Sue Page has refused to be held down by a glass ceiling in her distinguished medical carer. She was the first woman to be elected president of the Rural Doctors Association, at both a state and national level. She has been on numerous medical boards and advisory panels and in 2008 was made a Member of the Order Of Australia.

But for Sue’s mother, Diana Hodgkinson, it was a different story.

Diana was one of the first two women in Australia to be allowed to sit the diplomatic examination and became the Vice Consol at Australia’s Embassy in New York. But after about a year, Diana fell in love and married an American Army Colonel, David Page, 20 years her senior, and was forced to resign her position.

“If you were a married woman working in the public service, as soon as you got married you lost your job,” Sue explained. “It was a post-depression era premise of one job per family. If you were married, then by definition you had a husband and he should have the job, not you.”

Deciding that training women had been a waste of time and effort, the civil service banned women from sitting the diplomatic exam for the next 20 years and Diana Page was never able to return to work in the diplomatic corps.

Diana and David had five children and the family moved back to Australia when Sue was five years old.

“My father had sustained injuries during World War II that had affected his vision and he retired because he was starting to go blind. So, as a family, we travelled for two years, part of it in Australia… basically trying to see as many places and things as we could before he lost his sight entirely,” Sue said.

The family settled in Canberra, primarily because they had a left hand drive motorhome they had been travelling in and at the time it could only be registered in the ACT or NT. When Sue’s grandmother came to live with them they became an extended family of eight living in a three bedroom house.

Sue said from about the age of three she wanted to become a doctor. She used to play games with her siblings that involved giving first aid to teddy bears and bandaging them with handkerchiefs.

“I’m sure my parents encouraged me in that (wanting to pursue medicine) and at school I was bright enough to get the marks that meant my teachers also encouraged me… but I wouldn’t have been able to do it if it wasn’t for the Whitlam government making education free,” she said. “We were living on a retiree’s pension and my family had worked out they could afford to send two kids to uni but not more, and that was my older brother and sister.”

Sue has been an obstetrician, a surgical assistant and a GP, but much of her work has been at the policy advisory level and has been dedicated to improving the health outcomes of people living in rural and remote parts of the country.

“When I was doing medical training my father was very keen to encourage me into high level research… but I used to tell him right from the start ‘I want to be a country doctor’. I wanted to have patients that paid me with ducks and chickens and to be part of a community. And I think that happened because every Christmas holiday we used to take this caravan on wheels into different places, mostly in NSW and Victoria, but sometimes further afield to South Australia or Western Australia… and I fell in love with rural Australia.”

Sue chose to do her training at the University of Newcastle because it had a focus on rural health and was the first university to have dedicated places for Aboriginal students. According to Sue, about 70 per cent of all Aboriginal doctors in Australia today have graduated from there.

“That health equity, social justice aspect really appealed to me,” she said.

She did placements at Tamworth, Taree and a little town near Moree.

“I was attached with a rural GP who had this amazing farm house that looked over paddocks and the valley and every afternoon after work we’d pour a glass of wine and he and his wife and I would put our feet up and talk about rural life and what was good about it.”

For Sue and her husband, Dr Chris Mitchell, it was the sense of being a part of a community and getting to know their patients as people.

In 1989 while doing a stint as registrars on the North Coast, Sue and Chris were contacted by the CWA and persuaded to go to Lennox Head for “a look”. They liked what they saw.

“One of the local builders had just built a medical centre, hoping to recruit somebody and Marie Anderson from the CWA was very keen to put people in there… Two doctors were working in there (both part time) so Chris and I joined the practice and it just kept growing and growing,” she said.

Sue believes that part of the reason for the shortage of doctors in rural Australia is that most graduates don’t have a rural experience built into their career structure anymore.

“If you look back 30 years ago, in general, specialists had done a couple of years in a hospital and came out into general practice. As they got to about their mid 40s, they decided what type of medicine they would most like to specialise in. Slowly over time you had college systems… (where) the temptation was to cut short the time it took you to get you to the fully trained specialist bit, by cutting out the GP bit in the middle... Certainly when Chris and I were going through, the vast majority of rural GPs were people who were doing their hospital terms and loved everything… they’d done a bit of obstetrics and a bit of anaesthetics. The more we go down the speciality pathway, the harder it is to get doctors into rural practice because by the time they’ve done their specialty training they are late 20s, maybe late 30s or early 40s, so how do you then broaden (the skills) back out again and how do you transplant the whole family? Because by that stage they are probably married and have kids who are engaged in school.”

Sue is currently the senior lecturer at the Northern Rivers University Department of Rural Health, and also continues to work at St Vincent’s Hospital and at Cabbage Tree Island.

“You can’t talk about rural and regional health without talking about Aboriginal health,” she said. “The highest priority in this country is to improve the health outcomes for Aboriginal people, the next highest priority is to improve health outcomes for people living in rural areas, and this is coming from the mortality data.”

She then reeled off an example to show the type of discrepancies that occur between metropolitan centres and remotes areas, and the types of battles that are going on at a policy level.

“People (in rural areas) diagnosed with either cancer of the cervix or cancer of the prostrate have got a 300 per cent increased chance of being dead within five years… And people say ‘oh that’s Aboriginal people’. Well for a start that’s not okay. They say it almost like they are pesky,” she said with disgust. “But nationally the one per cent of Australians who live in remote communities, three quarters of them are white. It’s miners and farmers, many are fit and healthy – people between 20 and 35 that should be at the peak of their fitness – are dying at an increased rate and it comes back to access to services.”

In her various positions, and particularly as head of the Rural Doctors Association, Sue said she enjoyed “comfortable access” to both state and federal health ministers, but was frustrated because often the solutions to health problems often lay outside of the health portfolio. Her solution was to try and get her hands on the policy levers and in 2007 she ran as the National Party candidate for the federal seat of Richmond.

“My desire to get into politics was that there were so many areas where the solution to a particular problem lay outside of health… A really dramatic example of that is, if you increase the level of schooling by 12 months in an Aboriginal community, you decrease the perinatal death rate by seven to 10 per cent. Imagine that, if you can get kids to stay at school a year longer and all of a sudden you’ve a got a 10 per cent drop in your baby death rate. It’s pretty dramatic, but if you are a health lobbyist, you don’t get to play in those ponds… you’re not invited to the education meetings, the transport meetings, the housing meeting… Politics is really the only place where you can cross over all those boundaries.”

Her emphasis on social equity issues might suggest she would not have been a team player in a coalition government, but she said she ran for the Nationals because it allowed her to be “blatantly rurally and regionally biased”.

“I’ve been sitting around the table when people say things like ‘that’s the choice you make when you go to live in the country’. Well we actually need our farmers and miners to live in the country and as a kid you don’t get a choice. You live where your parents live. Thirty six per cent of Australians live in rural and regional communities – that’s a big whack of your community to dismiss and say ‘bad luck’… At a lot of meetings I would attend there might be 30 to 40 people sitting around the table with the Minister and there might be one or sometimes two people who came from a rural area. That needs to change,” she said.

Sue was defeated by Justine Elliot at that election and is unlikely to run again.

“To a certain extent I never really wanted to do politics in the first place, it was because the lobbying system was failing. I would much rather be getting out and doing stuff.”

She also said she was a bit naïve about some aspects of the political process.

“From a health background people are mostly honest… When you say ‘let’s get together and we are going to work to the betterment of this particular issue’, people come to the table with a genuine desire and are quite willing to put aside their own personal beliefs and be guided by the evidence,” she said. “I was not convinced that was the process in politics.”