A remote Australian town seeks a doctor, offering a $400,000 salary and free rent

A remote Australian town that will soon lose its only doctor is offering a salary of up to 680,000 Australian dollars ($428,000), plus free rent and a car, to attract a new candidate.

The remote Queensland town of Julia Creek, population 500, is offering about double the salary a family physician would earn in the state’s capital, Brisbane.

The catch is that Brisbane is a 17-hour drive away. The closest major city, Townsville, is a seven-hour drive.

Prospective applicants must embrace searing heat and tropical insects, too.

But the town’s outgoing medic, Dr. Adam Louws, says his replacement will also find a quieter pace of life and the chance to learn skills they’ve never used before.

Louws was recruited from Brisbane in 2022, when Julia Creek drew national headlines for offering a salary of AU$500,000.

“My mother-in-law sent me a link to this news article saying, ‘the half a million dollar job that no one wants,’” Louws said. “My first thought when I saw it and I looked at it was, where’s Julia Creek?”

(A sign in the main street of Julia Creek, a rural Queensland town of 500 people, Australia, Aug. 1, 2024. (Jo Thieme/ McKinlay Shire Council via AP)

Julia Creek is a sweeping, romantic slice of the Australian Outback with wide-open spaces and orange sunsets.

Kids play sports and ride horses. But it’s remote — high school means boarding school in the city and the nearest hospital is nearly three hours’ drive away.

Before Louws arrived in 2022, the town hadn’t had a permanent doctor for 15 years, with a roster of visiting physicians dropping in for short stays.

It’s a problem that has vexed rural towns in Australia and around the world for decades.

Australia has a shortfall of general practitioners of 2,500 doctors across the country, according to a 2024 government report, with the shortage worst in rural areas and expected to grow.

Attracting doctors to rural Australia is made harder by the eye-watering distances between the most remote settlements; the vast country is one of the world’s least densely populated.

In neighboring New Zealand — where 5 million people live in a country the size of the United Kingdom — distances between far-flung towns have worsened health disparities. In the United States, 65% of rural areas had a shortage of primary care physicians in 2023, official figures showed.

The town was not, she added, literally off the grid: Julia Creek has electricity and broadband internet.

“You don’t have to stay forever,” Fegan said. “Just give it a shot.”

Ref: A remote Australian town seeks a doctor, offering a $400,000 salary and free rent Photo Credit- Jo Thieme/ McKinlay Shire Council via AP