As part of our summer series, we’re highlighting nurses and midwives who featured in the Five of My Life podcast series in 2024.
A collaboration with the ANMF, podcaster Nigel Marsh talks with rural Victorian RN Katy Condliffe about her life and career, including as a Board member for NGO World Youth International.
From the earliest moment she can remember, Katy knew she wanted to be a nurse. “There was a passion inside me to care for other people. And from a young age I could see that nursing was an obvious way to get that. The more I looked into it, the more I thought, ‘yes, this is for me’.”
The true essence of nursing, she says, is doing every task no matter what it is, with love and passion. “When I was an early graduate, I was helping one of my clients change her sheets after she had a baby, and she said: ‘I don’t think you should be changing the sheets. You went to uni for four years, you did a degree, you just helped me give birth to my baby’.
“But for me while I’m changing her sheets, I’m providing her quality and comfort. I’m talking to her about her baby. All the incidentals happen through conversations.”
Family
Katy lives in Kyneton, just over an hour’s drive from Melbourne in Central Victoria, with a population of about 6,000. “We moved here when I was about eight or nine and it’s a beautiful town.”
She is the youngest of four girls, both parents were in the army and the family moved around from country Victoria, Western Australia in Indigenous communities, to Sydney, NSW.
“We moved around a lot in the true army sense. We were away from our extended family and that made us bond as a family because we only had each other. My sisters are my three best friends.”
Despite the siblings moving away to travel and work as they got older, they all returned to Kyneton where they’ve been able to raise their families together.
“It’s been a true blessing. I live in a house with one of my sisters and her kids. With my husband doing the fly in and fly out work, my family steps in. Mum and dad are down the road and the other two sisters with their kids are not too far away.”
Katy met her husband in Papua New Guinea while he was working as a resident doctor in the labour ward, and she was working as a midwife.
“We both have a passion for women’s health and children’s health. We lived there for three years, and I worked helping set up a domestic violence child abuse centre while he worked as an obstetrician.
“I was able to follow him to his family, up in Guinea. They’re all about family and their tribe and their community. Papua Guinea don’t have orphanages. If a child loses their parents, someone else takes them on. There’s no such thing as no one having a family. Everyone’s got a family and that’s central to life there.
“They taught me to value that. I found that in my own life, my family and friends are everything to me and they’ve definitely given me the strength and power to move through life, keep me grounded and keep me inspired.”
World Youth International: Kenya changed my life
In 2006, when in her 20s, Katy volunteered with Adelaide-based NGO World Youth International who assist volunteers to go abroad to work in Kenya, Nepal and Uganda.
“I’d been a nurse and a midwife already for a few years. I wanted a little step away from nursing, to have a little break and just travel in Africa and Kenya. I did a lot of travelling and then did 10 weeks volunteering. I mostly did community development work, which was incredible; we lived in the community, we fetched water from the lake and there was no electricity.”
Katy’s second visit was in an all-nursing volunteer program working in hospitals and during her last visit in 2013, she was part of a team that helped create a nurse-led program for positive change in communities.
“When you come back you debrief because there’s a lot of changes that happen to you when you step into those third-world countries and do that sort of work.
“Sad things happen there that we don’t accept here: far more babies die; people are living with cancer and not getting treatment; there’s a whole generation of children that don’t have their parents because of HIV and AIDS.
“I’ve definitely seen a lot of pain in those countries and learnt about limitations on how much we can do to help people. And that is something that I’m still getting my head around years later; the difference between our lives and their lives.”
Katy says the experience brings so many life skills and perspective. “The NGO are all about developing us, the people that we want to be. They taught me confidence, they taught me leadership, they helped me to being empowered. They helped me connect to my values. It put my life on a different track and helped me find the person I wanted to be. It changed my life going to Kenya.”
Coming home from overseas, you can feel powerless to help make a difference, she says. “You can get stuck living in your own community and forget how privileged we are and how much we have going for us. Travel not only helps you see the world, but it also helps you find yourself.
“To do small things in your own life with your own family or work to support people abroad from home. There’s so much you can do; it’s finding the right path that brings you joy as well as what makes a difference.”
