In an effort to lift a good number of scrub bulls by cattle train for the long truck to the abattoir at Katherine before the wet set in, the stockmen as well as the owner of Urapunga, Ray Fryer, were away mustering. It was left up to me, the school teacher to man the short wave radio for the four o'clock call-in to Darwin, an Outback safety check. Waiting my turn to report in was never tedious. There were always items of interest, some happy and some sad. The tersest of jokes were allowed.
Every-day requests became public knowledge. There were messages that derived from our remoteness, both from each other and from urban life, such as "permission to bury." This far out, no doctor made house calls. It was the task of the coroner in Darwin to decide whether to give or deny permission. With temperatures hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit along with rivers swollen by monsoon rains, permission was seldom denied.
One Monday afternoon, a Flying Doctor aircraft was heard requesting Darwin to relay a message to Gove, a bauxite operation on the eastern tip of Arnhem Land. Due to severe lightning strikes, a dry-storm precursor to monsoon storms that would soon sweep down from Indonesia, communication was difficult. One had to be patient and piece things together in spite of the static.
This particular call was unusual to say the least. We were privileged to sit in on an intense drama, the likes of which would unlikely be heard of anywhere but in the Australian Outback and even then it would only be once in a blue moon. Besides, the practice that occasioned this assault on life was something that was considered to have been dead and buried.
Nurse Harvey was requesting that an ambulance and a doctor be standing by in Gove with an adequate supply of morphine. I recognized her voice as she had visited Urapunga a month or two back to give my class their annual shots and to needle me just for fun.
"What is the extent of the patient's injuries?" Darwin asked.
"No physical injuries evident. Psychic only, if you must know."
The dialogue, shattered by periodic static, went on for a while, until the nurse, in a fit of exasperation, exclaimed. "It's a case of pointing the bone!"
"Got it!" Darwin responded. "Willco."
For the next two or three days, no member of the network had to be reminded of the Four O'clock.
