Proving the link between living on country and improved Indigenous health
Updated
First Nations people who spend time on country have better health outcomes.
It has been a long-held anecdotal belief of cultural leaders and health professionals, but a massive research project is underway to prove the science.
Known as Mayi Kuwayu, the study will be led by Australian National University (ANU) Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and will survey up to 250,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for up to 50 years in a comprehensive longitudinal study into how culture impacts health and wellbeing.
ANU associate professor Dr Ray Lovett said the pilot studies in communities in Victoria, along the Murray Darling River, and central Australia already demonstrated better connections to country vastly improved the mental health of its Aboriginal participants.
"Those two studies are showing the same thing in two totally different areas," Dr Lovett said.
"Usually you don't see these kinds of relationships this early on, but we're already seeing them in the smaller-scale studies that we're running as part of the development process."
The full survey will be rolled-out across Australia in mid-2018.
The questionnaire was developed in collaboration with 21 communities nationally and will ask First Nations people about where and how they were born and raised, their sense of disconnection to land and culture, their exposure to traditional languages and their kinship networks.
"These are the intangible things that we don't know a lot about in quantitative research because that data has never been collected."
Connection to country is the best medicine
An authority in the field of Indigenous health, Mark Wenitong, from the Cape York Health Council is a long-time advocate that culture, language and spending time on country all lead to better health outcomes for Indigenous people.
"It's a dose relationship as well which in medicine means, the more you take it the better it is," Dr Wenitong said.
"There's potentially even biological mechanisms for people feeling more life satisfaction, feeling happier and a sense of wellbeing.
"They're where they're meant to be.
"This is just proving that the link to country is actually a lot stronger than we originally thought and these just aren't people who were brought up traditionally."
Understanding culture the gamechanger for Indigenous health
Remote Indigenous communities across Australia report some of the highest rates of chronic disease and preventable illnesses.
But Dr Wenitong said it was a misconception that people in those communities live on their traditional country, with many tribal groups relocated during the days of forced settlements.
"You've got a lot of disconnected historical roots in those communities and that by itself causes lots of problems," Dr Wenitong said.
He said previous studies had found Indigenous people living even more remotely on outstations had better cardiovascular health due to their more traditional lifestyles.
"They were actually better than the urban mob; urban was better than remote, but very remote was better than both."
Dr Wenitong hoped Mayi Kuwayu would ultimately lead to a better approach.
"There's going to be therapeutic initiatives that we can [now] take that are much more in keeping with cultural approaches," Dr Wenitong said.
"This could be a gamechanger for the way we do health services."
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