Reverend John Flynn established the Australian Inland Mission in 1912 with the first of his nursing hospitals built in Oodnadatta. In 1913 he visited the telegraph station in Alice Springs and the adjacent township of Stuart and proposed that an outback bush hospital should be built there. It would be 13 years before this became a reality. The new hostel was named 'Adelaide House' because of the fund raising efforts of a group of young people in Adelaide. For 13 years between its opening and 1939, it was the only hospital in the whole of central Australia.
Building commenced in 1920, but there were lengthy delays as building timber and reinforcing iron bars had to be carted from the railhead at Oodnadatta. When drought reduced stock feed along the track from Oodnadatta, haulage ceased. This imposed more delays. When the new Alice Springs Hospital was opened in 1939, Adelaide House continued part of its former role by providing hostel facilities for bush mothers and their children and as an after-care hostel for recuperating patients. It became a museum in 1980.
The Alice Springs Inland Mission hostel was the third in the Territory. Maranboy had been opened in 1917, and Victoria River Downs in 1923, but both had been largely financed by the government. Alice Springs was largely built with private fund raising.
In May 1928 Flynn's other dream, of an aerial medical service, took to the air. The first plane carrying a 'flying doctor' took off from Cloncurry in Queensland. This first flight has now expanded to 48 fully instrumented aircraft. Today nearly a quarter of a million patients across outback Australia can call on the services of the Royal Flying Doctor Service which operates from 21 bases.
