Meet the Frontier! Editorial Team

Bridget Marshall

Throughout the six years of my UNSW medical degree, I have spent 50% of the time in Port Macquarie, at one of the five rural campuses my university has to offer. I have gained so much experience doing my clinical placements in a smaller hospital – a place where everyone knows each other, and every set of hands is needed.

Having grown up in the country and now having studied in a rural area, I am passionate about sharing with others the wonderful life people can lead living and working in the country. I have always enjoyed art and writing as hobbies outside of medicine, and so I saw being a member of the Frontier team as a way to engage in my hobbies whilst simultaneously promoting the rural lifestyle that I love. It has been wonderful working with the team to produce two excellent editions of Frontier!

Having constantly moved around Australia during my childhood, the decision for my family to have eventually settled in Wagga Wagga said it all: there’s nothing quite like country life! However, of course, the challenges of being rural become all the more evident when it comes to healthcare, as I saw the list of issues from our public health lectures have very real impacts upon my own family, friends and community – it impressed on me the importance and the privilege of becoming a doctor and an advocate in this tight knit community. Being an avid consumer of Frontier! myself, it was inspiring to read the stories from the people facing those very issues head on, while also portraying the overlooked raw beauty of rural medicine, especially from our own student community. The opportunity to join the editing team for Frontier!, to celebrate the mix of science and humanity in a rural context with this amazing team of authors and editors, was one I couldn’t possibly forgo. I hope you find something inspiring within these pages too, just as I have! Nipuni Hapangama

While I’ve lived most of my life in metropolitan areas, from the UK to Melbourne, I’ve always been interested in the different social dimensions that affect access to healthcare. I think, in order to be good clinicians, we should strive to both educate ourselves on the different barriers to healthcare that people experience, and to advocate for effective, equitable, and universal access to that healthcare.

I applied to help edit and format Frontier! to learn more about both the access issues present in rural medicine, but also the more overlooked richness and variety of experiences in rural medicine. The privilege of helping with Frontier! has certainly opened my eyes to the opportunities rural medicine presents, and I hope reading these editions will do the same for others.

Amani Azlan

Born in Malaysia, I moved to Perth in 2018. As if Perth wasn’t far enough from home, I came up to Townsville to study at JCU. After accepting the fact that I might not get Krispy Kreme or good boba for a few months, I started opening my eyes to the beauty of living in a remote community. It was such a nice change from the hectic city, to be honest. You never know what you can discover here in North Queensland!

Just remember that, ‘Life is what you make it to be.’ So I joined the awesome Frontier! Editorial Team to perhaps change your views on rural health.

Last year, I was based in Wagga for my third-year placement. Out there — especially in the year that was — I felt keenly the disconnect between the metropolitan-based faculty and our rural cohort.

More broadly, I also gained a sense of the all-toopervasive neglect that faces our country towns. Despite occasional outpourings, there’s little sustained sympathy for apple-growers in Bago post-fireseason; farmers in Coolamon during the drought, or Windsor rebuilding after the flood.

I applied to edit Frontier! with the hope that, in a small way, I could contribute to that conversation. So, thank-you for taking the time to read our work, and this journal. I hope you found some benefit from doing so. Will Choy