Sue Miller never wanted to be a nurse.  She laughs when she tells me over a phone conversation from her home in Cairns that for the first twenty years of her career she hated it, every single day was a struggle.

“I didn’t have a lot of choice because back in the seventies you were either going to be a secretary, a teacher or a nurse.  Nursing runs in my family and my grandmother had told me that I was going to be nurse when I was 13 and she was a matron so I didn’t argue. It wasn’t until I got into emergency nursing and later into remote area nursing that I actually found my niche.  Now I’m a paid tourist.”

Sue is taking some time out after a three month stint working at Docker River.  A remote indigenous community of 300 people, about ten hours’ drive from Alice Springs, out past Uluru and near the West Australian border. “You’re very isolated, the food truck comes out once a fortnight, the doctor comes once a month. When I come back to Cairns it’s overstimulation that is the best way to describe it.  There’s lights there’s cars everyone is going fast, you go to the supermarket and there’s nine varieties of apple.  I find it really difficult, I’ve been back nearly two weeks and I’ve been to the supermarket once.”

Sue is a grandmother and a mother of four children.  These days she lives with her partner of six years Phil, who is also rarely at home as a fly in fly out worker.  They’ve managed to align their diaries and both are at home this week but they’ll soon fly out and won’t see each other again till the middle of November.

In 12 years as a Remote Area Nurse for CQ Nurse, Sue has worked in 50 locations covering the Torres Strait, Cocas Keeling Islands and Alice springs.  It’s a huge area, which Sue describes as being about as big as two territories and a couple of states. It’s where she finally fell in love with her career and discovered a new hobby.   She photographs the places she visits and each one is worthy of a postcard, while the stories she tells me wouldn’t be out of place in a movie.

“I have retrieved people from a rollover, got bogged and slept in a riverbed on one night. I have delivered a premature baby on my own in a flood at two in the morning. Many years of this work and there isn’t too much I haven't seen or experienced. Within the first ten minutes of arriving in one community there was a plane crash at the airstrip. The landing gear hadn't come down on the plane and it was a small 6 seater. Fortunately no one was seriously hurt but that was my hello to that community. I have driven through flooded roads to get insulin to people who would have otherwise become very sick. I am not talking about a puddle either.  I have worked in the clinic all day and been on call for many days in a row and dealt with many sick babies at night. Last year at Timber Creek I got a call that a young girl was going to attempt suicide.  The other nurse and I drove over an hour to find her and keep her safe till she could be evacuated. 

That was a long night. I have travelled to communities by 4WD, boat, helicopter, mail plane and the Royal Flying Doctors. There is really no big stand out just lots of stories and some of them quite funny like the patient I was evacuating who stood on top of the ambulance naked waving the plane in.  Yep that was a funny one, I couldn't imagine what the pilot thought as he landed.

Sue revels in the challenge, autonomy, and the holistic nature of working remotely.  She describes herself as a one woman doctor, pharmacist, pathologist, paramedic, even the receptionist and cleaner.

As a visitor to these remote indigenous communities she’s also come to learn that respecting their culture is an important survival tool of the job.  “I look at things from other people’s angles and their values and their culture.  You need to accept that they’re doing it their right way.  We once had a man come into the clinic with a headache and he told us he’d been eating witchetty grubs to make it go away. We’re only there to help we’re not there to judge because if you do that they won’t come to the clinic.”

“I hate that phrase ‘non-compliant’ we use it a lot and that’s a very judgmental phrase isn’t it? It is because we talk about people who are non-compliant with their medication and they’re non-compliant with coming to the clinic to have their health check.  So if they come in and they’ve got red paint all over their faces because they believe it’ll help and they’ve also brought the witchdoctor along with them, then you work with them. Who says that we’re right? Maybe witchetty grubs do get rid of headaches.”