Ange’s face lights up as she swipes through photos from her time working remote. She’s enamoured by snaps of squishy-cheeked bubs on her lap in Community to maps of Australia traced in red marker, following all the roads she’s travelled.
“I did most of my travels, initially, in my Corolla and a swag,” she laughs.
“Being footloose and fancy-free travelling solo to some of the most amazing places, and meeting some beautiful people, was the absolute highlight of my career, without a doubt.
“The significant smells, colours, people, moments, recipes, watering holes you can only get to if you know locals – I wish I’d journaled all of that.”
Ange began her nursing career at tertiary hospitals in Perth, and then started to dabble in remote area nursing all across Australia, before doing her post-grad in Rural Critical Care and then travelling some more. She’s now working in Albury and teaching at Charles Sturt University in the nursing division.
Ange says, “Who I am now as a person is largely influenced by those people that I’ve met on the road.”
“There are some fairly unpleasant parts, as well as some significant traumas that you are exposed to, but I feel privileged to have been there to support and help those people in those tough moments.
“I’ve become very grateful for the exposure and experiences that I had.”
Working contract to contract, Ange appreciated the opportunity to have control over what her work-life balance looked like.
“You literally plan your life around what your priorities are,” she explains.
“My priorities throughout travelling were to be able to travel home and see my family at least a couple times a year. But apart from that, I didn’t really have anything, or anyone, keeping me in any particular place.”
That is, until Ange met her now husband and started their family.
“One of the first things I said to him is I’m very passionate about doing my nursing out in rural and remote areas, and he hadn’t really experienced that so he was keen to have a go as well,” she recalls.
“We’ve been very fortunate to get to travel together. We went up to Palm Island in 2021 and he was teaching while I was nursing. It was really nice to share that experience with him.
“Then we were fortunate enough to become pregnant with our little one – he’s now three. Since I got pregnant, we moved back to the Victoria/New South Wales border. We’ve made that home for the time being, and I dabble whenever I can in remote nursing.”
Jumping into facilitating CRANAplus courses for the first time at the start of 2025, Ange found that she fell right back into the mindset of remote area nursing, and is glad to have this new outlet.
“I was concerned I didn’t have the knowledge base after being out of it clinically for three years, but sure enough, when you get teaching, it’s absolutely all still there.”
“Facilitating with CRANAplus is really handy for me to scratch the itch of my passion, and connect and network with those nurses that I miss a lot.”
Ange says she’s lived a lot of chapters in her life already, and feels excited to think that she’s only halfway through with so many still ahead – hopefully to be filled with more experiences out remote.
“I would absolutely love to go rural and remote again in the next couple years. I’m really keen to do that as a family. I think that would be a beautiful experience for my little one to live out in those areas and experience life very different to how we live now.”
