Michele Browne is a doctor, wife, mother, grandmother and mentor. She has worked in general medical practice for four decades, since graduating in Medicine at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 1981. Following this, she and her husband Michael (also a GP) lived and worked in Canberra and, more recently, in the beautiful Shoalhaven region, where they currently work in a large group practice.
Beyond the Reef, her first book, is a memoir of the two-year volunteer service that Michele and Michael completed in 1988-89 while accompanied by their two very young children.
Have you ever wished you could go to a remote and dangerously distant island for a change of scene? Well – we did it!
Yep – we packed up our kids and went to a tiny Pacific island for two years in the late eighties, living and working with the 2000+ locals, with only twenty westerners in the mix.
Our job was to keep them all alive! Being doctors with scarce and archaic resources, only one colleague to share the work with, and airlifting patients on commercial flights to get them to surgical care – it was scary and enthralling stuff.
Mingling with the Cook Islanders was a steep learning curve of cross-cultural communications: sometimes we were mind-bendingly frustrated, and other times, so impressed by their awesome skills and psyches – the highs and lows were fickle and abrupt.
Our adventures were harrowing and hilarious – and ended on a tragic note late in our stay.
Immerse yourself in the adventures of living the dream (and sometimes the nightmare) of a volunteer sojourn beyond the reef…
