Former Home and Away and RFDS star Steve Peacocke on his ‘dream’ job and the task he embraced before starting a family

 The former Home and Away star gets candid about the lifestyle he loves the most as he prepares for a return to TV screens.

It was a full circle experience for actor Steve Peacocke to film RFDS in a rural area of Australia.

It implied going back to the carefree way of life he most values.

Steve, who is originally from Dubbo in rural NSW and has a child with wife Bridgette Sneddon, shot the upcoming Channel 7 show in Broken Hill so that his family could share a similar experience away from the bustle of the big metropolis.

On Tuesday night, RFDS, which follows the lives of medical professionals working for the Royal Flying Doctors Service stationed in Broken Hill, 13 hours west of Sydney, will return to Channel 7 for season two.

After becoming a father, Peacocke, 41, who is well recognized for his work on Home and Away, reprises his role as Nurse Pete Emerson.

Any parent could consider the value of taking a first aid course after spending time in the RFDS environment, and for Steve and Bridgette, it was a crucial duty they finished before their baby entered the picture.

The actor tells 7Life, “You do all those first aid courses, we did one before we started a family.”

“I believe that it is important to know for sure. I believe figuring out the fundamentals doesn’t take long.

The actor jokes that he is “happy to park (his first aid experience) and let people who know what the hell they’re doing do it” as he laughs at all the medical emergencies that his character Pete has encountered this season.

Steve’s “dream job” was to bring his family back to rural Australia.

When I grew up in Dubbo, it was about 20,000 people, which is probably not far from what Broken Hill is now but Broken Hill is just so isolated from the East Coast,” he says.

“So you feel like you’re more in the proper bush out there, it’s great.

“If I could live in the bush and then travel to the city when I had to, I’d do that.

“So to be able to do a job, acting is the greatest fun for me to do, to be able to do that in the outback with all these types of people that I have grown up with is an absolute treat.”

Despite having a young family, Steve says that the adjustment was simple, with the new parents being seasoned travellers and used to relocating worldwide.

We’ve traveled to some fantastic areas internationally with business that we would probably have never been to, he says. “To get to go and live somewhere new and explore a whole new region.”

Steve names London, New Mexico, Spain, and Budapest from the extensive list.

The actor explains that although he has spent the last fifteen years traveling, he “didn’t really travel until I was 28”.

“I was working, but I just had no money.”

I finished uni and then basically became a labourer for a decade until I was lucky enough to land the Home and Away role,” he explains.

“I just had no money to travel, all my mates were travelling and I was sort of at home trying to keep the electricity on.

“Then I got this job that has sort of taken us all over the place… we’re pretty lucky.”

Back in Broken Hill after the major success of season one in 2021, Steve says that this time round the show has “a different look and feel”.

For eight episodes, my character in particular had a fairly tough time… I found it to be a pretty exciting experience, even if it was really exhausting to play,” he says.

Steve claims that in order to help him get ready for the work once more, he consulted RFDS members whose accounts served as the inspiration for the TV scripts.

Steve noted two members of the RFDS staff: Dr. Tim Duncan and Andrew, a flight nurse. He said that they were there “to guide us through stuff, and I probably annoyed them with how many questions I was asking, just because I was curious.

However, some of the material they have seen is simply absurd, absurd, absurd, and absurdly unbelievable.

“They’ve seen everything,”

The actor expresses his astonishment at the nurses’ and physicians’ ability to “rock up to someone’s worst day of their life and their heart rate stays completely calm.”

In spite of the dire situation, they are able to rescue lives and make decisions by simply ignoring the catastrophe’s background noise.

“And as you well know, all medical professionals are remarkable.

“What these people can do out here in the middle of nowhere with dust and flies and whatever else they’ve got to deal with is extraordinary.”