Outback Vets

When I began searching for veterinarians living and working in out- back Australia,  I knew quite a few vets socially but very little about the world of veterinary science. Of course, I knew they fixed animals but hadn't ever considered the significant difference they can make to animal production. This was despite the fact that  in the 1970s, Syd Miller,  a long-since-retired vet who pioneered  embryo  trans- plants  in cattle, came to my parents' farm on the Western Darling Downs in Queensland to do some of the first transplants using semen from Aldersyde Lancejack,  a red Poll Devon bull Dad had bred, the first Devon semen donor  in Australia.

I was aware that the Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign (BTEC) was probably the single most significant veterinary event to happen in Australia, and especially in the outback. Prior to that program there were hardly any vets in rural Australia and none in remote Australia.  BTEC was initiated in 1970 and lasted until the country was finally declared brucellosis-free in 1989 and TB-free in 1997.  One of the most notable outcomes of BTEC, apart from the obvious, was the introduction of vets into rural and remote areas. As well as government vets, lots of private vets were contracted and subcontracted to carry out the testing and reading associated with BTEC. Subsequently, many of them established practices in towns and communities across the outback, ensuring people of the inland had hitherto inconceivable access to veterinary services. Ensured income while they were testing, the vets could begin offering private veterinary services with a view to building up sustainable businesses that continued after BTEC concluded. What I hadn't realised was that, when some of those vets retired, they weren't replaced. There are now fewer vets in the outback than there were in the '70s and '80s.

I knew some of the bush vets travelled long distances to get to the next job but hadn't realised just how far that can be. I knew that back in the '60s and '70s most vet students were men but not that most vet graduates these days are women.

So it's been a very educational year and, despite the fact that I used to really want to be a hairdresser, as I travelled around Australia meeting the vets – watching a procedure here, gazing at an X-ray there and looking through photographs of some of the most gruesome injuries I've ever seen – I was pleased that I had trained as a nurse! Seeing and hearing about some of the results of their ministrations just inspired me all the more to share their stories.

Unlike their urban counterparts, the vets who work in rural and remote Australia often work out in the most extreme of elements, a long, long way from home and any kind of professional back- up. All of them are in the business to help their livestock-producing clients achieve maximum potential with their herds, and most of them are also running or working in mixed practices.  From day to day, they have no idea what might cross their diagnostic pathway and most of them don't have the luxury of specialist services nearby that they can refer their patients to. They're it. If they can't fix it, it doesn't get fixed.

Which leads to one of the things that fascinated me most: their animal patients can't tell them what's wrong, where the pain is or how they hurt themselves.  Vets rely on whatever information the owners can tell them (which is sometimes none), their own ability to assess the obvious symptoms and pure gut instinct.  Granted, for many of the older vets in these stories, that's a gut instinct honed by years of practice, but all of them, including the youngest, least experienced vets, have grown up around animals in one form or another and have some intrinsic talent for 'reading' animals.

These people are without exception responsible, reliable, resilient, focused and dedicated.  And while some of them  are pretty damn  tough  – they have to be – when  they're handling  animals, especially other people's pets, they're invariably  gentle. All of them work very hard and some of them work unbelievably long hours on their own. One of them has had seven days off call in twenty years and a couple of them are away from home more often than they're not. They've not chosen easy pathways but they're all clearly com- mitted to what they do.

Vets are a breed of their own, and the outback vets even more so. In choosing these particular stories, I wanted to illustrate a cross- section of the people who work in outback veterinary medicine. From the not so remote Clare Valley in South Australia to the vast cattle stations of the north; from the Pilbara in Western Australia to the foothills of the Snowy Mountains in Victoria, all of these vets have strong connections to the outback. And then there's the ring-in from Norfolk Island, the most remote of them all.

It was truly a pleasure to meet them and it is a privilege to share their stories.