Australia: The Flying Doctors

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Australia mini-series, episode 151) is a short documentary about the Flying Doctors of Australia. It opens on a farm in the Outback, the huge, dry land in the middle of Australia, where the nearest hospital is hundreds of kilometres away. A minister, John Flynn, had a simple idea: if the patient cannot go to the doctor, the doctor can fly to the patient. The Aerial Medical Service started on 15 May 1928 in Cloncurry, a small town in Queensland, and two days later its first plane flew a doctor to Julia Creek. But most farms had no telephone and no electricity, so the episode looks closer at the pedal radio built by the engineer Alfred Traeger: turning the pedals made the electricity, and a family could send a message to the doctor's base. Today the Royal Flying Doctor Service still flies to farms, mines and small towns all over the country. The narration is in the present simple and the past simple, with relative clauses (the people who lived there) and a closing question in the second conditional (If you lived far from a doctor, what would you need to learn to do?); no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (minister, Outback, pedal radio).

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three photos (John Flynn about 1929, Alfred Traeger at his pedal radio, a plane of the Royal Flying Doctor Service today), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (If you lived far from a doctor, what would you need to learn to do?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates. The script explains its new words as it goes (minister, Outback, pedal radio).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations") and c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (3e). The episode targets CEFR level B1-.