





It has been 17 years since Greens leader Richard Di Natale left Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, where he spent 18 months working as a doctor diagnosing chronic and often preventable conditions.

After spending three days this week back in the remote town, located about 1,000km south of Darwin and 500km north of Alice Springs, Di Natale told Guardian Australia he was concerned to see some aspects of healthcare in the remote community had gone backwards.

There is no longer a maternity ward at the local hospital, forcing women to travel to Alice Springs at 38 weeks of pregnancy to wait for the labour and birth.

“Some women get onto a bus in middle of night to travel to Alice to have their baby,” he said.

“That is absolutely going backwards. Then I heard the story of a young woman who had to give birth in Alice and when she came back, she was stuck at bus stop at 2am in the morning waiting for transport home.”



It was also distressing to see children were still being diagnosed with chronic and infectious diseases, some of which were only normally seen in developing countries, he said.

A lack of affordable housing with clean water and sanitation meant trachoma, an infection which causes blindness and which was eliminated from the rest of Australia more than one century ago, was still endemic in Tennant Creek. Rheumatic heart disease, also eliminated from Australia except in remote Aboriginal communities, was also still being diagnosed in the town, he said.

Richard Di Natale training with his old football club, the Tennant Creek Eagles. Photograph: Cam Suttie

The Northern Territory health minister, Natasha Fyles, said her Labor government was investing a record $1.1bn to build and improve thousands of remote homes right across the Territory including in Tennant Creek.

“The government has started building more remote houses because we know that a good home with functional facilities is essential for a good health and better community outcomes,” she said.

The houses were being built by a local workforce that would contribute to the local economy. “We are also working to give communities more say over their lives by restoring local decision making in housing health and education,” she said.

There are roughly 3,200 people in Tennant Creek and the town is 70% Indigenous, representing 12 language groups. According to a 2015 study published in the medical journal BMC Health Services, health infrastructure includes a 20-bed hospital which treats short-term illnesses and injuries, as well as an eight-chair renal dialysis unit.



The local hospital works with the Royal Flying Doctor and the Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation to provide essential health services. While Di Natale says the population size has remained roughly the same since he worked there as a GP, homelessness had gone through the roof.

“It has noticeably worsened,” he said.

Di Natale at the Anyinginyi Aboriginal clinic in Tennant Creek. Photograph: Cam Suttie

“The public housing waiting list is now 10 years. Not one new house has been built for 30 years. But housing infrastructure is health infrastructure. If you don’t have flushing toilets and a shower where you can wash with running water, then you are susceptible to infections that can cause some of these diseases.”

These were all issues Di Natale said he would be raising with the territory and federal governments.

Fyles said the territory was home to some of the most disadvantaged people in Australia. She blamed the federal government, saying the latest budget had done “very little to improve their lives”.

“There’s little in the budget except a small national increase in health and education funding – but nothing to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the territory’s future,” she told Guardian Australia.

Di Natale said there had been some improvements. Tennant Creek now has a dialysis centre, something he continuously advocated for while he was a GP. Patients no longer have to regularly travel hundreds of kilometres for treatment.

And sport and recreation programs targeting children had also proven successful, he said. The Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation was also doing impressive outreach work beyond its remit, stretching itself to provide transportation and public health education to the community, he said.

Di Natale said returning to the community had given him a sense of where he might like to focus his energies once he was done with politics, though he said he did not see that time coming soon.

“I was nervous about coming back because I wasn’t sure if people would remember me, but they’ve been so lovely and welcoming and there are still lots of familiar faces,” Di Natale said.

“In fact I saw the father today of a young boy I diagnosed with renal failure when he was about 10 who ended up on dialysis.” After Di Natale moved to Melbourne, he and his wife Lucy took the boy into their home while he underwent treatment, and showed him around Melbourne, including taking him on a trip to the MCG.

“I was relieved to hear he is doing well.”

Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation practice nurse manager, Tandeo Sakala, has been working in the community for about six months and said the healthcare needs of the people in Tennant Creek were not dissimilar to the people of Zambia in Africa, where he grew up.

“In some ways, working here makes me feel at home,” Sakala, who before moving to the Northern Territory worked in Mount Isa in Queensland, said.

“We share aspects of our culture and beliefs, like the whole extended family helping to raise children, but we share disease patterns as well. It is challenging, but it is a challenge that I am happy to take on, and I look forward to coming to work every day.

“Sometimes you just feel that so much of the disease here is preventable and so I have a real sense of responsibility to help, and to treat every person as an individual requiring unique care.”

Sakala said chronic diseases like diabetes and infectious, cardiac, and renal diseases were common in Tennant Creek.

“The challenge is we are dealing with a migrating population, which can make it hard to provide continuity or care and follow-up,” he said.

“We try to go around the community to get understanding of where people have moved to and we make sure to put patients on the record so we can trace and track them and work in close proximity with their families.”



It was essential that Aboriginal-led community organisations, health clinics, community workers, and hospitals in surrounding towns and cities worked together, he said.

“We must work in cooperation because that is how you make an impact.”