One afternoon in February, Ric jumped on a quad-bike with daughter Clare for a short ride back to the house. The family had been working on their 54,000 acre property in south-west Queensland and had just finished in the yards, after a day of mustering.

Ric’s wife Larissa was driving the truck back with the horses aboard, but Clare wanted to come home with her Dad.

“It was getting on close to 4pm and I was finishing up, so I told Larissa, Clare could ride back with me on the bike,” Ric said.

Like any dad, Ric was driving carefully but the dirt road was rough, the result of some recent heavy truck traffic.

“There was a lot of bull dust and before I knew it, the tyre of the quad bike bit into one of the truck tracks and flipped on its side,” Ric recalled.

Ric took the brunt of the fall, breaking a rib as he tried to save Clare from serious injury.

“I was so worried about her, I did my best to keep her off the ground as we tipped over, holding her out in front of me as we fell off, but she hit her head.”

Ric was 10kms from home and with Clare getting sleepy and no one answering the 2-way radio, he had to keep driving.

“I just wanted to get her back home so we could call the Flying Doctor,” Ric said.

“I knew I had to keep her awake so I was asking her questions on the way.”

Larissa, 32 weeks pregnant with their third daughter, was unsaddling horses at the horse shed when Ric pulled up at the house and yelled out.

“That blood curdling cry-out from Ric about Clare being injured… I will never forget. It was the scariest day of my life,”

“I called the Flying Doctor straight away but I was in shock, so handed the phone over to a friend who took over the conversation.

We were in constant contact with them until they landed about an hour-or-so later.”

“We have an RFDS medical chest at home and while we had called the Flying Doctor for medical advice before, we had never needed them to fly out to the station until that afternoon,” Larissa said.

Nurse Diane Dowrick, Doctor Emma Leu-Marshall and Pilot Leonard Nicholas from the RFDS Charleville Base where working that day when the call came through.

“As soon as you hear about a quad bike accident you fear the worse, so I packed all the medical supplies we might possibly need and rushed to the aircraft,” Diane said.

Once the crew were airborne Pilot Leonard Nicholas contacted the homestead via the aircraft satellite phone to check on the condition of their landing strip.

“There was a record of the station having a landing strip but no one from the RFDS had landed there for some time, so I didn’t have many notes on what to expect,” Nicholas said.

“To their credit, the family were really well organised, they were up to date with airstrip maintenance and had already sent two men on motorbikes down to clear wildlife and cattle,” Nicholas recalled.

“I was able to give the station an accurate time of arrival and when we touched down, just before 6pm, the family were waiting at the strip.”

With nightfall quickly approaching, Doctor Emma Leu-Marshall tried to minimise the time on the ground and after some initial checks decided it was best to take Clare back to Charleville for overnight observation, pain relief and some stitches.

“We were airborne again within 15 minutes,” Emma recalls.

“During the flight, Clare rested in Larissa’s arms, and we kept monitoring her for signs of more serious injury,” Emma said.

“Fortunately, Clare seemed to have sustained only superficial injuries but overnight observation was important, particularly given the isolation of the property,” Emma said.

Miraculously Clare was released from hospital the next day with a black eye but no permanent injuries and Larissa and Ric couldn’t be more relieved.

“We are so grateful for the care the Flying Doctor team provided,” Larissa said.

“For the past 14 years we have been maintaining the Flying Doctor airstrip on our property and it had never been used. Then one afternoon it became the most important 1,000 metres on our property,” Larissa said.