I swapped the big city for a tiny community in the middle of nowhere. Rent is $60 a month – but the supermarket is a 5-hour round trip.

Sally Millar moved from Sydney to the outback and loves her new lifestyle.

Sally Millar

Sally Millar swapped the big city grind in Sydney, Australia for life in a tiny remote community. She now pays about $60 a month in rent and makes more money than she did in the city.But living a five-hour round trip from the nearest supermarket has its drawbacks.  

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Sally Millar about her experience moving from her city life to a remote corner of the Australian outback. The following account has been edited for length and clarity.

I’d been living in a tiny, one-bedroom flat in a busy suburb of Sydney for 10 years. I was just like anybody else, reasonably comfortable but working hard to pay my rent working in children’s entertainment.

When Covid hit my partner and I had been about to go on a big road trip across the Americas. We’d just given up our apartment, so had moved into his parents’ house.

But in the midst of a Covid meltdown, we decided to just travel around Australia instead and bought a van for 17,000 Australian dollars (about $9,000).

After eight months of DIY experiments, which included cutting a square in the roof for a fan – don’t ask! – we set off for a trip around Australia. But we never came back.

Now I live in the East Kimberley area of Western Australia in a tiny community of 50 people that’s two and a half hours away from the nearest town.

I make more now than I did in the city

This is the first time either of us had ever been somewhere like this, but we both found work in a local school and everyone’s been very welcoming. They really struggle in remote places to retain staff, so most schools offer an extra 10,000 Australian dollars (about $6,000), plus a retention bonus of as much as 25,000 Australian dollars.

I also get a remote living bonus of about 350 Australian dollars a fortnight to cover the criminally high cost of fuel up here – it’s about 50% more expensive than in Sydney.

The housing is also provided by my school, so my rent and bills are now just 100 Australian dollars a month. Compared to what we were paying in Sydney, it’s peanuts.

My life in Sydney was all about the hustle and grind. I was always working, always sitting in traffic. Now I walk to work in two minutes and when I finish I’m home again in the same time. It’s made me more relaxed and calm.

Sally Millar now spends her weekends exploring with friends.

Sally Millar

Here, we’re part of a community and we all hang out. I didn’t really have that before, but just having people close by that I can see every day is incredible. The kids come here in the afternoons and just want to say hello and play hide and seek. It’s very wholesome.

I only get to buy groceries once a month

We look like we’re prepping for an apocalypse when we go to get our groceries. With the nearest supermarket a five-hour round trip away, we have to stock up.

When it’s the dry season the population of Kununurra, the nearest town with a supermarket, almost quadruples due to tourism. Sometimes you’ll go to the store and there’s almost no food.

Sally Millar’s nearest town with a supermarket is Kununurra in Western Australia.

Google Maps

I’ve also had to learn to live with the snakes. Last week, in my school I was sorting out a box in the school shed and I accidentally picked up a baby brown snake, which has the second most toxic venom in the world. The kangaroos are cute though.

Rural communities get left out

Our tap water is really high in calcium, and we’ve been trying to get the authorities to supply new water filters for everybody’s house. It took months and months to get somebody out here to check it out, only to have them say “nah, it seems fine.”

For most people here that’s just how it is when you live in such an isolated place. Your needs get forgotten about when you’re just so far away from everyone else.

The community where Sally lives is a long drive from the nearest major town.

Sally Millar

We do have a board of directors made up of senior members of the community who lead decisions on housing and fixing the community. And the bins get collected and post arrives just like anywhere else.

But one of the biggest challenges is definitely access to medical care. There’s no specialist care so if something serious happens you have to take about four days off work to travel to and from Perth, thousands of miles away. It’s a major problem for people who need dialysis.

There are cultural differences that I should have been more aware of

Coming from Sydney, I wish I’d done a little more cultural awareness training before I’d come here.

To be honest, I didn’t really realise that there were places in Australia where whole groups of people have English as a second language. But in my school, 100% of the kids are from indigenous backgrounds. They’re bush kids, so they’re used to being outdoors and running around.

It was a bit naive of me and I think it would have been really helpful to have done more training to better understand some of the behaviors in class. Now I know that when they’re being a bit crazy they’re just feeling trapped.