The RFDS is an integral part of outback Australian life and there are many reminders of it here in North West Queensland. Mount Isa Airport is one of its major bases and in town the RFDS office sits just off the Barkly Hwy. Around the corner from the office in Mount Isa is the 1950s RFDS Wild Drover plane perched high on its platform and visible from the bridge on the highway. Just 120km down the road Cloncurry hosts John Flynn Place, a museum dedicated to clergyman Flynn's creation of the Flying Doctor service, which began in that town in 1928.

Flynn was a Victorian Presbyterian pastor and the inspiration behind two great health organisations in the bush. The first was the Australian Inland Mission a series of basic bush hospitals he established in the early 20th century in very remote communities like Oodnadatta, Fitzroy Crossing and Birdsville. These hospitals filled an urgent need, but highlighted another: How to get patients from very remote areas to remote care.

The need for a flying doctor was traced to an event over a decade before its founding. In 1917 Australia was transfixed by the tragedy of Kimberley stockman Jimmy Darcy. On July 29, Darcy suffered massive internal injuries when his horse fell in a cattle stampede. He was taken 80km on a dray over a rough track to the nearest settlement of Halls Creek in the far north of Western Australia. He needed immediate lifesaving surgery and with the nearest doctor thousands of kilometres away, Halls Creek postmaster Fred Tuckett had to perform emergency surgery on Darcy's ruptured bladder. Perth doctor Dr Joe Holland instructed Tuckett via morse code how to carry out the surgery and using his pocketknife and some morphine, Tuckett made an incision above the pubic bone. Tuckett worked for hours, cutting and stitching, stopping every few minutes to check the doctor's telegrams.

Though the operation was a success Darcy came down with malaria. Dr Holland made a mercy dash on a cattle ship that took a week to reach Derby and then bumpy six days in a Model T Ford before it died 40km from Halls Creek. Dr Holland walked for two hours to a cattle station and then rode through the night to reach the town at daybreak. Agonisingly Jimmy Darcy had died a few hours earlier.

Newspapers were gripped by the story of the young stockman's desperate struggle for life and John Flynn commented on it a year later in his Presbyterian Church Inland Mission magazine The Inlander. "It's still the pioneer who pays the price for the nation's development," Flynn wrote. But his eye was caught by another article in the same issue. Victorian man Clifford Peel was a fellow Presbyterian and a support of Flynn's Australian Inland Mission. Importantly he was also an early aviator.

Enrolled into a medical degree in Melbourne in 1917, Peel had signed up with the Australian Flying Corps and sent to the western front. His letter to the Inlander was written "at sea 20 November 1917". Peel could see how after the war planes could overcome the tyranny of distance in the Australian bush. He addressed two questions in the letter, safety and the lack of landing grounds.

Peel said even in war the number of miles flown "per misadventure" was "very large" while "the number of accidents per aerodrome was very small". He then calculated the cost of inland flying in "time, men, material and efficiency" and said in the bush it would be ten times cheaper than running a car while landing grounds "would be found where needed". Peel said aviation would transform mail delivery, government services and business and would be "an undreamt of boon" for those who lived in remote parts. Peel concluded his letter by saying he could foresee "a missionary doctor administering to the needs of men and women scattered between Wyndham and Cloncurry".

Perhaps Peel saw himself in that role after the war. Sadly he was shot down in combat and killed just a few days before the 1918 Armistice and never lived to see the dream come to fruition. But Flynn could not get the idea out of his mind. From 1919 onwards he devoted his magazine to promote the cause of a flying doctor. Flynn foresaw another problem. It was one thing to have a plane ready in an emergency but the people who lived on properties needed some way of calling it out in emergencies.

Morse code was available as the Darcy incident showed but only at telegraph stations. Wireless had also started but its equipment was cumbersome and was mostly just receiver-only with stations unable to transmit out.

In 1922 the Australian Inland Mission board launched an Aerial Medical Fund to raise money for a flying doctor. Around the same time Flynn met Qantas co-founder and pilot Hudson Fysh. The then two-year-old airline had flown 40,000km and carried a thousand passengers without accidents. Fysh advised Flynn to buy new planes that weren't damaged in the war and also to buy small planes as they would need to land on primitive airstrips. They also need to be covered from the elements to protect patients.

But with Flynn busy with the Australian Inland Mission, his Presbyterian church board appointed another minister Andrew Barber to supervise the hospitals to take the pressure off Flynn. Barber and a doctor George Simpson went on a tour of northern Australian hospitals in 1927 taking three months covering almost 13,000 kms. They arrived at Cloncurry when Qantas received an urgent message from Mount Isa to take a badly injured worker to Cloncurry hospital. Simpson accompanied the pilot to provide aid to the worker who had a fractured pelvis and spine. The quick aerial response saved the miner's life and the publicity led to interest and donations from public and private sources.

But how could people in an emergency contact help when needed? By 1926 Flynn was also talking to an electrical engineer named Alf Traeger known for his improvisation work in radio technology. Traeger had an idea from a returned war veteran who told him they captured a German radio transmitter in the trenches which used bicycle wheels to generate power at 20 watts. By using feet it freed up the operator's hands for sending messages. Traeger travelled around the outback trying communication experiments with Flynn. By 1929 Traeger had replicated the German model. His simple phone cost just £33 to produce. The earliest radios sent messages in Morse code and eventually Traeger adopted a typewriter to allow people to type in their messages in English.

The next need was a base radio station and Cloncurry, the spot where Qantas was providing planes for the fledgling aerial medical service, was ideal. Traeger went to Augustus Downs station, 300km north to successfully test the pedal radio. Flynn recruited eight radio experts and sent them to pastoral stations around Cloncurry to install the sets and explain how to use them. It also put them in isolated hospitals such as the one in Birdsville. The Australian Inland Aerial Medical Service was up and running with Kenyon St Vincent Welch the first doctor based in Cloncurry. Welch had been selected from 22 applicants responding to an advertisement in the Australian Medical Journal. In May 1928 he made the first emergency flight from Cloncurry to Julia Creek, on board a De Havilland model DH50 aircraft hired from Qantas.

It quickly expanded from being just an emergency service. When Welsh was flown to Dajarra, an hour from Cloncurry, to treat a child, people hearing of his presence queued up to see him. It was the flying doctors' first medical clinic, something that would become standard practice in the years that followed. When Flynn died in 1951 he was buried at the foot of Mt Gillen in Alice Springs in the centre of Australia. During the burial a single RFDS plane flew overhead "as if winging him to heaven" as Max Griffiths wrote in his biography of the Inland Mission. The Mission survived until 1977 but the RFDS still flies high today, a vital part of the health care services of the Australian Outback.