Abstract
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people strongly assert that health research has contributed little to improving their health, in spite of its obvious potential. The health concerns of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were largely ignored in early research published in the MJA, which reflected broader colonial history and racial discourses. This began to change with the demise of scientific racism, and changed policies and political campaigns for equal treatment of Indigenous people after the Second World War. In response to pressure from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations, in parallel to broader political struggles for Indigenous rights since the 1970s, there have been significant and measurable changes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research. Many of these changes have been about the ethics of health research. Increasingly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers, communities and organisations are now controlling and decolonising health research to better meet their needs, in collaboration with non-Indigenous researchers and research organisations.
Highlights
Indigenous people’s access to better health care was considered less important because most Australian doctors repeatedly read and believed that Indigenous people were an inferior and primitive race whose demise was inevitable.[7]
Concerns have been expressed about the overemphasis on descriptive research rather than research evaluating interventions in Indigenous health.[1,3,4,5,6]. In this centenary of the MJA, we describe how Indigenous health research has been influenced by colonial social ideologies and shifting discourses in Indigenous political struggles
The first Aboriginal community controlled health service (ACCHS) was established in Redfern in 1971.24 there are 140 ACCHSs, and they have been central in the drive for a new phase in Indigenous health research; this is reflected in similar
Summary
Before 1950, health researchers had little regard for the health needs of Indigenous people. Indigenous health received little attention in the MJA (Box 1, Box 2) or preceding Australian medical journals,[7] and the earliest articles predominantly related to tropical medicine, especially hookworm and donovanosis. This tropical health research was entangled with the politics of colonialism and a white Australia, and with broader discourses of “whiteness”, race degeneracy in a “new” environment, and the national Australian identity.[8] While hookworm was the first disease among Indigenous people to receive sustained attention in the MJA, the primary focus was the protection of the health of the white population.[9,10,11,12,13] Early hookworm campaigns concentrated on Queensland, with its larger white population, rather than the Northern Territory, where hookworm infection was common among Indigenous people but less important because it was not “a menace to white people”.14. In 1929, the MJA reported on the Victorian Branch of the British Medical
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