After a couple hours of sitting under the blazing outback sun, the two-decade-old Cessna 182 was being finicky. It stood by an overgrown airstrip that needed mowing and was missing a windsock.
When Niall Gibson tried to start the engine, it tiredly growled, then went silent. He revved it once more. It sputtered, before giving way to stillness.
“This is when we pray,” said his wife, Michelle Gibson.
In Australia’s Northern Territory, there are flying veterinarians, flying doctors, flying mechanics and flying mailmen. How else do you serve an area nearly as vast as Alaska but much sparser, where the cattle outnumber the humans seven to one? Where “The Wet,” as the rainy season is known, submerges roads each year, isolating towns and farms for months on end?
The Gibsons are the latest in a long line of “Flying Padres” — chaplains who have been traversing the region by air for the Salvation Army since the final days of World War II. They offer their counsel and services at key stages of life, like baptisms, weddings and funerals. But more often, they tend to the years in between, dropping in to lend an ear to people for whom isolation is a daily reality.
“They were just always there,” said Jade Andrews, who lived and worked on cattle stations for more than two decades and met three Flying Padres. You’d come in for tea after hours of hard, dusty farm work to find a friendly face in the kitchen, she said.
“Having someone to talk to was amazing because it can be so isolating,” she said.
The Gibsons practice the drop-in, an art of a bygone time in an age when social media offers instant updates from millions around the world. (Even in the remotest parts of the Northern Territory, Starlink satellites have made speedy connections the default.) They, mostly Mrs. Gibson, call, text or email ranch managers to ask if they can pop by. Once, as they were passing a cattle station, they called out on a VHF radio to ask: “Anyone out there?”
On their recent trip, the Cessna’s engine roared to life on the third attempt. The smattering of white buildings at the cattle station they’d just left became a handful of dots, before melding into the green and brown blur. Soon, nothing of man’s creation was visible as far as the eye could see.
Much of the Northern Territory’s landscape is Aboriginal communities and cattle stations — some large enough to rival Connecticut in size — separated by hundreds of miles of roads that can be challenging in the best of conditions. From the sky, many of the roads look like tenuous lines that nature could override with ease.
“It’s a huge vast area of nothing,” said David Shrimpton, who served as a Flying Padre from 2003 to 2014. “That sense of remoteness was really there,” he said.
For some, that isolation is the draw; for others, it’s the only life they’ve known. Teenagers and young adults from Australian cities sign up to work at cattle stations for a change from life back home. Many people in Aboriginal communities are born into the remote existence.
Since moving from Western Australia three years ago, the Gibsons — Niall, 61, and Michelle, 60, are both ordained ministers — have had to learn the rhythms and vocabulary of cattle station life. Before this, they were serving in sheep, barley and wheat country.
In mid-April, the Gibsons made their first trip by air since The Wet receded. As they flew out from their home base of Katherine, about a three-hour drive south of the regional capital, Darwin, much of the land was dusted with a mossy green from the rains.
They arrived at a station, which had a crew of about half a dozen, in time for lunch. The ranch hands plopped down at a picnic table or on a couch and unwrapped their sandwiches, grime visible under their fingernails from the morning’s work shoeing horses. One of them remarked that she’d heard the Gibsons’ plane and wondered if the mail was arriving.
Most of the workers were in their late teens or early 20s, some on a gap year from school. Others had been jumping from station to station.
Mr. Gibson chatted with Sam Haste, the 27-year-old head stockman. They talked about holiday pay; about other stations he’d worked at; about the upcoming campdraft (a cattle herding competition). The “God stuff” — as Mr. Gibson puts it — doesn’t come up often, unless people bring it up themselves.
He strikes up conversations without much mind to the time or the Gibsons’ schedule. But Mrs. Gibson keeps a spreadsheet of the stations and schools with dates and phone numbers, nudging him when his chats stretch on.
When Mr. Haste first arrived in the Northern Territory six years ago, he said, he worked on a crew of three. The others were brusque, older men of few words. A chance for a chat with anyone from outside can be a relief for young workers who are far from everything they know, he said.
On a bulletin board by the kitchen area was a list of a dozen mental health resources reachable by phone or online — a sign of the toll the loneliness of station life can take.
“You’re working and living with the same people the whole time,” Mr. Haste said. Tipping his screwdriver toward the Gibsons, he said, “These guys are like the O.G.s, making sure everyone is all good.”
Sometimes a station manager will quietly point the chaplains to a worker who is having trouble fitting in. At other times, they become inadvertent relationship counselors, talking about heartache or budding romance in the stations.
Sometimes, it’s about rolling up their sleeves and helping with whatever needs doing — fixing a fence that’s been washed out by the rains or helping to clean a kitchen.
A couple of years ago, the Gibsons were visiting a school in Amanbidji, an Aboriginal community of less than 100 people. There, a devastated woman said that last rites had not been performed for her granddaughter, a 15-year-old who had died by suicide, a sadly prevalent problem in the Northern Territory and in Aboriginal communities. Mrs. Gibson said she and her husband would carry out the rites.
The ceremony gave people the chance to share memories of the girl. “She had a really big, light-up-the-face smile. A lot of people spoke about that,” said the school’s principal, Carolyn Tucker.
The Gibsons visited the school again in April. They played games and sang songs with students, in the classroom where they’d slept on an air mattress on the eve of the funeral. The children, ranging in age from 4 to 15, greeted them with excitement, shouting out the names of crafts and activities they remembered from previous visits.
Mr. Gibson played air guitar and Mrs. Gibson mimed a crocodile to the lyrics of Christian songs. Kanelia, 15, followed along in the back, as two of her younger siblings jumped around in the front.
“They saw us grow up,” she said of the Flying Padres.
Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region.
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