Regional veterinarians tend to our family pets, our production livestock, our native fauna and our exotic animals, and in doing so, protect our biosecurity and contribute to better human health.
Story + Photos Mandy McKeesick
Dr Ameliah Scott touches her Piper Cherokee Arrow down onto the dirt airstrip of her station home, 80km south-east of White Cliffs in far western NSW. She has spent the day pregnancy-testing cattle on a station the other side of Wilcannia and as she steps from the plane, she is handed her 3-month-old daughter Winona.
Ameliah breastfeeds as she answers a ringing phone and provides first-aid advice for a dog in Packsaddle.
With the day nearly done she walks through the front door of her home, perched above an inland lake, and is met by the excited wails of 2 more children, 3-year-old Lindsay and 2-year-old Bobby. Her husband Brendan Leyden and her father Blue Scott rise from the kitchen table to greet her and to inform her they are a worker short for tomorrow, when mustering of their dorper sheep, across nearly 50,000ha, begins.
This chaos might cause a meltdown in a normal person but not in this woman, born to this land of red dirt and dust and channelling 4 generations of farmers before her; a woman who studied veterinarian medicine for 6 years, who cut her professional teeth in small animal and dairy practice in Victoria and on equine properties in New Zealand before returning to her land and her people to start her own vet business in 2019.
“I’m the only vet – I’m it – for a 300km radius,” Ameliah says of her 200,000sq km service area from Cameron Corner to Pooncarie, from Broken Hill to Louth. “Some days I wish I could clone myself, but I’m a sole trader with a mobile practice and a niche clientele. I get satisfaction in improving humane animal practices, providing access to medication and working with the people out here, though the logistics of getting drugs in and samples out in a timely manner or getting cold freight is extremely challenging.”
Ameliah offers her clients, 80% of whom are on isolated stations, a multitude of veterinarian services: radiography, ultrasonography, equine dentistry, ovine brucellosis testing and, when required, emergency anaesthesia and surgery. Though she often flies, one week each month Ameliah packs her 4WD and does a 3,500km run through western NSW, stopping at different towns each day.
“If you were going to build a vet, it would be Ameliah,” Fiona Lander of Marra station near Tilpa says. “She’s incredibly practical and flexible in her thinking and knows what is achievable out here because she runs a property herself."
Seventy per cent of our vets work in clinical practice with others employed by government, industry, pharmaceutical companies and academia. While Ameliah works with production and companion animals, vets can work across a diverse spectrum.
Listen to our interview with James Walker, who bought Longreach vets, on the OUTBACK podcast.
This story excerpt is from Issue #161
Outback Magazine: June/July 2025
