Red earth. Unforgiving bush. My own racing heart.
These were my snatched first impressions of the Australian outback, as the juddering propellor plane circled. Slowly, we began our descent towards the dusty runway of the town where I’d be working, alone, for the next 10 weeks as an outback vet.
After leaving my long-term job in the UK, I’d enthusiastically agreed to take on work in a tiny vet clinic in my home country of Australia. However, I’d never considered how far from my suburban home the ‘Red Centre’ really was. It was my first time in the outback, my first time working alone, and suddenly, as the plane touched down, I realised I was terrified.
This was the real Australia. The true outback where Brahman cattle were rounded up by helicopter, ‘road trains’ barrelled down the highway and there were more cops per capita than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere.
The time I spent in the outback pitted me up against challenges that I’d never even considered.
Here are some of the thing I learned, about life, work and myself, during my time as an Outback vet:
1. Running a Business is Tough
During my time in the outback clinic, not only was I the only vet, but I was also the only full-time employee.
That meant I had to do the work of the practice manager, the receptionist, the accountant, the kennel hand, the cleaner, and often the vet nurse too (my nurse was only part-time). And it was tough.
Having to write up accounts was a whole new challenge to me, as was learning to do the banking and keeping the patient records straight. One small mercy was that I didn’t have to learn to use new computer software, but that was only because the patient records were hand written on paper cards, which were stored in a tall filing cabinet.
I came away with a whole new level of respect for veterinary receptionists, and I will never take my vet nurses for granted again!
2. You Gotta Help Each Other Out
My tiny desert town did have one thing that a lot of the others were missing- and that’s a real small-town sense of community. Life in ‘the territory’ could be really rough, and that’s why you had to be willing to lend a hand when it was needed.
I once called an owner late in the evening to ask if he’d mind if I could use his dog as a donor for an emergency blood transfusion. I had a critical German Shepherd in the clinic, who presented with such a bad tick infestation that she had collapsed with severe anaemia.
“Of course” the owner replied “I’ll bring my dog straight down for a blood donation. But actually, I’m heading out of town tomorrow morning, and I needed someone to feed him. So could you look after him for a few days too?”
And that’s how I ended up dog-sitting a boisterous ridge-back for a whole week, while nursing a dying shepherd back to health. Dog-sitting was definitely not in my job description, but its the least I could do for a good bloke who’d helped me out.
3. Embrace the Community
When the environment is tough, then the community has to be even tougher. And my outback community was a real tight-knit and welcoming bunch.
Within a week of my arrival, I was invited to a range of social events that I’d never have attended anywhere else in Australia- sweep-stake auctions, bingo nights and Halloween discos amongst other eclectic events. I took a four-hour country drive with friend that I’d just met that week, and received discount passes to a local museum from a client I’d become friendly with. I even met the mayor and went to the annual council Christmas barbecue.
This little community welcomed me in a way that I’d never experienced before or since. I put aside my social anxiety, and said “yes” to every invitation that I could, and I had a much richer experience for it.
And one thing that did help, was learning to:
4. Release your Inner Aussie
Its fair to say that I’m not the most stereotypical Australian going round. My pale complexion isn’t made for the sun, I don’t love beer, and I’ve been told many-a-time that I’m far too well spoken to be a real Aussie (I’m laying blame on my English parents for this one). But nothing made me feel less Australian than moving to the outback and meeting all the true blue characters whoI thought only existed in Paul Hogan movies!
And so, I decided it was high-time for me to live out my own Crocodile Dundee fantasy and embrace my Australian roots.
Within a week, I was greeting all my customers with a cheery “G’day”, and swanning around town in my Akubra hat and steel-cap boots. I learned how to take the four-wheel drive ute off-road, and where to find the best spots to star-gaze from the roof of the vehicle. And over dinner with a respected indigenous elder, I learned more than I’d ever known about the local communities of Aboriginal Australians. I really gained a much deeper respect for those who called the outback ‘home’.
And the more I learned about the locals, the more I realised how important it was to…
5. Respect the Local Culture
There was a lot that I had never realised about indigenous culture. Some parts made sense to me, and other parts I had to learn to understand. But the most important thing I tried to take on-board that is that everyone has had a different life experience, and we all deserve to be respected and treated with kindness.
In the communities that I visited, many people had different ideas about how to look after pets to the one I was used to. However I soon learned that this didn’t mean they cared any less for their animals. Some clients would have difficulty communicating with me what the problem was with their animal, but I still took them seriously and did everything I could to help.
I also have endless appreciation for my indigenous vet nurse, who acted as a cultural (and sometimes literal) translator for me, and taught me so many wonderful things about her heritage- I would have had a much harder time becoming part of the community without her.
6. Say “No Worries”and Learn to Roll with the Punches
Things in the outback didn’t always go to plan, and attitudes in ‘the territory’ tended to be a lot more laid back than what I was used to.
Sometimes, this meant that clients were 2 hours late for their appointment and you’d miss your lunch-break. Other times, a client might phone to say they’d had their driver’s license revoked, so you had to drive to town pick them up, drive to their house to pick up their critically ill dog, take them both to the clinic, then drive them both home again after treatment was given. Acting as a taxi was not an ideal use of practice time and resources, but I also knew that its the only way that a dying dog would get the treatment it needed. We typically booked less appointments in the day to allow time for these kind of complications cropping up!
Honestly, it was hard sometimes not to get frustrated when plans changed or people caused me inconvenience. But I learned that there was no point dwelling on it or assigning blame- at the end of the day, I was still able to get my job done. And if I’d put my foot down and not been so accommodating, it would only be the animals that suffered.
So I took a deep breath, said “no worries” and got on with it.
Which brings me to:
7. Your Ability to Adapt is your Greatest Strength
Working in a clinic with very limited facilities meant that often I didn’t have the exact equipment that I needed for certain tasks. And with no option for gold-standard medicine, it meant you had to get a little creative.
When my patient was a eight week old kitten with a necrotic tail, we decided it needed an operation to remove the infected dead tissue. This would require an anaesthetic, but we didn’t have any anaesthetic masks or ET tubes narrow enough for its tiny airways. So, I cut an empty coke bottle in half, and duct-taped a rubber glove over the wide end of the funnel. I hooked up the nozzle to the anaesthetic tubing, and poked the kitten’s face through a hole in the rubber of the glove- and voilà! We had a gas mask that would last just long enough for the operation to remove her tail and save her life.
Another time, a patient suffered from hypothermia after a long operation and was slow to recover, so I had a nurse drive home for a hair dryer. We were able to warm the blankets with the hair dryer to speed her recovery, and she woke up uneventfully 15 minutes later.
With so many patients of different sizes and anatomies in vet medicine, thinking-outside-the-box is a prized skill, and working remotely really tested my abilities to adapt.
8. Don’t Mess with the Wildlife
The territory has some pretty gnarly wildlife, and I was lucky enough to see joeys, wallabies, native birds and even a dingo pass through the clinic doors.
An animal I did not expect to get intimately acquainted with, was the Eastern Brown Snake. This beast is ranked as the planet’s 2nd most venous land snake, and even a drop of its venom will have you unconscious within a few minutes.
And yet, somehow, I managed to accidentally sign up for a snake catching course- which involved handling wild brown snakes.
Now this sounds too dangerous to be true, right? Occupational Health and Safety nightmare, anyone? And that’s kind of how I accidentally signed up for it- I was offered the place on a ‘snake course’, and assumed I was registering for a snake identification lesson. It didn’t even enter my mind that it was legal for a man in khakis to ask a group of locals with zero snake experience, to “have a go” at catching live, agitated, fully-venomed brown snakes- in the conference room of the fully staffed council chambers no less.
First, of course, our instructot spent an hour explaining how deadly the snakes were, how many minutes we’d have to live if we were bitten, how prohibitively dangerous the anti-venom itself was, and best of all, not to worry about it because the only hospital in town didn’t stock anti-venom anyway.
And then we got underway. A snake would be released in the centre of the conference room, and we worked in pairs to approach, pin, lift and contain the beasts, while keeping the sharp end out of ankle-biting range.
I survived the course. I was so full of adrenaline that I didn’t sleep for an entire 24 hrs, and I didn’t stop seeing snakes in the place of every garden hose and tree root that I saw for a week. And as promised, 4 weeks later I received my “Certified Snake Catcher” certificate in the mail.
When my mother found out, she looked at my certificate in undisguised horror- “You’re not really going to go round catching deadly snakes are you?!”
I could guarantee her that no, I never wanted to see another brown snake as long as I lived. I do not mess with Aussie wildlife.
9. “I Got This”: Learn to Trust Yourself
One of the most challenging aspects of my time as an outback vet was having to work with more limited equipment and resources than I was used to. At first I was worried- with no blood tests and no x-ray machine, how was I meant to diagnose medical cases? But my employer put it to me this way:
“Working in the territory teaches you to rely on yourself and your basic bread-and-butter vet skills. You’ll be surprised by how much you can find out from a basic physical exam when you have to.”
And in many cases, he was right. In my previous roles, I’d fallen into diagnostic patterns… anorexic dog? Blood test, then x-ray, then ultrasound…. And so on. It meant that I wasn’t concentrating on my physical exams and clinical knowledge as much as I should be, because I knew a blood test would make-up for any subtle clinical signs that I’d missed. But not any more. My experience really forced me to trust my observations, and also to consider how often those expensive diagnostics really were performed out of habit rather than necessity.
Working remotely also meant that if a procedure needed doing, it was all on me. This TERRIFIED me. In past workplaces, challenging procedures would be hand-balled up to the senior staff, meaning I felt safe knowing I wouldn’t have to do difficult surgeries without support. But in the outback, all that changed. Of course, I never took on procedures beyond my knowledge level but, I did get the chance to perform my first eye enucleation, blood transfusion and kitten tail amputation solo. All three cases were successful with a happy (live) patient at the end of it, which wouldn’t have been the case if I had been too scared to trust myself.
Honestly, if I had know the challenging cases I would see in the outback before I had signed the contract, I probably wouldn’t had taken the job! Instead, I pushed myself, trusted my own abilities, and came out a much more confident vet and human on the other side.
10. Always Check your Toilet for Frogs
I wish I could say this last lesson was some sort of profound metaphor. But actually, turns out that when you live in the outback, its not so unusual to have a small population of the local wildlife living inside your home along with you. In my small “Donga” house, this manifested in a timid family of frogs whose chosen habitat was my toilet bowl.
At first, I tried to shoo them away, or carefully take them outside to a more appropriate non-sewerage-based environment. But try as I would, they’d appear again the next day, just chilling in the cistern or climbing up the walls of the shower.
So the main lesson here, apart from keeping the toilet lid closed, is never pee without first checking your toilet for frogs. Because nothing will ever make you scream so loud as heading for the bathroom in the small hours of the morning, taking a seat, and then noticing, from between your thighs, 2 unblinking beady eyes staring up from you from the depths.
If you’d like to read more about working as a vet in interesting parts of the world, check out the Global Vets Interview Page to see which other locations there are to discover?
Are you thinking of coming to Australia to work? There will be heaps of content coming on this topic very soon, but in the meantime, please contact me if you have any questions!
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