Unknown family at the taxi stand

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 15 May 2006 184 10 519-520 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2006 www.mja.com.au Dr Ross Ingram Memorial Essay Competition emotional resonance might return. For Gubbas genous Australians) to come to grips with what’s ha Indigenous health in this country doesn’t require heart. It does require new means to “de-Other” Australians — to situate us, and our experiences, national consciousness. Blackfella health won’t chan are no longer the exotics of our own land. he Fo wi T summer before last, two members of my family died. r an extended Aboriginal family, the fact that they died thin 6 weeks of one another wasn’t unusual — no less hurtful, but not out of experience. Blackfellas, unfortunately, bury often. Both deaths were unexpected: my mother’s, from postoperative complications, and my never-met, distant inlaw’s, from violence. My mother’s was unusual (she’d made it to 87), my unknown relative’s less so: shocking, distressing to all connected to her, but not unheard of for black women, or men, in their twenties. It was unclear whether the violence was selfor other-inflicted — the stories of the male relative who found her and the cops differed (“there was a piece of rope”/“there was no rope to be seen”). What was not in dispute was the fact that two young boys, who had accompanied the relative to the woman’s front door, now carried the picture of her legs protruding from a door frame down the hall. This is a difficult essay to write, even to justify: it’s personal — involving current and possible future pain for people I’m close to and care about — yet it relates to concerns that I research and talk about professionally all the time. As a Koori psychologist who has worked for some years teaching Indigenous health to medical students and registrars and Indigenous wellbeing to mental health professionals, it’s undertaken in the belief that narrative can carry a complexity that epidemiology lays out as so many bones. Coolly useful as data are, when statistics have real human faces there’s a chance that a lost (non-Indippening in a bleeding Indigenous inside the ge until we