As a scientist who has spent decades investigating the health of Aboriginal people in remote parts of Australia, I am seriously concerned that the push to shut down communities deemed to be economically unviable seems to be gathering momentum.
The Australian and NT Governments have been urged, in the final report from the NT Emergency Response Taskforce, to assess which communities are viable in the longer term, and to plan future investment based on those assessments.
It will be a mistake if such assessments are based purely on economic indicators and fail to take account of the mounting scientific evidence suggesting that there can be very positive health benefits for Aboriginal people who live on their homelands.
For example, I have been involved in a study documenting very positive health outcomes for the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr people living on traditional lands as part of the decentralised Utopia community north-east of Alice Springs.
The study, published recently in The Medical Journal of Australia, found that people in these communities were 40% less likely to die prematurely, whether from cardiovascular disease or any other cause, than other Indigenous people in the NT.
These findings are in line with previous work showing this community had lower than expected rates of obesity, diabetes, and smoking.
Because people usually hunt and gather their traditional foods more regularly when they are on their homelands or outstations, not only are they therefore more physically active, their diets are also much higher quality. And because they are living in family groups on their traditional country, they are in supportive and secure environments, and are therefore less stressed than is often the case in the larger settlements — and substance abuse is generally much reduced or absent.
The Utopia community is made up of 16 outstations, dispersed over an area of about 10,000 km2. There is no centralised settlement, with outstations, administrative offices, a clinic and store located up to 100km apart. The community-controlled Urapuntja Health Service (UHS) provides primary health care, including outreach services.
Perhaps the economic rationalists would not call this an “economically viable” community. But it offers advantages for the people who live there, although there is no doubt that they need better housing and other infrastructure.
As my colleagues and I wrote in the MJA:
We caution against assumptions of expense associated with supporting outstations, given the savings to health care systems when successful primary prevention is achieved, and a broader (positive) economic context of outstation living related to activities such as art, food procurement and land management. A stereotype of outstation communities as cultural museums that prevent health and social gains for Aboriginal people is not supported by the present evidence.
We are also collating data to compare the health of Aboriginal people living on homelands versus centralised communities in other parts of the NT, and similar differences are emerging, including a lower risk of diabetes, heart disease and kidney failure on the homelands.
Perhaps not all small homelands communities are as successful as the ones we have worked with, but it would be a folly to abandon those that are working successfully.
The terrible irony of the current move against remote homelands is that it is the forces of westernisation and urbanisation which have contributed so much to the development of diabetes, heart disease and renal failure in Indigenous people.
All the evidence indicates that the risk of these conditions is related to sedentary westernised lifestyles, and that Indigenous peoples were free of these diseases when they lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle.
Indeed, I have myself observed first hand the positive impact of traditional lifestyles, when I accompanied a group of Aboriginal people returning to traditional country more than 25 years ago. In just seven weeks, people lost an average of 7-8 kgs, and showed marked reduction in the severity of type 2 diabetes and striking improvements in risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
I also saw the psychological benefits, including increased confidence and competence as a result of people feeling more in control of their lives.
The Federal Government has repeatedly stressed its commitment to evidence-based policy. My colleagues and I stand ready to point any interested parties in the direction of some relevant evidence.
Professor O’Dea was Director of the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin from 2000-2005.
A timely and sensitive analysis, Professor O`Dea, with some important insights into the culture and way of life of the original Australians. Objectively, if the NT Intervention was about the welfare of Aboriginies and their `precious children`, it would not have happened the way it was carried out, and the taxpayers` money that was spent on police/army occupation of communities, the `business managers`, billboards proclaiming no alcohol and p-rnography, together with all the paternalistic bullsh-t of sequestrating welfare payments (sorry, income management), the suppression of the Racial Discrimination Act and the permit system, amongst other measures. And now we have the `economic viability ` test to a people in whose culture and tradition the idea of private property and profit has no place, rather the community, the extended family and the land, which they regard as sacred. Clearly, the welfare of the Aboriginies is not the issue at all, it is really further dispossession, of which we have a 200-year not-so proud tradition. These land tracts contain great riches which the big mining companies and Governments which back them want to get their hands on. The solution seems to be to get the disperate communities to live on American Indian-style reservations, then they will become `economically viable`, that is the mining companies.
So, professor, let`s not hold our breadth, what we have here, is a different agenda, one that was carried out inexorably over more than 200 years by capitalists and their governments..
You say “[p]erhaps the economic rationalists would not call this an “economically viable” community”. Surely your argument depends on establishing that it is not economically viable? Why did you write an article that is perhaps completely irrelevant without checking something so fundamental?
OK fine, let’s have these fellow citizens get back to their traditional lifestyles and get health levels to pre-invasion levels… But how will they get a share of the wealth that our economy is generating? How do they get the benefits? That’s the real challenge because going back doesn’t solve any equity issues.
Thank you Professor O’Dea! Clearly Nic has not heard of cost benefit analyses, or has any familiarity with the costs (social and financial) involved in dispossessing remote Aboriginal people and forcing urbanisation on them. Many of the social order (substance misuse and family violence), physical and mental health issues that larger (and more narrowly “economically viable”) remote indigenous settlements are currently experiencing are directly related to forced co-habitation by different family and language groups, overcrowded housing, and the breakdown of indigenous cultural law. The push to eliminate remote Aboriginal communities is the Australian version of the “final solution” – forced assimilation. The NTER taskforce (a suspiciously military term) does not seem to understand that Aboriginal peoples will not suddenly become whitefellas if they are kicked off their lands. Well done Doctor O’Dea for coming up with the scientific evidence that remote Aboriginal lifestyles are not as destructive to health and wellbeing as others would have us believe – it is cultural collision and forced adoption of an urban whitefella lifestyle that is destructive to remote indigenous community populations.