My Rural Story | Week Nine | Janie Dade-Smith

What have you experienced in remote Australia that has changed your world view? I think one of the experiences that changed my life path and the way I viewed the world was when I was working in Bathurst Island which is a little island north of Darwin in the Northern Territory. I was working there with 10 Aboriginal Health Workers and a nun who was working there as a nurse at the time. I used to say to the Health Workers, it was very important to fill in the pink form in the chart because that helped with the discharge summaries, and to me that was very important, what was written down etc. Then one day the health worker said to me ‘would you like to go hunting, Janie?’ and I had my little daughter who was about four or five at the time. We all

jumped inmy car with buckets and things, there were 10 of us in a two wheel Suzuki. Off we all went, I had my white shorts on. Going hunting in the mud for crabs out at the beach and as we were walking behind them they were running over these mangroves and they turned around and said to me ‘too slow, go back’, and they made two of the children, the seven and eight year old come back with us. They made us damper, sitting there in the sun. They were very reluctant about actually doing it because they wanted to be out there with their parents, catching crabs, and they saw these people who had no ideahowto survive in this environment. It gave me a moment to reflect, to actually think, we could sit here with our white skin burning forever and never find our way back and it made me realise just how unimportant the pink form actually was.

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