnared us and whipped the tinny over and Gail and me into the flooded river. 

Fitzroy Crossing roads impassable in the Big Wet

SWEPT DOWN RIVER

I surfaced. The first thing I glimpsed was Ray his arms flailing. He was caught up on one of the upper cables which had trapped him. Then Gail surfaced. She said “I can’t swim!” and went under again. She came up again and repeated “I can’t swim!”  “Yes you can!” I yelled, “You can do sidestroke.” I quickly demonstrated, and after going under one more time, she managed to keep above water. Miraculously, we saw the tinny, overturned, at a distance. I swam and reached the boat first and as Gail floated by, I swung her towards the boat so she could grab onto it. We both clung to its sides as we were swept off down the river. Then Gail suddenly said  “Pat where is your camera?” It had gone into the river when we tipped.  All I said was “Bugga the bloody camera!”  

We drifted past the Post Office. I thought we’d better let someone know we were in the river – so I started yelling for help and then as we passed the police station, I saw John Graysmark, the policeman, bailing out the police rescue boat. He saw us and got ready to come to our rescue but I told him that Ray Bates was caught in the cables and John said he would go for him first and then come back for us.  We okayed this, thinking they would only be gone five minutes. So off went the policeman to rescue Ray, together with a prisoner he sprung from the gaol whom he had incarcerated the night before for having a go at him with a shifting spanner while drunk. 

Meanwhile, Ray had managed to work his way along the cable to reach a partly submerged tree. He got into the tree and clung on, grasping its branches like a drenched Koala. In shock and distress, he wouldn’t let go of the branches when the rescue boat arrived and it took a very long time before they could get him into the boat. They took him straight to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Gail and I, hanging on to the tinny but increasingly exhausted, drifted down the river wondering what had happened to the rescue boat which we had expected to quickly come back for us. A few bemused Aboriginal people standing on the bank waved as we drifted past clinging to the sides of the boat as we were swept along with the current.  It was raining and cold and very lonely on the river especially after we passed Brooking Creek, then the pub, then Donkey Crossing and as I didn’t know the river from then on, toward the end of my known world of Fitzroy Crossing.

Fitzroy Crossing Hospital in Big Wet 1966-1967

After about an hour in the water, we had been swept five miles downstream. Suddenly, we were caught in a rapid side current and swept toward a patch of trees overhanging from the bank. Ahead of us, I saw an area where 30-40 foot (9-12 metres) trees were submerged. Our boat had started to drift towards them and I noticed lots of turbulence surrounding the trees. To my horror, I saw the turbulence had created a whirlpool a bit further up. I realised we had to let go of the boat and cried this out to Gail. 

This was a moment of particular clarity for me – we had to grab hold of the overhanging branches and get clear of the boat so that we weren’t knocked off, if it struck obstructions and bounced back onto us.  I saw there were only two small spindly branches available for us to catch and a flotsam of more spindly stuff through which the boat had to go if we were to be free of it tangling or injuring us. Leaving the boat was a big decision. It had meant safety for us until now. What if we didn’t catch the branches?

I explained the plan to Gail and we both edged our way to the back of the boat and then the first branch came up and Gail went for it, caught it and wrapped its thin stems around her arms and it held. Then the spindly stuff loomed up so with all my strength I shoved the boat through it and out of my way and went for my branch which I also caught and held.  We watched as  our overturned boat shot along in the rapids, hit a whirlpool, majestically rose straight up its prow skyward, and then immediately fell back, sucked straight down into the vortex of the whirlpool. 

We were left tethered by these thin stems to the tops of the trees as the current pulled us horizontally in the water.

Gail and I kept hanging on, drained of energy. Our position was dangerous. With the force of the rapids pulling at us, we had no hope of climbing along the small branches to the safety of the bank. Nor did we have enough strength to hold on for more than another ten minutes and there was a whirlpool ahead if we let go. 

Just then the rescue boat roared up with three very white-faced men in it. They’d seen the boat go down and thought we’d gone down with it!  

Team that rescued Pat – the post master, the prisoner and the policeman in Big Wet 1966-1967

THE RESCUE

They dragged Gail aboard and then me, depositing me like a sack of flour. I so much wanted to get aboard nicely!

It was difficult pushing away from the trees, but we made it.  We were thankful to find out that Ray was safe and in hospital.  It took about half an hour to come back to the police station against the current.  Shirley Graysmark, wife of John the policeman, brought us down to the hospital where Heather (another nurse) plus all the Aboriginal patients were waiting in a loving and sympathetic line to welcome us back saying “poor bugga, poor bugga.”  

Gail and I were very cold and in shock – but safe. We both felt that God’s presence rode the river with us. We showered, changed into dry clothes, had a cup of tea and then got on with work. It was just on dark by this time and there were treatments to do, babies to feed, the plant and water pump engines to start, and the evening meal to prepare.

It was only forty years later, when Gail visited me in my hometown in Victoria, that we talked about this incident for the very first time. Gail confided that when we were being pulled horizontally in the water, the current whipped off her shorts and she was left in her knickers and a brief top, which none of us seemed to notice during the rescue.

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