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This presentation explores the development of grassroots Aboriginal Medical Services in late twentieth century Indigenious Australia. Its target audience is students and staff interested in the history of Indigenious health activism in Australia, as well as the broader history of community responses to inequalities in healthcare access. 
This presentation explores the development of grassroots Aboriginal Medical Services in late twentieth century Indigenous Australia. Created by and for the community in 1971, these Aboriginal Medical Services served as both a contemporary extension of historical resistance to settler authority and a reflection of the profound shifts in Aboriginal activism in the early 1970s.

By 1983, at least twenty-five community-controlled Aboriginal Medical Services had been established in shopfronts, caravans, chapels and sheds across Australia. Ideologically influenced by transnational discourses of racial empowerment, these health services engaged with western biomedical systems of care whilst simultaneously championing alternative approaches to health and healing. Specifically, these Services aimed to holistically address the needs of individuals and their communities, introducing integrative medico-social programs to improve physical, mental, emotional and cultural wellbeing. In doing so, Activists bridged the gap between the politics of health and identity to arm the people with health education and political consciousness, curating Aboriginal Health Worker Education programs based on models observed firsthand in North America, China, Mongolia and India.

Beyond the immediate benefits which these Aboriginal Medicine Services brought to Indigenous Australia, then, Aboriginal activists also encouraged a more profound reconceptualised wellness, justice, and liberation amongst new and Indigenous nations. Exploring this history thus provides an invaluable opportunity to reconsider the relationship between health, identity and resistance in settler-colonial contexts and sheds necessary light on the richness of Aboriginal community health activism in late twentieth century Australia.

Speaker

Megan Graham

Megan Graham is a PhD Candidate in the School of History at the University of Leeds. Her PhD research, which is funded by an AHRC-White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities Doctoral Studentship, explores the history of Indigenous activism in twentieth-century Australia. Examining this through the critically understudied lens of health, her research considers the radical ways in which activists and grassroot organisations - in disparate local contexts - renegotiated western understandings of health, confronted wide scale health inequity, and drove efforts for self-determination.

Event notices

• Please note this event is virtual only.
• Please note that this session will not be recorded.