Clinical trials

For a town with a population of “about 70”, which falls closer to 30 in the heat of summer, when even the locals run scared, Birdsville has more than its fair share of interesting characters.

Pursell introduced us to quite a few, but then mentioned, in passing, that we might want to chat to the local nurse, Andrew Cameron, who’s “an interesting bloke, and a dead ringer for the Monopoly man”.

Not only is Cameron the only guy providing medical help to the community on most days (a doctor flies in once a week to hold a clinic), he’s a volunteer for the Red Cross, work which has taken him to war zones in South Sudan, Kenya, Georgia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clearly feeling that those experiences weren’t dangerous enough, he also flew to Sierra Leone in 2015 to help out with the Ebola crisis.

His job was to help with “discharges”, which meant burying at least half a dozen people a day, every day, which was the bad part, and being in charge of letting out the people who’d somehow survived the disease, and several weeks in quarantine.

“I’d put them through this chemical shower, which we called the Happy Shower, and then give them a hug, which was the first physical contact they’d had with another human in weeks, so that was nice,” he says.

One piece of advice, if you ever meet Cameron and he asks if you’d like to see some of his work photos, say no. I may never recover.

As Pursell says when discussing the locals, and those who work on the massive stations outside town, “these aren’t just ordinary people out here, they are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.”