My Rural Story

What have you experienced in remote Australia that has changed your world view? My first experience seeing remote Australia was probably the biggest life changing moment, in terms of my experiences with rural and remote health. I was raised in Brisbane, I’m a self- confessed city girl, that’s something that I really like and I’d never been anywhere like that before. If you want to see the social determinants of health in practice, then going to a remote Indigenous community is a really great thing to do. However, it can be really sad and I certainly found that it was really sad. We live in Australia, that has so many things to offer, and we have this huge inequality in terms of health and educational outcomes with Indigenous Australians and yeah, you hear about it and you read about it, but it’s so different to actually seeing it. The communities that we were going into, some of them are classified as being the most disadvantaged communities in both the state and Australia. So, you really do see a lot of poverty. From the moment we actually got off the plane and went to the health clinic you could really see it. You could see that the houses were run down, some of the places didn’t have doors on them, therewas a lot of pollution, there were a lot of mangy dogs running around and they looked quite sick.

Then when we got into the clinic, I remember that there was a scabies outbreak at the time, so a lot of the kids had scabies. I saw a lot of head lice, not that you don’t see these sorts of things in Brisbane or in urban contexts, you do, but it was much more prevalent there. That really changed my world view and, with a lot of the kids, you saw that certainly they were quite sick and you could really see that there was a disparity in health. Another thing that I remember is that you didn’t see a lot of old people. I didn’t really understand why until I was driven, from this first experience, to go and study public health and I learnt that I didn’t see any old people because Indigenous Australian’s don’t tend to live until they’re very old, particularly those who live in those remote communities. So, I think it’s quite interesting that my first experience was also my most life changing.

‘These communities, some of them are classified as being the most disadvantaged communities in both the state and Australia. So, you really do see a lot of poverty...’

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