Strengthening cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

This article summarises the findings of a project funded and supported by a principal committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Health Advisory Committee, chaired by Professor Adele Green.

A Worthwhile Exchange - a Guide to Indigenous Philanthropy: research findings and success stories from philanthropy supporting Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander People.

The Guide includes research findings from the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Non Profit Studies at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). This research probed the experiences of fourteen Indigenous people who have had different degrees of success in seeking funding from philanthropic organisations. This research shows how grantmakers can make a significant difference in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Moving and dancing towards decolonisation in education: An example from an Indigenous Australian performance classroom

This paper explores the special type of thinking, moving and dancing place which is opened up for decolonisaton when students engage in an embodied pedagogical practice in Indigenous education. The author examines what decolonisation means in this context by describing the ways in which the curriculum, the students and teacher, and more generally the discipline of ethnomusicology itself, undergo a process to question, critique, and move aside the pedagogical script of colonialism in order to allow Indigenous ways of understanding music and dance to be presented, privileged and empowered. Key questions are: What is the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment and decolonisation and colonisation? In what ways is embodiment more than, or other than, the presence of moving bodies? In what ways is performativity an aspect of power/knowledge/subject formations? How can it be theorised? What could the pedagogical scripts of decolonisation look like?

Providing culturally appropriate mental health first aid to an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander adolescent: development of expert consensus guidelines

BACKGROUND: It is estimated that the prevalence of mental illness is higher in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adolescents compared to non-Aboriginal adolescents. Despite this, only a small proportion of Aboriginal youth have contact with mental health services, possibly due to factors such as remoteness, language barriers, affordability and cultural sensitivity issues. This research aimed to develop culturally appropriate guidelines for anyone who is providing first aid to an Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander adolescent who is experiencing a mental health crisis or developing a mental illness.

METHODS: A panel of Australian Aboriginal people who are experts in Aboriginal youth mental health, participated in a Delphi study investigating how members of the public can be culturally appropriate when helping an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander adolescent with mental health problems. The panel varied in size across the three sequential rounds, from 37-41 participants. Panellists were presented with statements about cultural considerations and communication strategies via online questionnaires and were encouraged to suggest additional content. All statements endorsed as either Essential or Important by ≥ 90% of panel members were written into a guideline document. To assess the panel members' satisfaction with the research method, participants were invited to provide their feedback after the final survey.

RESULTS: From a total of 304 statements shown to the panel of experts, 194 statements were endorsed. The methodology was found to be useful and appropriate by the panellists.

CONCLUSION: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Youth mental health experts were able to reach consensus about what the appropriate communication strategies for providing mental health first aid to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adolescent. These outcomes will help ensure that the community provides the best possible support to Aboriginal adolescents who are developing mental illnesses or are in a mental health crisis.

Fundamental sounds

Fundamental Sounds was a live, intercultural and multidisciplinary concert that presented a new synthesis of music, performance & visual arts addressing the imperative of sustainability in a new and evocative form. The outcome was a ninety-minute concert, performed at a major concert hall venue, involving four live musicians, numerous performers & large-scale projections. The images and the concert were scripted in three key phases that spoke to three epochs of human evolution identified by ontological designer and futurist Tony Fry - ‘Pre-Settlement’, ‘Settlement’ and the era that he suggests that we have now entered – ‘Unsettlement’ (in mind body and spirit). The entire work was professionally recorded for presentation on DVD and audio CD.----- Fundamental Sounds achieved a new synthesis between quality performance forms and cogent critical ideas, engendering an increasingly reflective position for audiences around today’s “era of unsettlement” – an epoch Fry has recognized that we must now move to quickly displace through adopting fundamentally sustainable modes of being and becoming.----- The concert was well attended and evoked a range of strong, reflective reactions from its audiences who were also invited to join and participate within a subsequent ‘community of change’ initiated at that time.

Taken

This eighty-minute work examines responses to Australia's Stolen Generations history. Based on recorded interviews with aboriginal survivors of state removal of children, Taken uses music as a metaphor for white Australians listening to these stories, as the music follows the spoken intonation in the interviews.

Awakening the spirit : telling the stories

Stephen Page talking with Cheryl Stock Stephen Page is one of the most significant dance artists working in Australia today, unique in his ability to forge and sustain a company of Indigenous artists through his seminal leadership of Bangarra Dance Theatre, which celebrated its 20 year anniversary in 2009. Together with the many artists who have contributed to the Bangarra vision, Stephen has created a distinctive contemporary Indigenous dance style and approach, celebrated for the stories it tells of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience. Fusing the traditional with the contemporary through a connection to the spirit of the land and its people, Stephen has inspired and influenced a generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance and theatre artists as a choreographer, director and mentor. His down to earth humour, his passion and his sensitivity draw us as audience, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to his theatrical stories of place and spirit – both ancient and modern – in ways that simultaneously transcend and reaffirm the particular cultural experience which informs them. This conversation covers the early years of growing up with his 'urban clan', discovering dance and politics and his spiritual awakening at Yirrkala. Stephen then describes moving in and out of different realities as a member of Sydney Dance Company whilst simultaneously exploring his Indigenous dance voice, the transition from dancer to choreographer, creating the Bangarra identity and the intercultural experiment of 'Rites' with the Australian Ballet. The last section looks at his various roles as an artistic director and nurturing the next generation of Indigenous artists.