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Dear Reader

The flying doctor service of Australia fascinates me, and I think if I could stomach small planes I would have quite liked to work for the service—but I’ll have to be content to set my stories in their world instead.

This story evolved from a trip my husband and I went on last year, when we took our two boys to visit our godson who lives on a remote cattle station in south-west Queensland. The drive from Adelaide, the closest capital city, took us eighteen hours—although it takes the locals a lot less! For part of the trip there is no road to follow, just stony paddocks and the odd creek bed to bump across, and I still don’t quite know how we didn’t get completely lost.

His driveway is forty-five kilometres long, the next-door neighbour is a day’s drive away, and he uses a plane to check the cattle as the station covers one million square kilometres of Outback Australia! Food is delivered by truck four times a year, the mail plane visits once or twice a week, the children are schooled by School of the Air and the flying doctor is a regular visitor both for clinics and for emergencies. For city-dwellers it really is an amazing experience, and I hope I’ve managed to capture some of that world in Harry and Emma’s story.

While the story has come from my imagination it was born out of the places we visited on that trip. The locations are real—Broken Hill, White Cliffs, Innamincka and Thargomindah are all Outback towns—and the Cooper Creek exists, but I named the cattle stations and made up the medical emergencies.

While Harry and Emma’s story shows only a snippet of Outback life, which might be less frantic than living in the city but never dull, I enjoyed giving Harry the chance to introduce Emma to the country he loves while their relationship developed. I hope you enjoy their story.

Emily