LIFE ON THE ROAD AND IN THE AIR AS A RURAL AND REMOTE MENTAL HEALTH CLINICIAN

For the past few years my life has been lived between the road and the sky. One week I’m driving a car along a highway that disappears into the horizon; the next I’m climbing into a small plane bound for a remote First Nations community. The scenery is always changing—red-dirt airstrips, endless ocean, bushland thick with life, towns that appear like mirages—but the purpose never wavers: to walk beside communities in their stories of resilience, healing, and strength.

Remote work is its own world. The distances are vast, resources few, and the challenges rarely simple. Yet it isn’t the kilometres or the logistics that stay with me. It’s the relationships. The quiet moments of trust—sitting in a circle as someone shares their story, being invited into community spaces, learning traditions and ways of healing that reach far beyond textbooks or clinical frameworks.

Life on the move demands a kind of flexibility. Flights are cancelled. Weather shifts without warning. Plans are rewritten mid-journey. Sometimes the travel feels as big as the work itself. But then a sunrise spills across the wing of a tiny plane, or a night sky stretches endless above a campfire, and you remember: this isn’t just a job. It’s a privilege.

Out here, I’ve learned that mental health is inseparable from culture, from community, from land. They are threads of the same fabric. And in these remote places, I’ve witnessed a strength that defies distance—people holding each other with a depth of care that endures through hardship.

The road and the air can be tiring, but they are endlessly humbling. They keep teaching me that healing doesn’t happen only in clinics or offices. It unfolds in circles, connection, in stories, in the land itself…

and somewhere beyond the next red horizon, another story is already waiting to be told.