On Monday 22 small and excited folk of our privileged metropolis, this First World paradise bristling with facilities, were given a glimpse of the very different worlds of their cousins in remote Australia.
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The Royal Flying Doctor Service's educational 'simulator' had touched down in sumptuous suburban Deakin (just a short jog in a Hugo Boss tracksuit from the Prime Minister's mansion) just outside the Junior School of Canberra Girls Grammar. After a short, explanatory, and ideologically immaculate chat from the RFDS's education manager, Tom Ryan, the 22 skedaddled outdoors to see the aeroplane.
Then, only 11 at a time, for the plane (an exact model of a section of a PC 12, an aeroplane the RFDS actually uses in Western Australia and South Australia), is low-ceilinged and narrow, they gamboled aboard.
Once inside they shrilled and trilled with excitement. Tom Ryan had told them that once inside the PC 12 there was only one rule "And that's that there are no rules!" He encouraged them to press every button they could see, play with every piece of (real) medical equipment they saw, and to pretend to be pilots, doctors, nurses, patients, anyone.
Playing being a pilot was the most fun (it was difficult to prise girls out of the cockpit to give others a go) because children got to sit in the two-person cockpit and to hair-raisingly "fly" aeroplanes that came up on two screens. The inner urchin of this responsible old reporter (I am 70 but he, the freckled urchin, is eight) yearned to take the controls and (for I am an only child) to hog them to himself.
Canberra is so sawbones-rich and hospital-blessed that the RFDS's mercy-bringing aeroplanes will never need to land in suburban Deakin. (They could, though, at a pinch, because they carry an instructional plaque that explains how and when it's OK to land on roads.) So why, we quizzed Tom Ryan, is your PC 12 parked here today?
"It's to create an awareness. There were some figures floating around that said that we've got less than 5 per cent of the kids on the Eastern seaboard who know what a flying doctor is. But now [with the simulator] we've probably seen 1000 schools over five years. That's 30,000, perhaps 40,000, kids who all get this hands-on experience. Of course it's not the same as actual flying but it's as close to the original as you can get. There's the educational value of it, the role play."
Monday's education had begun with Tom Ryan's little lesson in the kindy classroom. His props included a huge photograph from the air of an outback station, framed by the scarily empty immensity of its remote setting. These are the sorts of places (anything less like the PM's Canberra neighbourhood in Deakin is hard to imagine) where the RFDS's clients live.
Another of Ryan's props was a dramatically enlarged $20 note.
"The reason I have this $20 here," he told his rapt audience, "is because on the $20 note is the story of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
"It starts off with this man here, this man with glasses. His name is John Flynn. Can you say John Flynn?"
"John Flynn," the youngsters chirruped in unison, like a Dawn Chorus chorus of songbirds.
Tom Ryan explained that John Flynn, was a very fine man who wanted to help people. And some of those he wanted to help were the people on big, giant farms like the one in the picture.
"When he visited these people he discovered, and this is a little bit sad," Ryan continued, now in a confiding whisper, "that when people on these farms got sick, because they lived so far from the doctor and the hospitals, some of them died. So John Flynn said 'We need to help these people.' So he raised enough money to buy the first flying doctors' aeroplane. And here it is on the $20 note."
His other prop was a big picture of two men and a woman, the essential crew, posed in front of an RFDS aeroplane. Once it had been established that one was the pilot, another the doctor and the other the nurse we were given a little test (competitive, I struggled not to put my hand up to compete to be Top of the Class) to see if we could tell which person did which job. Because, Ryan emphasised, we can't tell that the woman in the picture is not the pilot, not the doctor.
"Girls, you can do any of these jobs," Ryan assured his audience.
"Being a pilot is not a boy's job or a girl's job. It's a boy's and a girl's job. Hey girls, do you want to be a pilot when you grow up?"
Only a token number of hands went up. Perhaps it is already second nature for 21st century daughters of Australian gentlefolk to aim higher than that. Perhaps they imagine themselves as governors-general, prime ministers, ministers for foreign affairs, as our next Joan Sutherland, as the next Australian female winner of the Nobel prize in medicine, as our first Nobel laureate in literature.
Go to the RFDS website https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/ to see how you can support what is surely one of our wide brown land's most deserving institutions.
