There was a time when I assumed the Royal Flying Doctor Service was for people who live in the outback.
Not out of any particular ignorance. It's just how the RFDS sits in the Australian imagination — a plane on a dirt strip, a cattle station, somewhere very far from here. Worthy, remote, and nothing much to do with a fabric shop in Canberra.
It was late on Saturday the first of November last year, and I was putting the final stitches into something I'd made for Canberra Frocktails.
Frocktails, if you've never been, is an evening where a roomful of people wear clothes they made themselves. Most people plan theirs for months. I bought the pattern on the 28th of October — a fabric and a pattern had collided in my head and I couldn't leave it alone — and by that Saturday evening I was wearing it. Some of you watched it happen on Instagram.
Then the phone rang.
My husband Matthew had fallen ill on a two-week work trip to Western Australia. He was in Esperance, roughly as far from Canberra as you can get while still being in the country. It was appendicitis, and it had gone badly wrong.
Then I heard nothing for five hours.
I got as far as the door to the event.
We were sponsoring Frocktails that year and I had a prize to hand over, and I knew the organisers would be flat out and nowhere near their phones. It didn't seem right to simply not turn up. So I drove there in the dress, found someone, explained, and went home again.
Photo taken just before I put the dress on.
The Royal Flying Doctor Service flew Matthew from Esperance to Perth for the emergency surgery that saved his life. While that was happening, I was on the other side of the country, booking a flight and packing, with no idea how long for.
At ten o'clock a St John Ambulance volunteer I have never met sent me a text message with a photograph of the aeroplane. That was how I found out he was on it.
Photo sent to me at 10 pm that night by someone I've never met
You don't have to live remote. You just have to be somewhere remote when it happens.
That's the thing I'd got wrong, and I suspect I'm not the only one. Matthew wasn't living in the outback. He was away for work, in a regional town with a hospital and a good medical team who were preparing to operate themselves if the plane couldn't reach him in time.
Esperance to Perth is 583 kilometres.
So, October
This October, Matthew and I are each cycling those 583 kilometres as part of Oceans to Outback, which raises money for the RFDS. We've entered as the Codependent Cyclists.
We're aiming for $10,000, and we're roughly a third of the way there.
On the last day of the month we'll be in Perth, and if we can arrange it, we'd like to ride the final leg to the RFDS base at Jandakot — the airfield Matthew was flown into, unconscious, one day short of a year earlier. It seems like the right place to stop.
If you'd like to help
The fundraising page is here: Codependent Cyclists — Oceans to Outback
Every donation goes straight to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and it's tax-deductible. Nothing comes through the shop.
And if you'd rather not, that's completely fine. You came here for fabric, and there'll be fabric again next week.
I did get to wear it, three weeks later. The two toiles behind me are what it took to get the fit right.
