My Rural Story | Week Nine | Janie Dade-Smith

JanieDade Smith

My name’s Janie Dade Smith and I was born in rural Queensland. I’ve lived in rural and remote areas most of my life, in Queensland and in the Northern Territory for 11 years. I worked as a clinician over on Bathurst Island which is a little island north of Darwin. I went over there as part of a rural placement actually, just for two weeks, and when I came back they actually offered me a job. I thought that I had such wonderful skills and that’s what they were attracted to. But, actually I realised that if you had a pair of shoes and a pulse they would have taken anybody because of the recruitment and retention problems in rural and remote Australia which I really had very little idea about. What I found when I was working there

though was there were some fundamental moments working there with kids who had all these sores on their legs and they used to come in and have their dressings done. I really realised that you could work clinically with one person at a time but, with education you could actually have an impact on 100 people in an hour and just how incredibly powerful that was. Then I moved into education and I worked in high schools teaching sex, drugs and rock and roll to young people. I then moved to Queensland and wrote the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker Program which was another really fundamental turning point in my career, to do curriculum development but to also work for a community controlled health organisation and what that actually

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