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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.


All welcome- this session is free to attend but booking is required.