Assignment 2 Reflective Journal (30%)
Words: 1500-1800 Maximum

The Task
Self-reflection and reflection is an important element for improving professional practice and it also forms a significant part in the journey in becoming a culturally competent person. According to Wade and others, “Reflective thinking has a variety of meanings….common elements include understanding a dilemma or problem from multiple perspectives and questioning taken for granted assumptions, routines, rationalisations, and explanations (Wade et al., 2008, p.402). It’s about thinking about what people have said, what you have read and/or heard from your peers, what you are thinking and, how your thinking has changed. Essentially, this is what this assignment is all about: an opportunity to learn how to critically think and reflect on a range of Indigenous Australian issues that are covered in the unit.
You are expected to think about and make journal entries based on the lectures for an eleven week period starting from week 2 through to week 12 and post some of your thoughts on Discussion Board. In these journal entries, try and respond to the following questions:
1. What new perspectives, information or awareness did you gain from the lecture and readings?
2. How do you feel about the above and did it help change your existing beliefs and attitudes regarding Indigenous people, history, society, culture, health, politics or beliefs? 3. How might this new information, awareness and perspective influence your general outlook/attitudes and/or professional practice or further education/study?
From your eleven (11) weekly journal entries and lectures, choose three (3) and using essay style format write approximately 500-600 words per entry. It is the quality of your entries not the quantity that is important. We do not want to stifle your capacity to write and reflect so feel free to write as much as you would like but ensure that the 3 entries that are submitted for adhere to the word limit.

Responding to these three themes you will need to:
• Demonstrate critical thinking
• Provide evidence supporting your perspectives or provide evidence that supports your explanation
• Refer to contemporary issues that have been expressed publically (government report, policy, media or health policies/practices)
• Provide a reference list
It

Why study Indigenous Health?

(Lecture Notes) Module 1

More modules on the attached workbook (please refer the other attachment)
• As I said last week, all of us, except for Indigenous Australians, are from somewhere else. But we are on Whadjuk Nyungar (boodja) country.
• We have invaded, settled, taken control of, changed, benefitted from, studied on, profited from, walked on, slept on, built on, lived on and claimed as our own, what “is and always will be” Aboriginal land.

• But the fundamental layer, the heart and soul of this country, still belongs to Indigenous Australians.
• I believe we have a duty, a responsibility, an obligation to study and understand the place of Indigenous Australians. Only then can we know our own place. Acknowledgment, understanding, respect.
• But that is only my personal opinion.
• Other reasons…?
• 1. Most people have had no formal opportunity to study Indigenous Australia and its history so perceptions are based on stereotypes, family/friends and the media.
• 2. Indigenous Australians are also uniquely disadvantaged as a “group” or “minority nation” in their own right. As a “nation” Noel Pearson argues they hold a unique position in Australian society.

• Btw, who is this man, Noel Pearson?:
• Indigenous Australian lawyer, academic, land rights activist. One of the foremost Indigenous thinkers and leaders.
• Founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, promoting the economic and social development of Cape York.
• Keep an eye out for him in the media and in your research.

• 3. Learning about the history, health, social place, cultural values, dilemmas, issues and ongoing challenges Indigenous people face will equip you as a professional to meet Indigenous people at an equal level, provide health care that is culturally appropriate and always remind you this was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam (1972-5) said, “Let us never forget this, Australia’s real test…is the role we create for our Aborigines… the Aborigines are our true link with our region… The Aborigines are a responsibility we cannot escape, cannot share, cannot shuffle off; the world will not let us forget that.”

• Indigenous Australians have some of the worst health outcomes and statistics in the world.
• Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health is, in some instances, at critical levels.
• Cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, renal failure, domestic violence, obesity, stress, substance abuse, addiction, self-harm, suicide, incarceration, poverty are often entrenched and sadly, profoundly “normal” for many Indigenous Australians.
• But why has this happened?

• The Indigenous View:
• ‘The land is our school’ (actor Ningali Lawford)
• The Land is Law. [1]
• ‘Aboriginal Law [is] a system of natural moral law which establishes an extended, spiritual identity between land and person.’[1]
‘Aboriginal Law [is] a system of natural moral law which establishes an extended, spiritual identity between land and person.’ [1]
• The land was the continuing and integral factor in all Indigenous life and beliefs. Indigenous people belonged intrinsically to the Land. [1]
• In the Dreamtime ( a western term), the Creator Beings arose from the ground, they were very tall. They moved across the land and through all their activity, created all its features; rivers, mountains, valleys, flora, fauna. [1]

• What we now call “Indigenous people” were embryonic forms awakened by the Spirit Ancestors or Creator Beings. They taught them how to become human. [1]
• After much busy and varied activity, the Creator Beings finally returned to the land leaving traces of their activity in the land and rivers that we know today as various features and landmarks across the country, many of which are still sacred Dreaming sites for Indigenous People.[1]

• In the Nyungar Nation in the southwest of WA, Creation time was called Nytting.
• ‘It was a rich land formed by the snake known as Wagyl, who slithered over the earth, slicing rivers and escarpments from its flesh, whose serpent scales dropped off and became the forests, who rested his coiled body to make the lakes and bays.

• When the Dutch and others from France and England and New South Wales landed, they found a society who hunted with the kali (boomerang) and the gidgee (spear), who gathered native potatoes and wild onions and bush yams. They found an industrious people who maintained the land with fire but who also, especially during the whorl of a corrobboree, would pay heed to the spirits.’ [2]

• The European View:
• The land is a commodity to control, direct, change, destroy, cultivate, reform, divide up, manipulate, sell, buy, build on, profit from, invest in, farm, level, poison, graze on, mine, own and dominate.
• People own the land. People change the land to suit them. People have the power. People make the decisions. The people are primary, the land is secondary.
• For “modern” societies, the land is not law.
• Western law is varied, complex, changeable, made by a wide and diverse range of people including federal, state and local governments, councils, organisations; it is not equally applicable to all people, it is often be manipulated by people who have money and often a breach in the law can be solved by those who can most afford it.
• In 1788, indigenous people were considered the lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder.
• Top: industrialising societies. Middle: farmers. Low: hunter-gatherers-‘savages’, ‘heathens’, ‘nomads’
• Dark skin was also considered to be the inferior skin colour.
• Religiously, monotheistic religions (Christianity) at the top, polytheistic or those with more than “one God” or animists (everything has spirit) were at the bottom.

• So from the very beginning Indigenous people were the lowest low of the very low.
Beliefs of race inferiority along with homosexuals, the disabled and the mentally ill reached a climax in the 1930’s and 40s with the murder of these and 6 million Jews by the Nazis.
• What the invaders saw as groups of ‘wandering nomads’ in a God-forsaken wilderness was in fact a highly organised societal/familial structure incorporating the “Dreaming”, a vast store of knowledge, care of the land, its flora and fauna and a profound spiritual life including dancing, singing music, painting, hundreds of languages.
• The “myth of aimless wandering” was used as one reason to wipe out Indigenous people – if they’re not using the land productively they shouldn’t be on it!
• We now know without a profound knowledge of the plants, seasons, rainfall, animals no group of people could have survived for so many thousands of years.
• Occupiers had no understanding of the deep spiritual relationship with the land or Indigenous peoples’ responsibilities to care for it.

• This led to the label ‘terra nullius’, a formal, Latin, legal term literally meaning ‘land belonging to no one’ to justify the dispossession and occupation of the land – not overturned until the 1992 “Mabo decision”. (see Indigenous map)
• So given the prevailing attitudes of the times, Indigenous people were seen as pests to exterminate, slaves to be exploited, savages to be starved, blacks to be beaten and deprived of the basics of human dignity and respect.
• March 5, 1973, Gordon Bryant, the first Aboriginal Affairs minister [Whitlam gov’t]:
“The situation of the Aboriginal people of Australia is a national disgrace. There’s no other way to describe it. We know that there are people living in tribal areas who are absolutely neglected. We know that there are people living miserably in urban situations… when suddenly you come upon it… you are appalled at what the situation is. The reason I am more appalled now… is that you realise that, once you reach this exalted position [of minister] that there are a lot of resources

at your disposal if you have the wit and the will to put them to work… The first message you’ve got to give the people of Australia is… the situation in which the Aboriginal people find themselves is inexcusable.
We’ve got to change community attitudes… got to change municipal, state and federal governmental agencies and make them get on with the job… up until ten or fifteen years ago there weren’t that many noises made about it. They said. ‘Well, you can’t do much with them, can you?”

• So… back to Indigenous people and their “nation” – or is it?
• Can we consider Indigenous people to have their own nation within the Australian nation? We now know, pre- invasion there were many “Indigenous nations.”
• Noel Pearson prefers to use the term “peoplehood” – common attributes people need to be seen as a “nation”. (neighbourhood? man/womanhood?)
• He also believes in two “nations” within Australia – Indigenous and everybody else.
• This brings us to “layered identity” – something I referred to last week – “Indigenous” identity and “Australian” identity. For many Indigenous people this can be a source of conflict and dilemma.
• Can we see this also in migrant people?
• All this history (largely unknown), culture, unique survival in a harsh land and, perhaps even more importantly, Indigenous survival since the arrival of the First Fleet and the dispossession and occupation of Indigenous land, and their current marginalised place in Australian society, should surely be reason enough to spend one semester studying Indigenous health, history and humanity. Don’t you think?

References

(Can be used in assignment)

• [1]Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal World Views; Graham 2008.

• [2] The Noongar Warriors, by Konnrad Marshall; SMH, The Good Weekend magazine; July 2, 2016.
• [3] excerpt reprinted in Because A White Man’ll Never Do It by Kevin Gilbert, first pub. 1973 HarperCollins; pp72-75

• Foundation of cultural competency. Rob Banzij. Keith McConnaohie, Wendy Nolan

• CULTURAL PROTOCOLS
for Indigenous Reporting in the Media. abc.net.au/message/proper
• Raising Children in the Nunga Aboriginal Way. MERRIDY MALIN, KATHO CAMPBELL AND LAURA AGIUS
• ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA REPORTING ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS. Diana Plater

• Ellen Grote, PhD
Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council (IHEAC)

• [1] Scott, K & Thackrah R (2011) Indigenous Australian Health and Cultures, Pearson Australia, Sydney.
• [4] www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture
• [5] Betancourt JR, Green AR, Carrillo JE (2002) Cultural Competence in Health Care: Emerging frameworks and political approaches cited in Guerin P, Taylor K, Health Care and Indigenous Australians p 16.
• [6] Campinha-Bacote J (1994) Cultural competence in psychiatric mental health nursing cited in cited in Guerin P, Taylor K, Health Care and Indigenous Australians p 16.

• [7] http://www.weekendnotes.com/interesting-facts-about-australia/
• [8] https://www.humanrights.gov.au/face-facts-cultural-diversity

• [9] Coffin J (2007) Rising to the Challenge in Aboriginal Health by Creating Cultural Security (Health Worker Journal Vol 31. Pp 22-24 May/June)
• [12] printed in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2007 by Tara Ravens:
• [13] Camphina-Bacote (2005) cited in Ranzijn, R et al (2009) Psychology and Indigenous Australian Foundation of Cultural Competence. Palgrave Macmillan retrieved from www.ecu.edu.au IAS3100 Readings tab.
• [4] Binan Goonj Aboriginal Facilitators 1994-2009 cited in Eckermann et al (2006), Binan Goonj: Bridging Cultures in Aboriginal Health, Elsvier Australia, Chatswood NSW p 13
Chambers, John (ed.) 1983, Black English: Educational Equity and the Law, Karoma, Ann Arbor, MI.
Eades, Diana 1991, ‘Communicative strategies in Aboriginal English’, in Language in Australia, ed. Suzanne Romaine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
—— 1992, Aboriginal English and the Law: Communicating with Aboriginal English Speaking Clients: A Handbook for Legal Practitioners, Queensland Law Society, Brisbane.
Hudson, Joyce 1992, ‘Summary: Fostering English language in Kimberley schools: An in-service course for teachers’, in Pidgins, Creoles and Non-Standard Dialects in Education, ed. Jeff Siegel, Occasional Paper no. 12, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Melbourne.
Malcolm, Ian 1982, ‘Communicative dysfunction in the Aboriginal classroom’, in Aboriginal Education: Issues and Innovations, ed. J. Sherwood, Creative Research, Perth.
—— 1992, ‘English in the education of speakers of Aboriginal English’, in Pidgins, Creoles and Non-Standard Dialects in Education, ed. Jeff Siegel, Occasional Paper no. 12, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Melbourne.
—— & Kaldor, Susan 1991, ‘Aboriginal English: An overview’, in Language in Australia, ed. Suzanne Romaine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Schmidt, Annette 1990, The Loss of Australia’s Aboriginal Language Heritage, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Shnukal, Anna 1988, Broken: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Torres Strait, Pacific Linguistics C107, Canberra.
Troy, Jakelin 1993, ‘Language contact in early colonial New South Wales 1788 to 1791’, in Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia, eds Michael Walsh & Colin Yallop, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Trudgill, Peter 1983, Sociolinguistics, Penguin, Harmondsworth