Darcy's Horse is a sculpture that I have built for the Western Australian division of the Royal Flying Doctors. The piece will be auctioned off in 2021 to help raise funds for this incredible community service.

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Darcy's Horse also has its own website;

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The story of the horse is  below;

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Kimberley stockman Jimmy Darcy suffered massive internal injuries on 29 July 1917 when his horse fell in a cattle stampede.

 

An 80-kilometre ride on a dray over a rough track took him to the nearest settlement of Halls Creek in the far north of Western Australia.

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Jimmy Darcy needed immediate lifesaving surgery and with the nearest doctor thousands of kilometres away, Halls Creek postmaster Fred Tuckett had to perform emergency surgery with the help of morse code, a penknife and some morphine.

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For days, newspaper readers around Australia were gripped by the story of the young stockman's desperate struggle for life.

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It was 2800km from Halls Creek where a doctor in Perth, Dr Joe Holland, instructed Tuckett via morse code how to carry out the surgery on Jim Darcy.

Tuckett is afraid he'll make a mistake – that he'll kill the injured man – but Dr Holland tells him if he doesn't act now Darcy will die anyway.

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Using his pocketknife, Tuckett makes an incision above the pubic bone as the stockman's brothers try to ease his agony and shoo the flies away from the blood. Tuckett works for hours, cutting and stitching, stopping every few minutes to check the doctor's telegrams.

The operation on Darcy's ruptured bladder is a success but the 29-year-old stockman is weak and now suffering from malaria.

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Dr Holland makes a mercy dash from Perth. He boards a cattle ship that takes an agonising week to reach Derby and he then spends six days in a Model T Ford held together by leather straps, bumping and thumping his way across the desert to save the stockman's life.

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Aborigines help push his car across river beds and up sandy banks and he endures punctures, radiator leaks and engine stutters.

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At one point he has to use the rubber tubing from his stethoscope to siphon the last drops of petrol from a can. The car finally conks out 40km from Halls Creek.

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Dr Holland walks for two hours to a nearby cattle station and then rides through the night to reach the town at daybreak. Jimmy Darcy has died a few hours earlier.

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Source: https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/news/stockmans-story-begins-flying-doctor/

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