The reception area in the medical clinic in the small southern New South Wales town of Jindera isn't your typically quiet, mannerly space. Here, patients arrive with hand-baked cakes or homegrown produce, or invites to weddings and parties.
After checking in, they chat with practice manager Tracey Mobilia like friends in the front bar of a local pub, with other waiting room patients sometimes joining in the banter.
The town's doctor — Tracey's husband Glen — is also unlike most general practitioners. "He's a character and very individual," says one local. "He's just unusual," says another. Others describe the softly spoken 65-year-old as "unique" or "different".
It's why Jindera is a lucky town — not just for having a full-time doctor but also for having had the same one for two decades.
In the early 2000s Glen Mobilia was in the process of selling a clinic he ran in partnership with another GP in the Victorian border town of Wodonga. Back then, Jindera hadn't had a doctor for many years, so a well-connected Liberal Party member had some parliamentary mates encourage Mobilia to establish a practice there.
Mobilia had never heard of Jindera, despite living just 24 kilometres away, so he said to his partner Tracey: "Let's take a trip and see what's out there and see what they want."
Jindera locals weren't going to leave Mobilia in any doubt about what they wanted. "When I came out here there was a Lutheran priest in the street and people praying," he said. "And I thought, 'This is friggin' madness!'"
Wanted: GPs in rural Australia
The shortage of doctors in rural Australia has long been a problem, forcing many country people to travel long distances for medical care. Dr Yann Guisard, a spokesperson for the NSW Rural Doctors Network, says a recent survey found a third of rural and remote practices in the state were seeking to recruit GPs.
But the problem is likely to get worse, with the survey also revealing a quarter of GPs were planning on retiring within the next five years. And further compounding the problem is the current trend of medical graduates pursuing specialist careers instead of general practice.
"Specialists do make a hell of a lot more money than GPs," says Dr Andrew Pascoe, a former clinic owner and member of several medical boards. "And, trouble is, doctors don't want to do it [move to rural areas] for lifestyle reasons, especially doctors with kids who need access to schools."
Some shire councils have resorted to offering inducements. Last year the remote Queensland town of Julia Creek advertised an annual salary of $513,000 plus a rent-free house for any doctor wanting an outback lifestyle. They waited nine months before someone accepted.
Mobilia's first task in Jindera was to set up a makeshift surgery in an old disused hall. By then he was the registrar at the Wangaratta hospital in Victoria and thought his stay in Jindera would be temporary. But, he says, "After a time I just kept going and going and going and I kind of liked it."
What Mobilia most liked was being able to use many of the skills doctors learn, like removing swallowed objects or fishing hooks from mouths, cutting out cancerous moles, providing total care for type 2 diabetes patients, and resuscitating patients. "We get three, four, five or six cardiac arrests here a year so you've got to get them going — there's no tomorrow."
Then there are emergency procedures unique to rural clinics. "We had a crazy case one night with an 80-something year-old drover, who was on the side of the road taking cows up to God knows where," Mobilia says.
"Well, she caught her calf on the back of a barbed wire fence and had ripped most of it almost off. She came in with a towel wrapped around her leg and there was blood all over the joint but she wouldn't go to the hospital so the nurse and I sewed the whole bloody thing back up. It took hours to put it all together."
Then the COVID pandemic hit
The COVID-19 pandemic required a different skillset. "A bigger part of the problem was the mental health stuff — people getting depressed, fighting at home, drinking, gambling," Mobilia says. "Often these people would come in and just spill it all out to the nurse."
Mobilia told patients he was available day and night in case they considered doing something they might regret. "If you know people well enough, and they trust you enough, and you've got enough experience in life … they'll talk to you about some of their deepest, darkest secrets."
Mobilia likes to talk as well as listen, which partly explains his colourful reputation. Visits to the Jindera doctor often last 15 to 20 minutes or more, with jokes and social chat used to encourage patients to open up so he can piece together a more holistic diagnosis.
Upon graduating, he says, he worked at a clinic in suburban Adelaide for "a bloke who had an egg timer and people were just milling through all day and I thought, 'Is this it? I'm not going to be doing this'."
Still, law was Mobilia's first profession. He spent several years "on big dough" in partnership with a fellow commercial lawyer in Melbourne when, in the mid-1980s, came a generous offer to buy the practice. He then purchased a string of video libraries during the boom VHS years of the 1980s and '90s and got another generous takeover offer.
Then, remembering his fondness for high school chemistry and physics, Mobilia returned to Melbourne to study medicine. Upon graduation he worked at clinics in Adelaide then rural Gawler before he and Tracey returned to Wodonga.
A handful of patients from Mobilia's former Wodonga clinic now make the drive north rather than find a new doctor closer to home. Others come from much further away — Harden near Canberra, 250 kilometres north-east, Wangaratta, 90 kilometres south-west, and Dartmouth, 116 kilometres south-east.
Doing some good as Jindera grows
As for what keeps him turning up five days a week two decades on? "I enjoy it," Mobilia says. "It's not driven by financial considerations. The people are fantastic to work with, you're doing some genuine medicine and you don't have to do things you don't want to do. And people are kind to us. I think we're still contributing and doing some good."
That "good" includes his role supporting the council's bid to establish a nursing home in Jindera, and enticing a chemist to set up shop. "I had to be the pharmacist when we started, with all the stuff in the cupboard," Mobilia says. "Then we attracted a pharmacist into town, and then along came the supermarket across the road and then a few other shops sprung up."
That's not all that's sprung up in Jindera. The town's population of 2,721 is almost triple what it was in 2001, a remarkable growth rate considering the exodus rural Australia has experienced since federation.
Much of that growth can be attributed to Jindera's close proximity to the thriving regional cities of Albury and Wodonga, which have a combined population of over 99,000 and a plethora of employment opportunities.
Councillor Jenny O'Neill, a Jindera native and former teacher at the St John's primary school, says younger people are attracted by the affordability of new homes being built on blocks up to 2,000 square metres.
There has also been a "big influx" of big Catholic families who have come "purely" for the local school, Saint Mary MacKillop College, O'Neill says, "which is a sort-of fundamentalist training ground for nuns and priests, sort-of".
Changing identity, losing charm
Two newcomers are Henri and Tianah Taylor who arrived from Nowra, nearly 500 kilometres away, in 2020. Henri, who teaches at the Saint Mary MacKillop College, says the school and church are so popular that, "There are now satellite towns for Jindera — not Albury — like Culcairn, Gerogery and Howlong, to come to the parish here."
However, with growth has come a loss of identity and the description of Jindera as a "dormitory town" — where people sleep but work elsewhere.
"There's an awful lot of people here that nobody knows except maybe the postman," says Margie Wehner, a fourth-generation Jindera native.
The Wiradjuri people first inhabited the Jindera area before German Lutherans established a foothold in the 1860s. Aside from some old churches and shop fronts, today Jindera doesn't look or feel much like a country town.
It lost a chunk of rural charm in 1973 when the Hume council ordered the demolition of some 20 century-old cottages due to structural concerns. Two of those belonged to blacksmith Ernst Wehner, who told the local paper he'd knock the cottages down himself because, "I won't give them the satisfaction of doing so".
Wehner's daughter Margie now runs the pioneer museum in the 1907-built Wagner's general store, which displays a wide range of vintage items on the original cedar counter and shelving. Wehner is no fan of what's replaced other heritage buildings like the old Jindera Hotel, describing the 1970s reconstruction as a "beautiful mausoleum/public toilet".
As for the suburban-like row of shops, Councillor Jenny O'Neil says: "That's what happens when you let developers do their own thing. There are no council rules to say you must build in this style."
Still, Jindera — and specifically the 123-year-old school of arts hall — may have found some unlikely saviours in two newcomers to town. Kieran Williams and Michael Green were part of the Catholic wave and brought with them their large families and a love of live theatre.
And so the two resurrected the Jindera Theatrical Society, calling on locals to perform roles in the Agatha Christie play, Spider's Web, which sold out five nights last November.
"I love the idea of doing something local and getting people together," says Williams. "Before the shows and during intermission, and after the shows, people were bumping into each other and chatting. And I love the idea of, half a dozen times [a year] something happening here, making it a bit of a focal point. I love the idea of building community here."
