Everything you always wanted to know about The Flying Doctors. Dedicated to Lenore Smith and Christopher Stollery.
 

Chapter 7 - Liz and Rebecca

This chapter is part of the book The Inside Story by James Oram. It's a book about the actors of The Flying Doctors and it was published in 1990. You get to know a lot about the actors and about working for the most popular Australian TV series.
Only to obtain second hand via websites like E-bay these days.

Hell, it was cold. Her teeth chattered as though they were driven by an electric motor, her hands shook, her nose felt it belonged to someone else. Liz Burch could not remember ever feeling so cold. Yet she was supposed to be in the outback with sweat pouring off her face, out there in the heart of Australia with the heat, dust and flies, where a person can die in two days if stranded without water. She was in no danger of dying from dehydration, of ‘doing a perish’ as they say in the outback. She was getting more water than she ever wanted to see again, gallons of the stuff pouring down on her from the freezing belly of a water tanker.

She swore under her breath. Then she laughed. When she had taken the role of Dr Chris Randall in The Flying Doctors she had thought, perhaps carelessly, that she would be working where the sun seldom stopped shining and where, if the temperature fell below seventy degrees, it was a cold day.

Instead, she was filming in Minyip in the middle of winter. It was 4 am and the clothes she and Lenore Smith (Sister Kate Wellings) were wearing were more suitable for the tropics. To add insult to injury, or bitterness to bleakness, they had to suck ice blocks to condense the moisture in their breath. It wouldn’t look right for them to exhale small white puffs as though they were playing Eskimos.

‘It’s a glamorous life, ain’t it?’ someone said. No one laughed.

According to the scriptwriter, who wasn’t feeling cold at all when putting the words on paper, Liz and Lenore had to carry a patient from the Flying Doctor aircraft to an ambulance during a rainstorm. To ensure the rain was not dropping gently from the heavens, or at least from a hose attached to the water tanker, a wind machine produced a miniature gale to add to their misery.

They did one take. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to shoot it again,’ said the director. ‘There was water on the lens.’

So they did it again. They picked up the stretcher carrying the patient, who Liz estimated weighed about nineteen stone – although the miserable conditions may have caused her to exaggerate his bulk – and went through the performance for a second time. As they staggered through the ‘rain’, their hands slipped from the stretcher handles made greasy by the water. Their burden thumped to the ground, yelling blue murder, and they raced for cover.

‘We’ll have to do that again, thank you.’

Eventually one of the prop men donned oilskins and gave them a hand, pretending he was a farmer who just happened to be wandering past in the middle of the night.

At last they got the patient where they wanted him. Another scene which had to be shot involved sawing off one of the patient’s legs with a hack-saw. Not his real leg, of course. The Flying Doctors strives for authenticity but cutting off a thespian’s leg is frowned on by Actors’ Equity, even on double rates. To add realism, a water pistol full of fake blood was squirted into Liz’s face as she sawed away. The scene over, Liz, freezing cold, her face splattered with ‘blood’, laughed, walked outside and washed herself down in the ‘rain’.

Unfortunately, their toil was in vain. The amputation scene never made it to the screen, the producers deciding it was not appropriate viewing for 7.30 p.m. in the evening.

After observing the misery of working in Minyip in winter, Pamela Bone, of the Melbourne Age newspaper, wrote: ‘Watching the cast in the small town of Minyip was for me another shattering of the myth of stardom. The wind blowing off the Wimmera wheat fields down the main street of Minyip must have had a chill factor of about zero degree ... the discomfort level was approaching physical pain.’

It’s not easy being a doctor in The Flying Doctors. They face problems unknown to the general practitioner. For one scene Liz was required to administer an injection to a girl patient. To give authenticity and yet save the actor’s skin from becoming a pin cushion, a piece of wood was placed under the patient’s shirt, allowing Liz to jab away with total confidence. But the needle jammed in the wood. Liz wrenched it with such force it leapt from her hand and somersaulted sharp-end first into the patient’s leg.

She leaped to her feet, screaming: ‘You bloody bitch, you’re trying to kill me!’

Such is show business. Liz can barely remember a time when she didn’t want to be in the business that would later have her tail frozen off at four in the morning. ‘Since the age of four I’ve always dreamed of becoming an actress, a star, the best actress in the world ... I found I could make people laugh. I could say dumb things, get words mixed up and people would laugh at me, and with me.

A year later she wrote to the ABC, the Australian equivalent to the BBC, volunteering to work for the children’s radio programme, The Argonauts; any job, from sweeping floors to cleaning toilets. They wrote back politely suggesting she wait until she was a little older.

Undeterred, Liz studied drama at her Sydney school and at sixteen got her first role as Snow White in a pantomime. Things got tough after that. She had to play opposite a dog in The Tinder Box and any actor will tell you dogs not only never remember their lines but they steal the scenes. After appearing in a couple of revues at a Sydney hotel, she toured the club circuit with the eccentric entertainer, Tiny Tim. Her role was to dance in a little frilly dress while he went through a medley of eighty-six songs.

A bleak period followed, a time known in show business as actor’s drought. She worked as a barmaid, an usherette, a book-keeper, wondering if perhaps acting was the right career for her. She was about to give it up and find a proper job, when she found work with a game show, Winner Take All – not the greatest role for an aspiring actor but one that kept the rent collector at bay. Then came a meaty, continuing part in the police drama series, Cop Shop. It was the biggest break in her career, a chance to establish her name, to fulfil her childhood ambitions. But she couldn’t handle it, the pressures, the hype, the so-called glamour. ‘I sort of buggered up my life a bit. I lost a lot of friends through being a bit of a loudmouth and being self-centred. I never worked hard enough and I was terrible in the series.’

After eighteen months she left Cop Shop and departed into a lonely life. Many people she thought were friends turned their backs on her, although the regular actors in Cop Shop stayed with her, helping when they could. For two years she could not find another acting job. Her confidence shattered, she worked in a furniture store, an experience she thought she would hate but which proved invaluable when she came into contact with ordinary, nine-to-five people. It taught her never to believe in her own publicity. A role as understudy for the stage comedy, Noises Off, allowed her to look again at her craft. Then came the lead in the adventure series, Five Mile Creek, co-produced by Walt Disney Studios.

Her work in Five Mile Creek attracted the attention of Crawford Productions who offered her the role of Dr Chris Randall, a single woman who had dedicated her life to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The bad days were behind her. ‘At this stage in my life I think I’m one of the luckiest people around,’ she said soon after signing her contract.

She and Rececca Gibney became close friends. They were known as the twins, sharing a larrikin (larrikin: young person full of mischief) streak. ‘When you work with people so closely for so long you develop almost a second language. You just know what the other person is going to say, particularly if you are acting together. Actors are very insecure human beings. It’s great to have people around you can trust.’

Her life was settled. Her work was all she had hoped it would be, with the possible exception of certain winter days in Minyip. She was surrounded by people she knew were friends, and her bank manager was happy. ‘A long run is good if you use it properly and you’re still interested in what you’re doing,’ she told Karen Lateo of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph. ‘I think there are two things to do if you’re in a series; to save all the money you possibly can, which I’ve done – I’ve bought myself a flat and I own it – the other is to work as hard as you can at your craft. I’ve been very lucky because it’s a role very different to me. She’s very serious. I’ve been able to use that. I think I’m a hundred times better actor than I ever was.’

Perhaps her life was too good for whoever it is that decides our fate. Quite suddenly her blue bird of happiness fell from the sky. She wasn’t to discover until later, of course, that in some ways her private life would be reflected in an episode of The Flying Doctors. The writers had Dr Randall surviving a horrifying plane crash and then having to contend with the grief of losing someone very close to her.

The episode was the last for the year, a fine piece of drama to bring viewers back the following season. Tired after a year’s work, Liz was looking forward to the break. But her peace was shattered by the breakdown of a long love affair. Worse was to come. She learned that her forty-one yr. old sister, Rosemary, had contracted a rare skin disease – scleroderma – which caused the skin to tighten and become hard, resulting in a stiffening of the joints and leading to a gradual wasting of the muscles. She died soon afterwards. ‘I didn’t even know such a disease existed,’ Liz said. ‘There was nothing they could do for her.’

As Christmas drew near, Liz was close to breaking point. She didn’t know which way to go or who to turn to. One day her telephone rang and on the line from London was her former Flying Doctors co-star, Andrew McFarlane, who had been in Britain for six months.

‘Get on a plane and come over here,’ he said. ‘It’ll do you the world of good.’

After considering it for a while, she couldn’t think of a good reason for not going and caught the next available flight to London. The first thing she knew was that she had found a place colder than Minyip; London was going through its severest winter for fifty years. She and Andrew played like kids in the snow and within days she was not only feeling better but had also regained her inner strength. ‘Andrew was a great comfort. He was absolutely magnificent. When Andrew and I get together – regardless of how long a break there’s been – we just click in with each other. We really are great mates.’

Liz and Andrew have what could be called an interesting relationship. At times they thoroughly enjoy each other’s company, at other times they drive each other around the twist. Andrew put it this way: ‘Liz is great fun to be with, we have very similar interests, live similar lives. She is certainly, outside my family, the only person I can discuss absolutely anything with. We never plan anything when we are together, things just happen. We eat, talk, have a drink, talk more, watch videos. It is never dull when Liz is around. I really think Liz is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are times when I could smack her and scream she is selfish and pig-headed. Then there are times when she is the most loving and caring person I have ever met.’

Back in Australia and back in The Flying Doctors, Liz became involved in a project that was to change her life. So emotional and traumatising was it that she had to seek help from a psychiatrist and considered giving up work on The Flying Doctors. On behalf of World Vision she went to Ethiopia to make a documentary on its starving children. When she returned she was haunted by what she had seen: children with swollen bellies, legs like matchsticks, faces made grotesque by hunger, empty eyes – figures from a nightmare.

‘I was in such a state,’ she told Bunty Avieson, of Woman’s Day. ‘No one could get through to me. I had been through a huge trauma and I was angry. Angry with my family, my friends and with World Vision for abandoning me once we got back to Australia and leaving me to cope on my own. There was no point in talking to my family and friends because I just upset them. So I went along twice a week and cried for an hour to a psychiatrist. I told him how angry I was with everybody, how I didn’t like working on The Flying Doctors any more, how I felt fat. Eventually it came down to "Okay, so you feel guilty". We talked over everything and it kind of freed me. The trip was so emotionally draining it took me a year to come to terms with it.’

But come to terms with it she did, helped when 5,500 people each promised to sponsor a child after the documentary was screened on television. The guilt was still there (she feels it can never be completely erased) but at least now she could face up to the harsh realities of third world poverty. She agreed to go back to Africa, and to Bangladesh, for World Vision. The memories of her second trip remain vivid but now she is able to cope with the horrors she saw, the madness of a world that has mountains of food in Europe and the United States, yet allows children elsewhere to die of starvation.

Some memories are bitter-sweet. In Bangladesh 200 children gathered around, silent, their big eyes staring. Liz wanted to communicate.

‘This isn’t getting anywhere,’ she said to the film crew. ‘Maybe a song will break through.’

There in the dust of a strange and tragic land, an unimaginable world away from the prosperity of her own country, she sang an old Australian children’s song, The Kookaburra Sits on the Old Gum Tree. When she finished singing the children applauded and laughed. The international language of music was working, as it always does. The children shyly drew closer. Liz sang the first line of Baa Baa Black Sheep, then got the children to parrot the line. In no time at all they had learned the simple song and were singing it with gusto and, for a while, they forgot their empty bellies.

Sometimes she was reminded of how small the world really is, that the global village is upon us. Arriving in a small Ugandan village, miles from anywhere, which in European terms would be considered a civilised town, she heard a song coming from a tape-recorder. It sounded familiar. No, it couldn’t be! But it was – Kylie Minogue singing The Locomotion.

She journeyed on. In a Kenyan slum she met a deserted mother, Jacinta, and her daughter, Hannah. Jacinta owed A$ 75 on a piece of land in the country which would take her years to pay off.

‘Jacinta wanted to move Hannah out of the slums so that she would have a better chance in life than she had had,’ said Liz. ‘We went into her tiny house and it was very neat, with flowers and a picture of Jesus on the wall. She gave me a hand-embroidered wall-hanging. I’d been fine until then. I thought, God, I have everything and she could sell this to make money. I walked outside and thought I’m not going to pretend any more and I just sobbed and sobbed. I looked up and there were about twenty children standing staring at me. They looked bewildered. They couldn’t understand what they had done to upset me.’ Liz and the film crew gave Jacinta her A$ 75, adding A$ 150 towards the cost of building her new home away from the slums.

Liz became almost completely preoccupied with promoting World Vision. She convinced co-star Brett Climo of its worth and also roped in Rebecca Gibney, who plays Emma Plimpton, the feisty garage mechanic in The Flying Doctors. Liz and Rebecca were known as the ‘twins’ by many working on the series, not only because they were far from the end of the queue where good looks were concerned but also because of their close friendship.

Rebecca got her role in The Flying Doctors because she wanted it badly. She thought about the audition for some time, deciding the best way would be to appear looking like a garage mechanic and not the stereotyped image of an actress carefully made-up and coiffured. Crawfords knew her work but she had to convince them she could play an earthy role. She wore dirty shorts and a baggy T-shirt, no make-up and her hair looked as though she had just got out of bed.

‘You’ve got the part.’ Crawfords told her.

A couple of years later, when going for an audition in the important ABC production, Come in Spinner, a mini-series set in Sydney during World War II, she used the same trick. Borrowing a dress from the old series, The Sullivans, also set in World War II, and with hair-style and make-up to match, she went off to audition.

‘You’ve got the part.’ the ABC told her.

Rebecca twenty-six, grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, one of six children. It wasn’t an easy life. Her father was an alcoholic, who was destroyed by a circulatory disease which led to the amputation of a limb and a long-drawn-out and painful death. Rebecca was sixteen. ‘I had to look after him. I didn’t really know him well until then. I got to know him as we sat each day watching daytime soap operas. That was about all he was able to do towards the end. When he died I went through some huge changes. I became very rebellious for quite a while.’

She went from job to job, unsure of her future, not caring too much about it anyway. She sold jewellery and did a little modelling before concluding that acting seemed a more interesting job than working behind a store counter. She landed several small jobs on New Zealand television. She was soon in demand and did what any ambitious New Zealander does, fly across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

She was nineteen, with enough confidence to walk off the street into the office of a Melbourne theatrical agent who looked her up and down, noted her experience, albeit in the small pond of New Zealand television, and put her on the books. Two auditions came to nothing. Her confidence was sapped and she retired, slightly bruised, back to New Zealand. Two weeks before Christmas the telephone rang. It was the agent with offers of parts in two television series. She chose the Crawford children’s series, The Zoo Family. A movie, I Live With Me Dad, followed.

Then came the role of Emma Plimpton in The Flying Doctors who saves Hurtle Morrison’s garage from sinking beneath a load of debt. ‘When Emma arrives, the garage is very sloppy and in a real financial state. Hurtle has drawers full of bills and he’s been running it like a real country garage; three chooks for forty litres of petrol, that sort of thing ... Emma was fairly black and white at the beginning, headstrong, tough, no bullshit. There wasn’t a lot of femininity about her – that came after she had been there for a while and they decided they needed to soften her up. All of a sudden you’d see her in a dress and people would say, "Oh, she looks all right! That was nice, I like that." ‘

Romance was inevitable, on-screen romance, that is. In no time at all the writers had Emma married to Sam Patterson, played by Peter O’Brien, working on the proven theory that there is nothing like a wedding to help ratings. Weddings are to soapies, or drama series, as car chases are to cop shows. If viewers are displaying disloyal tendencies, such as tuning in to another programme, a wedding will bring them back, hopefully for good. The only unfortunate thing about the romance between Emma and Sam was that some London newspapers, now hopelessly besotted by Australian soapie actors, confused it with the actors’ private lives. Peter was then involved with Elaine Smith, of Neighbours, prompting one newspaper reporter to gush: ‘Peter is torn between two star lovers. He still loves Elaine, but he’s desperately attracted to Rebecca. It isn’t all over between him and Elaine, but he’s spending a lot of time with Rebecca.’

After recovering from a fit of laughter, Rebecca’s reply was simple: ‘He’s not my type – and I don’t suppose I’m his, either ...’

Her popularity brought another problem, not uncommon to actresses. Olivia Newton-John has faced it. So has Jodie Foster. They have become the subject of a fan’s obsession. Not a harmless obsession, it should be pointed out, but one that can be dangerous. In Rebecca’s case it was a man who believed he was the Son of God and Rebecca his virgin bride. ‘He’s driving me out of mind,’ Rebecca told TV Week.

She first became aware of the man when still in New Zealand. He would write her strange letters, explaining his exalted position and inquiring when Rebecca would be ready to slip into the bridal gown. When she moved to Australia, he followed and continued with the same annoying, at times frightening, nonsense.

Then she was terrorised by a prowler, who may or may not have been the same person. Sitting in the lounge of her Melbourne terrace home one night, enjoying a glass of red wine and a book, she heard a scratching at the window. She ignored it. Maybe it was just a branch. Then came a sound like a long-drawn-out ssshhh. She turned and at the window was the figure of a man. Terrified, she leapt to her feet and ran to the door. But the man had disappeared. He came back again and again, creeping up to the window at night and emitting the curious, hair-raising ssshhh sound. It played havoc with Rebecca’s nerves until she thought out the matter and decided a dog was a girl’s best friend:

‘I thought, to hell with this. Just because I’m female, somebody out there thinks he can terrorise me. But he’s wrong. So I went out and got myself a bull terrier, which I’ve still got, and I don’t mind being at home on my own now. I’ve also learnt some self-defence.’

After this trauma, her private life went smoothly for a while. She became engaged to Scott Rawlings, a sound technician and a wedding date was set, ‘I can’t complain at all,’ she said.

Then her life changed. Perhaps the Great Planner thought she was having too much fun. For reasons she will not discuss, she broke it off with Scott. It was then she returned to the beliefs of her childhood, back to Christianity. ‘It has changed my life,’ she told reporter Christopher Day. ‘It has given me new meaning, something to believe in. It has given me peace.’

Actually, her Christian upbringing had never deserted her. It was always there but had been pushed into the background as she had been discovering life. She began thinking of the spiritual side when her brother, Patrick, developed a brain tumour. He was twenty-three and his wife was expecting their first child. The doctors looked at him and shook their heads. He would die. If he didn’t die he would be paralysed. An operation was his only hope but the doctors told the family to prepare for the worst.

‘But Patrick had this incredible faith,’ said Rebecca. ‘I found people who didn’t even know him were praying for him. Three days after the operation he was sitting up in bed. The doctors were amazed. They couldn’t explain it,’

His faith inspired her. So did that of her three sisters who, one by one, became Christians. She saw the changes in their lives, the aura of peace and happiness which always seem to surround them. She was convinced that life had to be lived as a Christian.

‘My childhood faith was rekindled,’ she said. ‘People say it’s a cop-out. It isn’t. You just let go of all the bad things. You turn the negative into positive. It’s a really nice way to live. I don’t call myself religious or a born again Christian. I am simply Christian. I have a definite belief in God and Jesus Christ. I am certainly not perfect ... I am not a Bible basher but it is the way I choose to finish one week and start the next. I’ll tell you this, I’ve never been happier in my life.’

Quick pick Chapter 4 Andrew McFarlane - Chapter 5 Robert Grubb - Chapter 6 Peter O' Brien, Brett Climo - Chapter 7 Liz Burch, Rebecca Gibney - Chapter 8 Maurie Fields, Max Cullen - Chapter 9 Lenore Smith

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Liz

Rebecca