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@ElsevierAUS
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...’