When Dr Sonia Henry was heading in the direction of her mid-30s, she was consumed by the desire to flee her own life.
For a while, the GP and author had felt lucky. She had written Going Under, a bestselling novel that exposed the brutal treatment of medical interns. She was living with a friend in a Darlinghurst apartment, a picture of the big-city existence she had always fantasised about. But, as the pandemic took hold, her emotional hurdles mounted. As a doctor, she started struggling with the pressure to be perfect, the toll exacted by endless study. Then, she was betrayed by the narcissistic heart surgeon she was involved with. She wanted to get as far away as possible. She called a locum agency that specialised in regional Australia. They needed a doctor urgently. She never looked back.
“I was in a really, really dark place,” she says. “A few days later, I was driving down the North West Coastal Highway. I can still picture it in my head – those flat red tabletops. I felt this sense of ancientness. I had no idea about things like the healing power of the land.” She pauses to gather her words. “Until you are there, you don’t know. And I didn’t understand.”
Since Robyn Davidson wrote Tracks in 1980, women from the city have embarked on odysseys through the desert. In the worst instances of this trope, the outback remains a cipher. The people who live there, foils for observations that uphold the lazy idea that Australia’s real life happens in the country’s urban centres. Henry’s new memoir Put Your Feet in the Dirt, Girl chronicles her time as a solo GP in the Pilbara and New South Wales’ central north-west, places she describes as Desert Town and River Town. In the book, her personal emotional reckoning plays out against a world in which these old divides – city and country, east coat and west coast, Indigenous and non-Indigenous – underpin both the failures of the medical system and its hierarchies of care.
I meet Henry, who now works rurally part of the year, at a cafe in Sydney’s Crown Street. She emits warmth and candour. We fall into easy conversation. It’s people rather than status – reserved, she says, for specialists and surgeons – that draws her to medicine. “All the power doesn’t make people happy. Being a doctor is about being a healer or trying your best to be one.”
At the medical clinic in Desert Town, “staffed by approximately seven people and situated 400km from anywhere”, she’s caught between her best intentions and the realities of remote medicine. Samples must fly in and fly out. She is on call every night and lacks basic medical equipment, such as blood gas machines, to manage the around-the-clock emergencies she’s confronted with.
When she’s asked by a nurse to intubate a patient, a risky procedure for which she hasn’t received adequate training, “I said, ‘I can’t do that.”
“The job asked for a GP with basic emergency skills and I am actually quite a cautious doctor,” she says now.
But the beleaguered nurse insists, “You just have to do your best.”
“They talk about air support in the regions, but the truth is the flying doctors are understaffed and if they don’t have enough planes or if the plane breaks down it is just you.”
In the Pilbara, she says, she relied on excellent nursing staff, kind doctors who advised her over the phone from Royal Perth hospital. To preserve calm, she swam. She struck up close friendships. She wasn’t prepared, however, for the way the economics of mining exacerbated this crisis of isolation. She meets miners who are suicidal. Drill blasters who neglect serious heart conditions while working on outback stations.
“People are very lonely,” says Henry, who has changed details of individuals in her book to protect confidentiality. “They are doing 14-hour shifts far away from family. We are a giant country, but we focus on these coastal cities. Mining is such a huge industry; they have enough money to stick a hospital out there and staff it if they wanted to.”
According to July 2022 statistics by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the 28% of the country’s population that live in rural and remote regions have poorer access to primary health care services, and as a result, are far likelier to experience death, injury or hospitalisation.
“There are some tropes thrown around by doctors, that rural medicine is more interesting,” says Henry. “To me, I’d rather have boring medicine and healthy people. A child who is dying of rheumatic heart disease isn’t interesting, it’s a tragedy. In Sydney, because you have access to everything, you don’t have to think about Australia. I felt like an Australian doctor in that way, not just a city doctor.”
In River Town, where Henry lives out of a suitcase for a long time and adopts a dog called Buddy, she is awed by the nearby Baiame’s Ngunnhu or Brewarrina Fish Traps, near the Barwon River – one of the world’s oldest human-made structures. She grapples with the presence of infectious disease such as syphilis. She confronts the hollowness of phrases such as ‘closing the gap’.
“You start losing faith in humanity,” she says. “I love this country and I hate this country. In the end, I had to stand in the middle of the bridge between this terrible suffering and amazing beauty and reconcile both in order to keep going.”
Henry’s life changed when she met The Sailor, a young, Indigenous woman working in the Pilbara. She shares the doctor’s wanderlust, dreams about building boats in Sardinia.
“I asked if I could write down the conversation,” she says, her voice cracking. “I found out she had died a few weeks later. Chances are that if she was white, if she had been in Sydney, it would not have happened.”
The injustice of The Sailor’s death hit Henry in a visceral and personal way. A situation she understood intellectually had come to impact her emotionally.
“I think about her every day,” she says.
Henry wrote the book in The Sailor’s memory. This fleeting and powerful encounter taught her the importance of speaking about healthcare outside the city hubs. “I hope that people can understand it from the perspective of someone like me, who wasn’t like this weird white saviour – but just an idiot that left Sydney hoping to escape my life,” she says.
There’s an ego in medicine, Henry says, that presumes doctors know everything. Writing her memoir strengthened her path as a GP. It galvanised her belief in the power of listening.
“You can learn to listen without trying to own it,” she says. “It is not about you.”
Put your feet in the dirt, girl by Sonia Henry is out now through Allen & Unwin
