University of Western Australia
Ten years after its release, the go-to text on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health and social and emotional wellbeing echoes the 2024 NAIDOC Week theme.
Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice by The University of Western Australia Professors Pat Dudgeon and Helen Milroy, an Honorary Research Fellow at the The Kids Research Institute Australia, and Murdoch University Professor Roz Walker, is a seminal work.
“It was a leading text in the movement to decolonise the discourse around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island mental health and wellbeing and it still is,” Professor Dudgeon said.
Image: Professors Helen Milroy, Pat Dudgeon and Roz Walker.
On the 10th anniversary of the book’s second edition, the NAIDOC theme Keep the fire burning! Blak, Loud and Proud, honouring the enduring strength and vitality of First Nations culture, could not be more pertinent.
Working Together – first developed in 2010 by the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Kulunga Research Network at The Kids Research Institute Australia – was groundbreaking in its foregrounding and honouring of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing being and doing, and its recognition of the strength of First Nations culture in Australia and the Torres Strait.
“A key aim of the book was to educate mainstream health professionals, social workers, educators, academics and researchers and students to gain a genuine understanding and respect of the impacts of colonisation on Aboriginal health and wellbeing, knowledges and experiences,” Professor Walker said.
This NAIDOC Week, Professors Dudgeon, Milroy, and Walker are reflecting upon not only the hard work required by them and the team to get the book published but also the strength of Aboriginal culture, including connection to country, which underpinned much of the text.
“I don’t think we had any idea when we did the book just how important it would be to people working in mental health and social and emotional wellbeing," Professor Milroy said.
“It was unique in its development and content at the time and still is. It was well worth the hard work we all put in to making sure we worked through a cultural lens to improve outcomes for our families and communities.”
Working Together’s 2014 second edition print of 50,000 copies sold quickly, as did the 50,000 printed for the first edition, and it is freely available via digital download on the The Kids Research Institute Australia website where the second edition has now been downloaded close to 20,000 times.
The Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing project at UWA will be hosting a series of webinars later this year to celebrate the anniversary of Working Together to keep the fire burning by honouring Aboriginal understandings of wellbeing and mental health.