There is a little known connection between the popular television crime detecting Father Brown and the late Father Frank Flynn , an eye specialist member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Coeur in the Northern Territory and Papua New Guinea .
By Peter Simon
The Father Brown character, originally the subject of 5l short stories by prolific British writer , philosopher, dramatist , orator , lay preacher, literary and art critic and Christian apologist , Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1938), gave rise to television and radio series and films .
The son of an Irish doctor , Frank Flynn (1906-2000) , the youngest of six sons who all took up medicine , was brought up in Sydney. Flynn sailed to England in 1933 aboard the Jervis Bay as ship's surgeon to further his medical career, specialising in ophthalmology at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital (Moorfields ) , the world's oldest eye hospital of great renown .
Dr Flynn also studied in eye clinics on the Continent and made a big impression at Moorfields, introducing a new drug , Mydricaine, for the maximum dilation of pupils ; he also designed and patented a machine used in detached retina operations, becoming known as a leading ophthalmic surgeon .
In London he mixed with a wide range of medicos and literary luminaries , many of them Catholics, including Chesterton , a convert to Catholicism , and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), these two very close . Chesterton, below, who stood 6ft 4 inches and weighed 20 stone, with a booming voice , usually wore a cape and crumpled hat .
Of Chesterton , Flynn said he was a man of genius who shook with laughter and was a powerful speaker. Some of the encounters took place in Fleet Street pubs . While in London Flynn developed the desire to become a priest, not unexpected as he came from a devout family , two of his three sisters entered the Brigidine Convent in Sydney.
Of Chesterton , Flynn said he was a man of genius who shook with laughter and was a powerful speaker. Some of the encounters took place in Fleet Street pubs . While in London Flynn developed the desire to become a priest, not unexpected as he came from a devout family , two of his three sisters entered the Brigidine Convent in Sydney.
In 1934 he headed back to Australia, again as a ship's surgeon , intent on becoming a priest ; the next year he joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and while studying philosophy at the Kensington Monastery in Sydney met the first resident Catholic Bishop of Darwin Monsignor Francis Xavier Gsell, known as "the Bishop with 150 wives" due to him saving the lives of runaway Aboriginal girls in the Territory who did not want to marry a tribally appointed husband by "buying " them with trade goods. Over 18 years he amassed this number of so called wives. Flynn was deeply influenced by Bishop Gsell and read up on the NT .
Ordained a priest in 1942, Flynn was sent to the Northern Territory where he was attached to the Army as a Major in the dual role of chaplain and ophthalmologist, serving in various places including the Darwin Fortress Hospital at Myilly Point , Berrimah , Katherine and Alice Springs .
He came to the aid of Army convoy drivers who suffered eye troubles driving through the dust , blazing sun . He told them to wear goggles , rinse their eyes regularly and paint a green strip along the top of the windscreen ; increasing the distance between vehicles in convoys along the track from Alice to Darwin also helped. Demobilised in 1946 , he continued as a part time chaplain and ophthalmologist to the RAAF with the rank of Wing Commander.
Very early in his time in the Territory he became aware of the widespread incidence of the eye disease trachoma in Territory Aborigines. In 1957 he made a report on trachoma for the Medical Journal of Australia , urging a mass programme to combat the scourge . He became involved with Professor Fred Hollows in the Australia wide survey of Australian Aboriginals ; Hollows described Flynn, below, as his mentor and" the man behind his fight for sight ".
In the late l950s , when I was a reporter on the Northern Territory News , I had numerous dealings with Father Flynn in Darwin during which he spoke of Chesterton and Anglo-French writer and historian Belloc in particular as having strengthened his religious beliefs.
I spoke to him before he set out on a 2000 mile outback journey in a four wheel drive through the NT and Western Australia conducting weddings, masses, christenings and confessions, calling at Katherine ,Willeroo, Coolibah, Timber Creek, Auvergne , Newry, Ivanhoe , Wyndham , Argyle Downs, Rosewood, Waterloo, Limbunya, Inverway, Wave Hill, Hooker Creek, Monteginnie ,Victoria River Downs , Humbert River and Newcastle Waters.
He took with him a mass kit brought back from France after WWl by Bishop Gsell . A golden chalice used by Father Flynn had been given to him by his mother shortly before she died . The Holy Cross on it was made of gold from his mother's wedding ring ,studded with diamonds from her engagement ring and emeralds from the brooch worn by the bridesmaid at her wedding .
When my wife , a New Zealander , spoke to Father Flynn he told her that when he had been at Sydney University, where he was an active member of the newly formed Students' Representative Council , he toured NZ with the Australian Universities' Rugby Union Football team in 1929 .
Father Flynn and the Bishop of Darwin , J.P.O'Loughlin , sailed by lugger to the early settlement of Port Essington as part of plans to remove the remains of the NT's first priest, Father Angelo Confalonieri shipwrecked in the Torres Strait in 1846 and taken to the 1838 established , ill- fated tiny British settlement at Port Essington , named Raffles Bay, in the hope it would become another Singapore, to St. Mary's Church crypt in Darwin .
Father Flynn reported that there was little of the settlement remaining . They found the priest's grave and four others - a woman and her child , the settlement doctor and a surgeon . Searching the area, Father Flynn found a willow pattern plate among the ruins . Father Flynn wrote a paper about Port Essington which was presented at a function in Darwin presided over by the NT News editor , Jim Bowditch.
As I also played for the Brothers Rugby League team , NT News journalist Keith Willey and I apparently the only non Catholic members , this brought me into further contact with Father Flynn . Willey subsequently collaborated with the priest in the writing of a book about the Territory, one of several written by the cleric.
In 1967 Father Flynn went to Port Moresby as Administrator of the Cathedral and Director of Catholic Health Services in Papua New Guinea. During his busy time there he was involved with the construction of a new cathedral, as he had in Darwin , studied and reported on eye diseases there and in the Solomons and was deeply involved in the setting up of a medical faculty at the University of Papua New Guinea where an early graduate was a nephew, Father Peter Flynn, MSC.
Back in Darwin in 1977, he was an early resident at new living quarters for priests , known as The Ranch , on the Nightcliff foreshore, where he got about on a bicycle with a distinctive hat like Father Brown . In his 90s he devised a cardboard device with a slit that fitted over his face like Ned Kelly to help his vision reading in old age.
In the 1988 bicentennial year, Father Flynn was honoured with an Australian Achievers Award and included in both the Heritage 200 list and The 200 People Who Made Australia Great , a list of 200 Remarkable Territorians . A book published that year contained biographical details of Father Flynn next to a photograph caption " Frank Flynn having a morning shave while on the track with Mrs Flynn." Oops! It was actually the Presbyterian minister, John Flynn , known as Flynn of the Inland, founder of the Flying Doctor Service .
FOOTNOTE : G. K. Chesterton loosely based the Father Brown character on Father John O'Connor (1870-1952), a parish priest in Bradford , who had been involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922. From a well to do English family in Ireland , Father O'Connor mixed with writers and artists and when he died it was discovered he had left behind an extremely valuable art collection consisting of pictures by Turner, Constable , Reynolds , Brueghel and Piero Della Francesco , a situation described by one writer as befitting a Father Brown mystery.
