By May Slater. Earlier this year, Blackmores was invited by Adnyamathanha elders to attend a six-day cultural festival on their red-rock country in the Flinders Ranges, seven-hours drive from Adelaide.
The ‘Hands Around the World’ event, part of National Close the Gap Day celebrations, was billed as one for reconciliation and sharing between tribes. It brought together elders from Katitunda (Lake Eyre) and Mirning country (Coastal Nullabor), as well as Maori and Hawaiian healers, artists and musicians from across Australia. The Adnyamathanha wanted to talk with Blackmores about their concerns for the loss of their traditional medicines.
“Now is the time we really need to share our knowledge because we’re losing our languages and our health,” Elder Joseph McKenzie told Blackmores. “The white man’s introduction of their stock – the sheep and cattle - have wiped out a lot of our tucker and traditional medicines. It’s important we preserve what we have left of our bush foods before they become totally extinct,” he said.
“And we need to bring our people home to heal.”
According to SA Health, South Australia’s Aboriginal population is hospitalised at twice the rate of its non-Aboriginal population. The Adnyamathanha community suffers chronic diabetes, renal and heart disease – but Mckenzie says one of the ‘the biggest killers’ for his people is poor medical services to remote areas like the Flinders. The community’s need for regular dialysis for kidney failure, for example, is especially high - but the nearest dialysis
machine is 160 km away in Port Augusta.
“To travel for treatment is a killer because our families, especially the elderly, they can’t survive out of country,” he said. “I’ve seen my Mum go through it, my uncles, my aunties, and in the end they just give up because they long for home.”
Mckenzie launched his own Healing Foundation at the gathering to raise money for a machine for the nearby Leigh Creek Hospital, and to train local staff in how to use it. The foundation is one step towards building a healthier lifestyle that is connected to country, but Mckenzie also wants to see his people foster traditional food and medicine cultivation at home.
“For me, the starting point would be to set up a conservation area where the bush tucker and medicine is still abundant, or at least surviving, and to teach our young ones about it,” he said.
Professor Kerin O’Dea of the University of South Australiais leading a National Health and Medical Research Council study on improving chronic disease outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
She says the problem of chronic and infectious diseases in remote communities is getting worse and access to good, fresh foods and primary care is ‘appalling.’
“For remote Aboriginal people to be doing anything they can to maintain connections with their land and their traditional foods and medicines, is incredibly important,” she says. “When I’m talking to people about food, I frame it in the context of how Aboriginal people used to live; what they ate when they were hunter gatherers and how healthy that lifestyle was.”
O’Dea says we need to work on early prevention and health education, but our current approach to remote indigenous heath is “like having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.”
“Good nutrition is fundamental in preventing chronic disease and really, it ought to be a human right, no matter who your parents are or where you were born.”
Healthy Yarta, healthy people
For the Adnyamathanha, the health of their people is inextricably tied to the health of the land, or yarta, which they say is changing.
“In ancestral times, our people would have eaten 50,000 different critters and plants and you’d find all the plants you’d need to survive. It wasn’t an accident it was a paradise, but that diversity is now being eroded away by the poor management of Australia,” says Peter Watts, an Arrubuna man from Lake Eyre country and co-chair of the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance.
Watts says climate change, poor land use and mining has damaged supplies of fresh artesian water, bush foods and traditional medicines across remote South Australia. He is especially concerned about the Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine that borders his country near Leigh Creek.
“There is no safe dose of uranium,” he says. “It turns to dust and blows all over this country, and it breaks the stories of our bodies, of our DNA, the stories our bodies hold that keep us healthy.”
Adnyamathanha elder, Aunty Enice, says she gets emotional talking about how much the land has changed in her time.
"People say that Akurra the giant serpent made these waterways and lives in the natural springs. But the water has all dried up. These places are now being drilled, polluted, and destroyed by exploration,” she says. “It’s like they’re ripping the guts out of our muda; our history and our dreaming.”
Bush medicine
Jacqui Mckenzie is determined to tackle the health problems of her community with a bush medicine education program for Adnyamathanha young people.
“My vision is to start a plantation; to use the plants and fruits to make creams for healing,” she says. “I want to bring the elders in, the people with the life skills and knowledge of the land, to educate the younger generation about the medicines we’ve used for so many years.”
As a child, Jacqui learnt about bush medicine through dreaming stories told by her mother and grandfathers. But the loss of her husband to heart disease at a young age prompted her real interest in natural therapies.
“I was looking at all these young people we’d lost throughout the years with illnesses that were preventable. I’d been a youth worker for many years and I started thinking I wanted to work with youth at-risk of chronic diseases; to look at what sort of programs we could run to address this before it gets so serious,” she says.
The Aboriginal Health Council says Indigenous South Australians are still dying 11 years earlier than the rest of the population. Youth suicide and depression are highly prevalent, and families travel regularly to attend funerals in the city.
“Years ago, when we were on the traditional diets, we weren’t like that but we’ve now got young people not living to the age of 50 or even 40 in aboriginal communities; I don’t know how low it’s going to get but something’s got to be done about it,” says Jaqcui.
Three years ago, Jacqui suffered a heart attack herself. “But I came back and I’m here today and looking after myself,” she says. She enrolled in a certificate of natural therapies and is pursuing further study while developing her business plan.
“I’ll call it Ngulundulla Life Education,” she says. “Ngulundulla is the name my father gave me when I was born - it means green frog!”
Jacqui’s father, Ken - who says her plant juice cured him of years of pain - has a different plan:
“I’m just trying to get strong now so I can do my dance again to teach the young people our stories.”
Blackmores donated a hire tent and resources for a wellness sanctuary for the Gathering for the Aunties at the ‘Hands Around the World’ event, in line with traditional custom at community gatherings.
May Slater is a freelance journalist with a background in community and International Development; she has worked for a number of non-profit organisations in Australia and Ethiopia, and as a journalist in Indonesia. She has a special interest in natural health and wellbeing.