Neale McShane is to retire after spending the final 10 years of his career in sole charge of 93,000 sq miles of remote outback

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Like any police officer patrolling his beat, Neale McShane has a keen awareness of where his backup is, but he knows there is little chance of getting help if he gets into trouble.

That is because he is the only police officer on duty in Birdsville, Queensland, solely overseeing a jurisdiction about the size of the United Kingdom.

In McShane’s patch – covering about 93,000 sq miles (240,000 sq km) across south-west Queensland into the Northern Territory and South Australia – the job is less about making arrests than rescuing those who get stranded in some of the harshest conditions a traveller can encounter.



An officer getting himself marooned does not bear thinking about.



The closest colleague is 120 miles (200km) north in Bedourie (but often elsewhere). The next nearest police are 250 miles east at Windorah, 310 miles south down the Birdsville track in South Australia and 460 miles west across the desert in the Northern Territory.

Ample food, water, communications, a network of friendly local informants and a keen appreciation that “a police vehicle can roll on a sand hill just like any other car” are what matter.

Local ranger and Aboriginal elder Don Rowlands, who “knows more about the desert than any person on planet earth”, has been an invaluable ally.

“He’s better than a GPS, he’s just brilliant,” McShane says.

Now after 40 years in the service – almost 10 of them as the senior constable patrolling the vast desert plains and dirt roads around Birdsville – the officer is handing in his badge.

Facing compulsory retirement from the service on turning 60 this year, McShane is grateful that he swapped the lot of most police officers – callouts to assaults, robberies, domestic violence – for the outback, where the challenges are of a different nature.

In 2009, when McShane woke up to a sandstorm so large it could be seen from space, the authorities called with a mission, to rescue a driver who had rolled his car somewhere in scorching expanse of sand and rock.

While Sydney marvelled at the dusty haze that blanketed its harbour bridge, McShane spent the next 20 hours in the Simpson desert.

Driving virtually blind, he had to change two tyres in the howling grit before bringing the injured traveller to safety.

On his second day on the job in Birdsville, McShane was greeted with a temperature of 48.7C, the hottest of 2006.



It was almost that hot the day a man – wanted on a warrant – stole fuel at Windorah and was picked up on the one road to Birdsville. “How dumb? If he’d paid his fuel we wouldn’t be out there looking for him,” McShane says.



Sometimes even criminals need rescuing. One group who stole tools and loose change from cars in Birdsville ran out of fuel before they even got to the police roadblock.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neale McShane says the landscape ‘can do some serious damage to you in no time at all’. Photograph: Neale McShane

Then there was the man who had “worn out his welcome in town” and gone on a drunken bender, robbing a council depot and driving his car through property gates – a major affront in cattle country.



But it is the rescues in a landscape that “can do some serious damage to you in no time at all” that cling to mind.



McShane recalls the three motorbike riders “hopelessly underprepared for a crossing of the Simpson desert” who put out a radio distress signal when one of them injured his back.



A plane from Melbourne dropped two survival packs containing water, food, and a satellite phone on the campers, who looked at the packs then walked away. A third pack bearing the message “open me” followed but they ignored that, too.



“We got there about 8am and the poor buggers are out of water, almost out of food and I said: ‘Boys, why didn’t you go and have a look at that?” McShane says.



“They said, we thought they were marking the camp. One bloke drunk three litres of water straight up.



“They were saying the next half-hour they were going to leave the injured guy and ride off and so we would have had two searches.”



Another man spent three days stuck on the Birdsville track, “drinking water out of puddles, bitten by millions of sandflies and insects”.



He would have died but for a mustering plane that spotted him, McShane says.

“Sometimes people are lucky,” he says. Sometimes they are not. Mustering planes are used in Australia and elsewhere to gather livestock.

In 2012, Mauritz Pieterse, a worker on a conservation property called Ethabuka Station, went with colleague Josh Hayes to check on a bore set up to provide kangaroos and other wildlife with drinking water. Their car became bogged and they tried to walk back to the homestead. Pieterse died from heat exhaustion but would have survived had both men waited in the car to be rescued, McShane says.

“The sad thing about the next day, Melbourne Cup day, it was 15C cooler and drizzling rain,” he said. “We’re out there, thinking, how unlucky.”

One insight McShane says he gained from Birdsville was a striking difference in how people from the city and the country take their cues from nature.

“Country people, if it rains or there’s a dust storm, they say, oh well, we can’t go,” he says. “But city people are stuck to an itinerary. They’ve got to be somewhere. They seem to be more schedule bound instead of just relaxing and enjoying the trip.”