Remote Town Wants Doctor, Offering $428K, Free Rent, and Car Allowance

A remote town in the Australian outback is looking for a doctor. To sweeten the deal, the town is offering a generous salary, rent-free accommodation, and a car allowance.

The catch? You’d be the only doctor in an isolated town that is a 19-hour drive from the nearest major city — Brisbane.

The North West Hospital and Health Service is advertising for a senior medical officer in Julia Creek, Queensland, an outback town of about 550 people.

The job listing shows that the role would offer an annual salary of up to $680,277 in Australian currency, or about $428,000. That’s almost seven times the average Australian salary.

The position also includes rent-free accommodation, a motor vehicle allowance, and 3.6 weeks of annual professional development leave.

“Your primary role will be as the sole doctor providing clinical care for the community,” the listing said. This would include seeing patients in primary care clinics, on the ward, and in retirement homes.

It listed one of the perks as “no traffic jams or long commute here.”

While there may be no long commutes, the town is far from urban life and its conveniences. It’s so isolated that most high-school students there need to go to boarding schools.

The nearest small cities are Mount Isa, about a three-hour drive away, and Townsville City, which takes more than eight hours to drive to.

Brisbane, the third-most populous city in Australia, is over 1,000 miles away, or a 19-hour drive.

Back in 2022, Julia Creek put out a hiring call to fill the role. The listing went viral and attracted applicants from all over the world, with a doctor from Brisbane eventually chosen to fill the role.

He’s now leaving.

Australia is facing a growing shortage of general practitioners, with the government estimating a shortfall of thousands by 2048.

The situation is particularly bad in rural and remote areas, the country’s Department of Health and Aged Care said in an August 2024 report.

As a result, some isolated towns are offering highly competitive packages to entice doctors to leave major cities.

In 2023, the Shire of Quairading, about two hours east of Perth, which is considered one of the world’s most isolated major cities, offered a salary equivalent to $189,000 along with a four-bedroom home.

The General Practice Registrars Australia said that rural areas typically offer much higher salaries, along with incentives like housing and relocation payments, to address difficulties in attracting medical professionals.