Silence--not so golden?

In remote Australia, when the dust settles after a windstorm, nothing remains the same--everything becomes coated with the dust that penetrates all crevices and surfaces of life. So it is with remote area nursing--from the early 1980s until today, remote area nurse voices have stirred up the winds of change. This followed over almost two centuries of silence. Token support came from local community leaders and health ministers to strengthen remote area nursing voices. But why has it taken almost two centuries? This paper represents the results of my interaction with the public discourses of Australian nurses during the nineteenth century (when there were barely any nurses at all) and with remote area nurses of the twentieth century. This led to the development of a model to explore the process of agency and breaking silence. It became evident that within the ranks of nursing itself, a process of downward closure was enacted. A strategy of dual closure was enacted by nurses against their own colleagues at an intra-occupational level and was operationalised by legalistic (State registrations) and credentialist (exercising control over content and standards) tactics.