How Angels Came To Tragedy Corner

“If you want to commend your gospel to men, first of all do something for them they understand.” (Rev. John Flynn’s favourite saying.)
 
A century ago, ‘Tragedy Corner’ was an undefined space where the borders of South Australia, NSW and Queensland and the 5000 km long dingo fence, jostled each other. Scorching winds, summer heat and the fitful flows in the Diamantina River and Cooper’s Creek had made it a graveyard for exploring parties like those of Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills.
 
It was the tragic toll it took on families that caught the attention of the Rev. John Flynn in the war years, 1914-18. Twice he had received anonymous letters containing the white feather suggesting he was a coward for not going to the War. But he believed the remote Inland was his battlefield and threw himself recklessly into the effort to raise money for a hospital and recruit high grade nurses for the tiny settlement of Birdsville. The conquest of Tragedy Corner had begun.

 Lou Reese, who drove Grace Francis and Catherine Boyd on the last leg from Brisbane in 1923, was hugely impressed watching them treat illnesses during the journey to Birdsville. He wrote to Flynn, ‘If ever angels came on earth, I’d say these were two.’ Others in the Corner country remained unconvinced; “We don’t want no bloody missionaries round here!”
 
Conditions were crude – but the two women won the hearts of their neighbours by cheerfully setting up camp in a refurbished pub built with hewn stone, mud walls and an iron roof. The nearest telephone was 400 km away, so they were the decision makers on the cases that they treated. These nurses soon became known as ‘the border sisters’ or ‘Flynn’s boundary riders’, covering long, hard miles as they tackled ‘Tragedy Corner.’
 
Grace’s experience nursing wounded soldiers on the Western Front in France, equipped her with diagnostic skills and she made a deep impression by being the kind of ‘angel’ who didn’t mind getting down and dirty. When a rotting horse carcass threatened the town water supply, she rolled up her sleeves and removed it.

​The children suffering with inflamed eyes caused by Sandy Blight (trachoma) particularly distressed the two women. It had the potential to cause blindness but their careful treatment was soon saving the sight of bush kids.
 
When John Flynn drove into town in 1925 on the long circuit that was to take him through Bourke and Cobar, the nurses showed their records for the first 14 months of their stay. The pioneering padre was brought to tears as he scanned the records of the 2000 patients these women had treated without a doctor’s help. The saving of children’s eyesight moved him in particular. The combination of intrepid Christian faith and unflagging kindness in ‘the angels’ he’d recruited was changing the character of ‘Tragedy Corner.’

Following John Flynn’s urging to generate a sense of family, they brought the children together in a Sunday School and offered sewing classes. They arranged table tennis competitions, organised picnics and laboured to create a tennis court, drawing the scattered community together. They were in the centre of the action at the Birdsville Races and their ‘Brisbane Home’ became a popular gathering place offering cups of tea and a library. 
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​The creative nurses announced a Christmas party. They appealed to their city contacts to send gifts and mobilised a team to prepare food. On Christmas Eve 1923, sixty-four people gathered around Birdsville’s first Christmas tree – a desert ash. Sister Francis reported great excitement among kids who’d never seen a decorated tree or received gifts from Santa. “They are all satisfied it is the best Christmas yet in Birdsville,” she reported.
 
These ‘angels’ functioned without wings. More often than not, medical supplies and equipment arrived painfully late by camel train from Adelaide. The two women treated a steady stream of bush folk with broken limbs, wounds, diseases and rotten teeth, often making arduous trips on rough tracks by car or buggy. Flat tyres, breakdowns and bogging were all in a day’s work.

They delivered babies, offered palliative care to the dying, prepared and wrapped the dead, read the burial service and then comforted the bereaved. This tough experience ignited a lifelong passion in them to help John Flynn spread the wings of his impossible dream of an airborne medical service across the skies of Australia.
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 When the time came for Grace and Catherine to depart, people travelled from all across ‘Tragedy Corner’ to express their gratitude to the ‘angels’. In the words of author Ivan Rudolph, “The ‘bloody missionaries’ had been successful at Birdsville and left behind them a legacy of love and healing that prevailed right into the following millennium.” (Flynn’s Outback Angels, Vol 1. Casting the Mantle)  
 
John Flynn made it clear that this vision of stretching a ‘mantle of safety’ over the whole Australian continent was his way of following in the steps of Jesus as described in this eyewitness account. “That evening, after the sun was down, they brought sick and evil-afflicted people to him, the whole city lined up at his door! He (Jesus) cured their sick bodies and tormented spirits.” (Mark 1:32-33)