Walwa vet David Hall wins NT business award for Tennant Creek clinic

Dr Hall, who has run a thriving animal clinic in Walwa since 1991, 10 years ago leapt at the chance to open another clinic in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.

He now runs both businesses, although his NT venture is operated remotely except for the three times a year he travels up north to visit his staff.

He tends to an assortment of animals at home, from livestock breeding, to cats, dogs and guinea pigs, but the NT practice presents more unusual calls for help.

While a lot of his patients in the territory are camp dogs and pet cats, he also gets a wide range of animals injured on roads including kangaroos and goannas.

The far north business, however, is a daily source of satisfaction and Dr Hall was rewarded for his efforts when he received a gong at the NT Excellence in Business Awards three weeks ago.

Dr Hall said an "email out of the blue" sparked his interest in branching out to the NT.

"About 10 years ago an email came around, it was from the environmental health officer up there in Barkly, to set up an operation in Tennant Creek," he said.

"It was essentially asking for interest from anybody who wanted to set up a clinic up there and they could service the remote community on a contract with the council."

Dr Hall said, at the time Tennant Creek "was only a name to me, I'd never been there".

His only experience with the territory was passing through Darwin when he was occasionally working on a voluntary basis as a vet in East Timor.

"When I got that email I thought, well, that's a novelty ... hmm, Tennant Creek," he said.

"That place is 500 kilometres from Alice Springs, 700 kilometres from Katherine, 700 kilometres from Mount Isa, it's in the middle of nowhere.

"Before I set up there, if people needed to get their animal to a vet they would have to travel those vast distances."

Dr Hall said he mostly runs his clinic through locums.

"Which makes it incredibly difficult," he said. "It's hard enough to find a vet going anywhere, let alone Tennant Creek.

"This is in the bush, you're not in the middle of Perth or somewhere. We have X-ray, we've got a blood-analysing machine, all of that, but there's no referral - if you can't fix it, there's nobody who's going to fix it.

"This isn't the city, you might have a broken leg or something and I don't like putting hardware in camp dogs because they never look after them.

"But sometimes it's appropriate - young dogs would be happier with four legs than three probably, but if it doesn't work out, chop the leg off, it's that simple."

Dr Hall said he employed Indigenous people as both administrative assistants and as vet nurses.

"I want Indigenous employees in order to engage with the community, I would say probably half of our clients in town would be Indigenous," he said.

Dr Hall previously worked in Corryong, Benalla, Myrtleford, Melbourne and the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula before he spotted the opportunity in the NT.

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