My Rural Story | Week One | Jacinta Elston

there’s nothing in sight except for bush and hills and land and the water, and to be able to just sit and feel the country and hear it breathing around you. So there are those sorts of opportunities. What have you experienced in remote Australia that has changed your world view? One of the big ‘aha’ moments in working in Aboriginal health and rural remote health was probably the first time I went to Thursday Island, to the Torres Strait, and I was only going there from North Queensland but it was a saga to get there. You spent the whole day, you’d be on the plane then you’d be on the bus, then you’d be on the ferry, and it really brought home to me the cost of traveling in rural and remote communities for peoplewho aren’t on the tax payers dollars, who aren’t part of health care systems or service providers who are paying for them to get out there. And so for people in rural remote communities, the cost of getting back and forwards to regional centres for health care, for family community business, for funerals, for bringing somebody’s body home after they’ve passed away - all of those things are immense costs to our communities and they take a toll and people make choices about whether or not they will get care based on those costs often, and based on what their families can afford.

And so we’ve got to remember that a lot of people living in rural and remote communities, particularly the Indigenous people, have poorer education standards, poorer opportunities for employment, often living ingreater situations of poverty. And so their health is worse and that’s a large burden on the health care system. But giving people more help to get to the health service, to be able to engage it, I think is critically important and I think that was one of those ‘aha’ moments for me. The other thing that I’d like to add about working with Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people is understanding and having a commitment to the principles around self-determination and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been really powerless over ‘Out in the lake Argyle region of Kununurra, where there’s nothing in sight except for bush and hills and land and the water, and to be able to just sit and feel the country and hear it breathing around you...’

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