Remote Australia Online

Background Conducting effective and culturally sensitive dog health education programs in Aboriginal communities requires an understanding of appropriate adult education and community development principles. Finding relevant material can be difficult, given that many of the available resources are in the ‘grey literature’. Aims and objectives To critically review publications addressing the principles governing dog health education in remote Aboriginal communities. Methods A critical review was performed by searching English language peer-reviewed and grey literature databases for papers published between 2010 and 2018. Besides a small number of peer-reviewed papers, there was an extensive list of reports, educational material, guidelines and posters and pamphlets that illustrated the principles. Only a small amount of this grey literature was selected for the review. Selection was based on the publication illustrating a specific principle of dog health education. The material was organised around educational themes highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these publications. Results Findings suggested that although relevant literature is scattered, there are clear processes for conducting culturally appropriate and effective dog health programs in Australian Indigenous communities. Two major principles were identified: acknowledging the effect on education of the ambiguity around the status of dogs in Aboriginal communities, and embedding programs within a social determinant of health framework or community development approach. These two principles provide guidance on negotiating educational sessions, the preparation of culturally appropriate materials, teaching sessions and what learning styles to foster and the use of a health promotion approach. Conclusions Some contradictions exist within the literature, particularly around the use of images, and consistent with the first principle, a hesitancy to engage with Aboriginal people around the issue of dog health.

INTRODUCTION: Providing an emphasis on Indigenous health in medical undergraduate education is seen as a high priority by Australian medical organisations. A regional North Queensland medical school asked local Indigenous people to list personal attributes they want to see in graduate doctors who choose to practise in their remote community. METHODS: This 2011 pilot study used a participatory action research design, with 13 local Indigenous health professionals, elders and community members from Mount Isa participating as co-researchers in 'Yarning Circles' discussing desired medical graduate attributes. Medical school co-researchers inductively extracted themes from the discussions via a qualitative 'grounded theory' approach. RESULTS: Eight major subtopics were identified by the Mount Isa Indigenous community around desired skills, knowledge and attitudes for graduate doctors: provision of quality patient care; culturally appropriate communication; medical knowledge; culturally appropriate knowledge; knowing the local health system; a positive personality; a positive attitude to working with Indigenous peoples; and a desire to engage with the Indigenous community. DISCUSSION: Effective communications with Indigenous patients and working in remote Indigenous communities requires doctors to have appropriate clinical skills, medical knowledge, knowledge about how local health systems operate, familiarity with significant Indigenous health issues such as child safety and alcohol management, and positive attitudes to working with, learning about and providing an advocacy role for Indigenous peoples. CONCLUSIONS: Findings have implications for enhancing the professional behaviours and engagement of James Cook University medical students in Indigenous communities while on rural placement and after graduation, and for Australian medical and health practitioners more broadly.

Over a two-year period, six leading independent artists - both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal - were invited by six Aboriginal art centres to collaborate in producing a significant body of work. The selected artists travelled enormous distances to regional and often remote Aboriginal communities across Australia where they stayed for extended periods of time.

This research aimed to identify systemic housing-level contributions to infectious disease transmission for Indigenous Australians, in response to the Government program to ‘close the gap’ of health and other inequalities. A narrative literature review was performed in accordance to PRISMA guidelines. The findings revealed a lack of housing maintenance was associated with gastrointestinal infections, and skin-related diseases were associated with crowding. Diarrhoea was associated with the state of food preparation and storage areas, and viral conditions such as influenza were associated with crowding. Gastrointestinal, skin, ear, eye, and respiratory illnesses are related in various ways to health hardware functionality, removal and treatment of sewage, crowding, presence of pests and vermin, and the growth of mould and mildew. The research concluded that infectious disease transmission can be reduced by improving housing conditions, including adequate and timely housing repair and maintenance, and the enabling environment to perform healthy behaviours.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal people in remote Australia took decisive steps to decentralize from government settlements and missions to live and make a living on their ancestral lands at places that have become known as homelands. Over time, this migration garnered some state support and saw the emergence of new facilitating institutions. But in the last decade homeland living has been discursively demeaned by politicians, and policies have been put in place to undermine the possibility of residing and making a livelihood in these smallest, most remote places mainly located on Indigenous-titled lands. As Indigenous territorial rights expand, the state looks to extinguish possibilities for current and future generations to utilize the land and its resources for livelihood. In this article, I draw on evidence from political discourse, policy documents and programme design and implementation to outline this state project to eliminate a contemporary lifeway. I provide ethnographic evidence from work with Kuninjku people in Arnhem Land that documents this destruction. I engage with the work of Raphael Lemkin to document and theorize the techniques being deployed in terms of the logic of cultural genocide. I end by asking what homelands people might do to push back and what role anthropologists might play in such a process.

The poor health of Indigenous Australians is well established. However, the health of residents of one remote community in the Northern Territory of Australia called Utopia has been found recently to be much better than expected. In this article, we draw on historical anthropological research to explain this finding. We trace how cultural and social structures were maintained through changing eras of government policy from the 1930s, and show how these structures strengthened psychosocial determinants of health. We argue that the mainstream psychosocial determinants of social cohesion and self-efficacy are usefully reconceptualized in an Indigenous context as connectedness to culture and land, and collective efficacy, respectively. Continuity of cultural and social structures into the 1940s was facilitated by a combination of factors including the relatively late colonial occupation, the intercultural practices typical of the pastoral industry, the absence of a mission or government settlement, and the individual personalities and histories of those connected to Utopia.

Australia's current robust macro-economic condition, at least relative to that of many comparator nations within Europe and the USA, is built largely on the nation's particular insertion into the global economy as an abundant and reliable source of mineral and energy resources. Within Australia, though, public concern is mounting over the many direct and indirect economic, environmental and social effects of mineral and energy resource extraction and processing. Resource peripheries like the Pilbara have been characterised as ?slippery spaces? where capital, commodities and labour rapidly flow in, and all too frequently out, of these remote regions, with the surplus from local extraction and processing captured by the ?sticky places??the metropolitan cores host to the national and multinational mining and energy corporations (Hayter 2003). Drawing on insights from Innis' staples theory and geographical political economy, this paper focuses on two of these closely connected concerns. First, it briefly explores the attempts to establish a redistributive mechanism with which to equitably allocate the benefits of the boom in a federal polity in which socio-spatial inequity is still regarded as a substantial public policy concern. Second, shifting the focus to the regional and local scales of the Pilbara and its scattered towns, the paper critically explores the ?Pilbara Cities? initiative, funded by the ?Royalties for Regions? scheme, querying whether or not this ambitious plan can create the conditions for the development of functionally complex local and regional economies.

The genus Triodia R.Br. is currently undergoing taxonomic revision in the light of intensive botanical survey in remote Australia and molecular phylogenetic data. Several Triodia species have been known by phrase names in Western Australia for about 20 years. This paper deals with two of these names, Triodia sp. Mt Ella (M.E. Trudgen 12739) and T . sp. Robe River (M.E. Trudgen et al. MET 12367), that were first recognised as distinct taxa by one of us. Both species are ‘soft’ spinifexes with awned lemmas, and are known only from the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Triodia sp. Robe River is formally described as T. pisoliticola Trudgen & M.D.Barrett. This species is restricted to the western part of the Pilbara bioregion and has flowers morphologically similar to T. melvillei (C.E.Hubb.) Lazarides. Triodia sp. Mt Ella has floral parts morphologically similar to T. bitextura Lazarides; a full description of this entity is given, but it is not formally named pending further revision of the T. bitextura complex across northern Australia. Both taxa are currently given a conservation ranking of Priority Three. Both taxa are illustrated, and diagnostic character combinations are given to allow discrimination from all other Pilbara Triodia species.

The Audit of Disability Research in Australia (hereafter the Audit) identified research about people with disabilities, including psychosocial disability, and their families and carers living in Australia. The Audit covered both scientific and grey literature published in Australia between the years 2000?2013. Because the National Disability Research and Development Agenda (Disability Policy and Research Working Group, 2011) identified four cohorts that experience particular disadvantage, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, women with disabilities, those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and those living in rural and remote Australia, the Audit included a search based on geography. This paper reports on studies identified in the Audit that address disability and mental illness in the rural and remote context. In the literature unclear and overlapping definitions of mental illness and psychosocial disability were considerable challenges for the reviewers and these difficulties may potentially impact on how psychosocial disability is conceptualised. Of particular concern is the scant research that reflects the experiences of, and issues faced by, people living with disability and mental illness in rural and remote Australia.

In this article, I examine an Aboriginal ritual object, the secret/sacred tywerrenge which in many respects lies at the heart of Central Australian Aboriginal religious belief. Given its ritual power, the tywerrenge has always held a special place in the administrative rationalities of both colonial and post-colonial authorities. For certain missionaries, the tywerrenge was seen as an object to be eliminated as it constituted an impediment to Aboriginal ?salvation?. For early anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, they offered material evidence supporting social evolutionist theories regarding the ?staged? transformation of ?primitive? religious beliefs into science. More recently, tywerrenge have been subject to an intensive regime of inspection and evaluation by government authorities, museums, and land councils. Indeed, they have come to play a significant role in the enforcement of Australian law under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act since the possession of a tywerrenge can decide the ownership of traditional lands. In short, these religious objects?and the beliefs associated with them?have been co-opted and employed by a variety of authorities in order to achieve a range of governmental ends. In this sense, tywerrenge have been transformed into instruments of colonial and post-colonial rule.

Review question: The question of this review is: Which locations in Australia have chronic disease programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adult populations in the primary healthcare context been evaluated? Specific objectives are to: Determine geographically where chronic disease programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations have been evaluated in the Australian primary healthcare context.Scope the involvement of Aboriginal Community-Controlled Health Organizations and/or other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organizations in the included literature.Scope the various ethical frameworks and/or protocols in the included literature.

Ethical research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is a complex and delicate space. It often juxtaposes Western views of ethical practice with Indigenous worldviews and values. The lead author’s doctoral research project has focused on the expectations, experiences and outcomes of boarding school for remote Aboriginal students, families and communities. This paper presents a thematic analysis of the reflections of the authors on working together on this research as a non-Indigenous researcher and an Aboriginal Community Researcher. Strategies to implement what the authors and literature describe as ethical practice in remote Aboriginal communities are discussed. Implications for future research and lessons learned through this experience are identified.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often touted as the solution to social and environmental ills associated with Australia?s mining boom. This paper extends prior research concerning mining?s social impacts and related CSR programmes by investigating the emergence of new institutional arrangements in pre-existing rural communities which are now dominated by the mining industry. The paper finds that major Australian mining companies? increasingly decentralised management approaches to CSR policies and programming lead to crucial and sometimes troubling implementation gaps between the intentions of corporate headquarter level policies and their carrying out at the community level. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for remote communities in relation to how mining companies? CSR programmes are currently implemented. The discussion offers suggestions for improving long term outcomes for remote communities through better targetted CSR programs.

Indigenous children in Australia’s Northern Territory are densely colonised with the pneumococcus within weeks of birth antecedent to a high prevalence of acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI). We assessed the impact of the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (23vPPV) in pregnancy against infant ALRI in this setting.

Background Alcohol-related harm is a significant health and social issue for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Primary healthcare can play a part in preventing these harms. Objective The aim of this paper is to describe three domains for action in preventing alcohol-related harm in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: addressing the social and economic determinants of health; supporting population-level action on alcohol availability; and providing culturally safe treatment for individual clients. Discussion General practice has a role in treating and preventing illness both on an individual and at a population level. In preventing alcohol-related harm in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, this dual role may include screening and brief interventions; referral pathways and access to multidisciplinary care; cultural safety; support for action on alcohol availability; advocacy on the social and economic determinants of health; reorienting general practice towards population health; and support for Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services.

Introduction: Access to speech-language pathology services for children in rural and remote communities is often limited. Telehealth is increasingly used to provide these services to schools, demonstrating high satisfaction with both service providers and recipients, but the requirements for successful program implementation are as yet unclear. We aimed to explore the implementation requirements for a telehealth speech-language pathology service for children from the perspective of a rural school. Methods: A qualitative approach, supplemented by program activity data, was used to understand the experiences and perceptions of the benefits, limitations, enablers and barriers of a telehealth speech-language pathology program delivered to a school servicing approximately 400 children in a small rural town in the state of Queensland, Australia. Thematic analysis was conducted of transcripts of individual semi-structured interviews with nine school teaching staff and field notes of informal discussions regarding 85 speech-language pathology telehealth sessions (n = 9 children) during program establishment and implementation. Results: The speech-language pathology telehealth service was acceptable to teaching staff at the rural school, who cited improved access, the suitability of the technology for child engagement, and perceived effectiveness. Implementation issues were highlighted as critical to program success and scalability, particularly staff workload, technological issues, communication processes, and sustainability. Conclusion: School-based speech-language pathology services delivered via telehealth were perceived as a suitable way of increasing access for children by rural school staff. Future implementations of telehealth speech-language pathology programs should prospectively consider workload implications and develop strategies to communicate with and involve school staff.

Poor diet including inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption is a major contributor to the global burden of disease. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians experience a disproportionate level of preventable chronic disease and successful strategies to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in remote areas to consume more fruit and vegetables can help address health disadvantage. Healthy Choice Rewards was a mixed methods study to investigate the feasibility of a monetary incentive: store vouchers, to promote fruit and vegetable purchasing in a remote Australian Aboriginal community. Multiple challenges were identified in implementation, including limited nutrition workforce. Challenges related to the community store included frequent store closures and amended trading times, staffing issues and poor infrastructure to support fruit and vegetable promotion. No statistically significant increases in fruit or vegetable purchases were observed in the short time frame of this study. Despite this, community members reported high acceptability of the program, especially for women with children. Optimal implementation including, sufficient time and funding resources, with consideration of the most vulnerable could go some way to addressing inequities in food affordability for remote community residents.

In May, I found myself locked in a room in Canberra, surrounded by suited bureaucrats, quietly buzzing about the room. It was Federal Budget night and I'd been invited to attend the 'lock-up'. I knew it had to be a positive sign but didn't want to count my chickens. The bureaucrats sat quietly beside me, mostly, to make sure I behaved (I'd threatened to put my undies on my head if I got good news).

Hybrid economy research in remote Indigenous Australia is what Gibson-Graham [2008. Diverse economies: performative practices for ?other worlds?. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613?632] describe as a performative ontological project. This research seeks to address the marginalisation of customary economic activities that contribute to the well-being of Indigenous Australians. It aims to make the customary sector more real, more credible and more viable as an object of policy and activism, challenging the dual dominance of the state and the market as the focus of development (cf. Gibson-Graham 2008). This paper outlines how hybrid economy research has sought to broaden views of the economic landscape in remote Indigenous Australia amid the withdrawal of key policy and programmatic support by the Australian Government. This research draws on Canadian national surveys of Indigenous peoples, harvest studies and programmatic support for customary harvest ? hunting, fishing and gathering of bush foods ? to identify ways in which the Australian Government might better see and support Indigenous community food economies.

This paper is set out as a conversation between three people, an Indigenous person and two non-Indigenous people, who have known and worked with each other for over 30 years. This work has involved them researching with communities in central Australia and the south west of Western Australia. The discussion concerns itself with ideas and practices that come from three conceptual traditions; English, Noongar and Pitjantjatjara to talk about how to build ngapartji ngapartji ("you give and I give in return", in Pitjantjatjara), karnya birit gnarl (respectful and kind ways of sweating/working with people, in Noongar), between marlpara ("colleagues", in Pitjantjatjara) and involving warlbirniny quop weirn (singing out to the old people, in Noongar).

The World Health Organization reports noncommunicable disease as a global pandemic. While national and international health research/policy bodies, such as the World Health Organization and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, emphasize the importance of preventative health, there is a continuing distortion in the allocation of resources to curative health as a result of government failure. Government failure is, in part, the result of a political response to individual preference for certainty in receiving treatment for specific health conditions, rather than the uncertainty of population-based preventative intervention. This has led to a failure to engage with those primary causative factors affecting chronic disease, namely the psychosocial stressors, in which the socioeconomic determinants are an important component. Such causal factors are open to manipulation through government policies and joint government-government, government-private cooperation through application of nonmedical primary-preventative health policies. The health benefits of Aboriginal people in traditional land management, or caring-for-country, in remote to very remote Australia, is used to exemplify the social benefits of nonmedical primary-preventative health intervention. Such practices form part of the “healthy country, health people” concept that is traditionally relied upon by Indigenous peoples. Possible health and wider private good and public good social benefits are shown to occur across multiple disciplines and jurisdictions with the possibility of substantial economies. General principles in the application of nonmedical primary-preventative health activities are developed through consideration of the experience of Afboriginal people participation in traditional caring-for-country.

In the UK, refused asylum seekers who are considered destitute are provided with subsistence-level financial support through the Azure card, a cashless technology similar to a debit card. In Australia, identical technology is used to quarantine fifty per cent of the welfare benefits of mainly Aboriginal residents of the Northern Territory. In this paper, I explore the underlying state logics driving such punitive financial policies directed at these populations, arguing that cashless technologies represent a form of slow violence that employs financial tactics to undermine the provision of care for populations with precarious citizenship status. This slow violence leads to increased precarity among asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians. Under the guise of ‘caring’ and ‘for their own good,’ these paternalistic financial tactics act as measures of intense control. Financial tactics enact new forms of border securitization, slowly but permanently excluding people with precarious claims to citizenship from participation in the nation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Rates of End-Stage Kidney Disease among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) Australians in remote areas are disproportionately high; however, haemodialysis is not currently offered in most remote areas. People must therefore leave their ‘Country’ (with its traditions and supports) and relocate to metropolitan or regional centres, disrupting their kinship and the cultural ties that are important for their wellbeing. The South Australian Mobile Dialysis Truck is a service which visits remote communities for one to two week periods; allowing patients to have dialysis on ‘Country’, reuniting them with their friends and family, and providing a chance to take part in cultural activities. The aims of the study were to qualitatively evaluate the South Australian Mobile Dialysis Truck program, its impact on the health and wellbeing of Indigenous dialysis patients, and the facilitators and barriers to using the service.

Ethnomusicology is a highly pragmatic discipline in Australia driven by an ethos of research engagement that seeks to deliver applied and relevant outcomes for the musicians and communities whose lives and cultures ethnomusicologists examine. In this article, I explain how this ethos has been informed by the chequered history of colonial engagements with Australia's Indigenous peoples, and how this, in turn, has shaped my own approaches to teaching collaboratively with Indigenous colleagues. I explore how, within this context, my own thinking as an ethnomusicologist was shaped by Indigenous conceptualisations of bi-culturalism such as those theorised by educator and musician Mandawuy Yunupinu, and how this influenced my collaborations with Indigenous colleagues in teaching the undergraduate course Garma Fieldwork at both the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. I show how this contribution as an ethnomusicologist was advantageous in challenging students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to think about the nature of knowledge, and the non-textual ways of expressing it that traditionally dominate within Indigenous epistemologies. Finally, I consider what insights this experience might hold for ethnomusicology amid this broad academic context.

The Alice Springs Town Camps are ongoing sites of Aboriginal community life, service delivery, and advocacy. As with other Town Camps throughout Australia’s Northern Territory, they are also the target of numerous program and policy reviews, as well as recurrent media attention that focuses on a variety of ills and rarely on community voices or experience. This paper works through three reports, contrasting community-based research by the authors that found the Camps are strongholds of community history, identity, and aspiration with the most recent review of the Northern Territory Camps undertaken for over $2m by a private consultancy that recommended the closure of the Camps. Between these two reports lies a third by the Public Accounts Committee of the Northern Territory Government that found serious errors in the contracting process for housing service delivery on the Camps; errors that had come at the expense of community-based service providers. The paper draws on the Town Camp community research and work by other Aboriginal communities that shows in contrast to a persistent dominant narrative of economic development as requiring the closure or privatisation of Camps, communities are already interested in and pursuing hybrid models that respect their histories and aspirations.