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In partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA), the strengths-based National Empowerment Project (NEP) brought together researchers from across Australia and began to address issues surrounding Aboriginal wellbeing and, in particular, the high rates of Aboriginal deaths by suicide. The NEP utilised participatory action research (PAR) and was concerned with promoting positive cultural, social, and emotional wellbeing (CSEWB) and building capacity and resilience within Aboriginal communities. Throughout the NEP, consultations with 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities led to the development of a CSEWB program. The program seeks to increase self-determination and empowerment, developing participants’ awareness of a variety of issues relevant to wellbeing. This enables participants to gain a greater understanding of the holistic nature of CSEWB and the complex influences on Aboriginal wellbeing at individual, family, and community levels. This chapter is concerned with the development and delivery of the CSEWB program within three community sites in Perth, Western Australia. Shared philosophical approaches of the CSEWB program, between UWA and Aboriginal communities were human rights and social justice, community ownership, community capacity building, a strong focus on resilience, empowerment and partnerships, respect for local knowledge, and the delivery of community consultations. Investigation into the impacts of the program are based in an anti-colonial space, employing Indigenous Standpoint Theory and PAR approaches. This chapter demonstrates the success of the CSEWB program, links this success to the vital importance of Indigenous research ethics, and positions the research within an empowering and capacity-building context.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Aboriginal) people are overrepresented in Australian prisons, where they experience complex health needs. A model of care was designed to respond to the broad needs of the Aboriginal prisoner population within the nine adult prisons across South Australia. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods and findings of the Model of Care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Prisoner Health and Wellbeing for South Australia.

The project used a qualitative mixed-method approach, including a rapid review of relevant literature, stakeholder consultations and key stakeholder workshop. The project was overseen by a Stakeholder Reference Group, which met monthly to ensure that the specific needs of project partners, stakeholders and Aboriginal communities were appropriately incorporated into the planning and management of the project and to facilitate access to relevant information and key informants.

The model of care for Aboriginal prisoner health and wellbeing is designed to be holistic, person-centred and underpinned by the provision of culturally appropriate care. It recognises that Aboriginal prisoners are members of communities both inside and outside of prison. It notes the unique needs of remanded and sentenced prisoners and differing needs by gender.

Supporting the health and wellbeing of Indigenous prison populations can improve health outcomes, community health and reduce recidivism.

Only one other model of care for Aboriginal prisoner health exists in Australia, an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation-initiated in-reach model of care in one prison in one jurisdiction. The South Australian model of care presents principles that are applicable across all jurisdictions and provides a framework that could be adapted to support Indigenous peoples in diverse prison settings.

Social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) is a term used to refer to the state of an individual's overall wellbeing. This review aims to consider the importance of understanding and assessing SEWB in prisoner populations, and identify potentially important differences between groups of prisoners, including those who identify as from minority cultural backgrounds (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander in Australia), protective custody prisoners, remand prisoners, prisoners identified with an intellectual disability, and prisoners with an acquired brain injury.

The paper is a general review of the published literature, with a specific focus on work conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.

Eight domains of SEWB are identified across which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, along with those in protection units, remandees, and prisoners with intellectual disabilities or acquired brain injuries are likely to experience particularly low levels of functioning. Few programs have been developed to address these needs, although attending to low levels of SEWB has the potential to make a positive contribution to prisoner health, prison management, and offender rehabilitation.

Relatively little literature has considered this topic previously and, as a result, the paper is necessarily descriptive. Nonetheless, issues of SEWB appear to warrant further consideration, particularly in relation to those prisoners who identify with minority cultural groups.

Indigenous Australians report mental health problems at a much higher rate than non-Indigenous Australians. However, rather than more services, it has been proposed that there should be a positive, socially based approach to improving mental health in Indigenous communities. The population-wide Western Australian Act-Belong-Commit mental health promotion campaign appeared to be consistent with such an approach. Hence, after consultation with Indigenous community members, a culturally adapted version of the campaign was developed and launched in a largely Indigenous remote Australian community. A survey of Indigenous community members was conducted two years later to assess campaign impact. The aim of this paper is to report on the impact on community members of this cultural adaptation.

Intercept interviews were conducted with Indigenous community members (n = 31) to assess respondents’ awareness of the campaign elements and activities, understanding of campaign messages and whether respondents had undertaken activities to improve their own or their family’s social and emotional well-being as a result of the campaign.

There was universal awareness of the adapted campaign in this sample, with 81% reporting doing something for their own social and emotional well-being, 74% reporting doing something for the social and emotional well-being of their family or friends and 48% reporting doing something for community well-being, as a result of campaign exposure.

The cultural adaptation of the Act-Belong-Commit campaign in the Australian Roebourne community is the first reported Indigenous adaptation of a population-wide mental health promotion campaign.

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications services in many health services is limited, leaving enormous gaps in the broad understanding of its role in health care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to address a specific (intercultural) area of healthcare communications consumer disadvantage; and it examines the potential for ICT exploitation through the lens of a conceptual framework. The opportunity to pursue a new solutions pathway has been amplified in recent times through the development of computer-based ontologies and the resultant knowledge from ontologist activity and consequential research publishing.

A specific intercultural area of patient disadvantage arises from variations in meaning and understanding of patient and clinician words, phrases and non-verbal expression. Collection and localization of data concepts, their attributes and individual instances were gathered from an Aboriginal trainee nurse focus group and from a qualitative gap analysis (QGA) of 130 criteria-selected sources of literature. These concepts, their relationships and semantic interpretations populate the computer ontology. The ontology mapping involves two domains, namely, Aboriginal English (AE) and Type II diabetes care guidelines. This is preparatory to development of the Patient Practitioner Assistive Communications (PPAC) system for Aboriginal rural and remote patient primary care.

The combined QGA and focus group output reported has served to illustrate the call for three important drivers of change. First, there is no evidence to contradict the hypothesis that patient-practitioner interview encounters for many Australian Aboriginal patients and wellbeing outcomes are unsatisfactory at best. Second, there is a potent need for cultural competence knowledge and practice uptake on the part of health care providers; and third, the key contributory component to determine success or failures within healthcare for ethnic minorities is communication. Communication, however, can only be of value in health care if in practice it supports shared cognition; and mutual cognition is rarely achievable when biopsychosocial and other cultural worldview differences go unchallenged.

There has been no direct engagement with remote Aboriginal communities in this work to date. The authors have initially been able to rely upon a cohort of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with relevant cultural expertise and extended family relationships. Among these advisers are health care practitioners, academics, trainers, Aboriginal education researchers and workshop attendees. It must therefore be acknowledged that as is the case with the QGA, the majority of the concept data is from third parties. The authors have also discovered that urban influences and cultural sensitivities tend to reduce the extent of, and opportunity to, witness AE usage, thereby limiting the ability to capture more examples of code-switching. Although the PPAC system concept is qualitatively well developed, pending future work planned for rural and remote community engagement the authors presently regard the work as mostly allied to a hypothesis on ontology-driven communications. The concept data population of the AE home talk/health talk ontology has not yet reached a quantitative critical mass to justify application design model engineering and real-world testing.

Computer ontologies avail us of the opportunity to use assistive communications technology applications as a dynamic support system to elevate the pragmatic experience of health care consultations for both patients and practitioners. The human-machine interactive development and use of such applications is required just to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare and the growing health knowledge transfer environment. In an age when the worldwide web, communications devices and social media avail us of opportunities to confront the barriers described the authors have begun the first construction of a merged schema for two domains that already have a seemingly intractable negative connection. Through the ontology discipline of building syntactically and semantically robust and accessible concepts; explicit conceptual relationships; and annotative context-oriented guidance; the authors are working towards addressing health literacy and wellbeing outcome deficiencies of benefit to the broader communities of disadvantage patients.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

Aboriginal people across Australia have diverse practices, beliefs and knowledges based on thousands of generations of managing and protecting their lands (Country). The intimate relationship Aboriginal people have with their Country is explored in this chapter because such knowledge is important for building insight into the relationship between social and ecological systems. Often in research Aboriginal views have been marginalised from discussions focused on their lands to the detriment of ecosystems and human health. This chapter aims to understand if such marginalisation is evident in Western human–nature relationship discourses.

This chapter provides a critical literature review which examines whether Aboriginal people’s diverse understanding of their ecosystems have been incorporated into human–nature theories using the biophilia hypothesis as a starting point. Other concepts explored include solastalgia, topophilia and place.

Critiques of these terminologies in the context of Aboriginal people’s connection to Country are limited but such incorporation is viewed in the chapter as a possible mechanism for better understanding human’s connection to nature. The review identified that Aboriginal people’s relationship to Country seems to be underrepresented in the human–nature theory literature.

This chapter emphasises that the integration of Aboriginal perspectives into research, ecological management and policy can provide better insight into the interrelationships between social and ecological systems.

Emerging discourses focusing on the social, emotional, educational, and economic disadvantages identified for Australia’s First Peoples (when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts) are becoming increasingly dissociated with an understanding of the interplay between historical and current trends in racism. In addition, it may be argued that the very construction of Western perspectives of Indigenous identity (as opposed to identities) may be deeply entwined within the undertones of the interplay between epistemological racism, and the emergence of new racism today.

This chapter shall review a substantial portion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational research, with a particular emphasis on the acknowledgment of the impact of racism on the educational outcomes (and other life outcomes) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with a focus on higher education.

This review has found that while there is evidence emerging toward the engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in all forms of education, there is also considerable resistance to targeted efforts to reduce the inequities between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and all Australians (especially within the university sector). It is argued this resistance, both at the student and curriculum level, is clear evidence of preexisting epistemological mentalities and racism.

The implications of this review suggest that greater effort needs to be placed in recognizing unique Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences and perspectives, not only at the student level, but such perspectives need to be imbedded throughout the whole university environment.

This paper aims to compare the health status of Roma in Europe and Aborigines in Australia, examining access to health care (both primary and long‐term), administrative and communication problems, environmental risks associated with location of residences, women's health, substance abuse and mental health.

The paper discusses issues generated by cultural practices by both health care providers and the target groups.

Both Roma and Australian Aborigines have significantly poorer health status than the majority of the societies they are embedded in, and are clearly amongst the most disadvantaged members of their respective societies. Nevertheless, affirmative action programs for Aboriginal people over the last 40 years have produced some significant changes, with Aboriginal doctors and nurses, and culturally appropriate service provision being found in many areas.

Although there are considerable similarities between the health status and situation of Romanies and Australian Aborigines, clearly, there are also substantive differences. The paper suggests possible culturally appropriate service provision for Roma, based on Australian Aboriginal experiences and models.

The situating of pimatisiwin as a framework for spatial justice and self-determination aids educators in strengthening their understandings of Indigenous knowledges to support an authentic inclusion of Indigenous students with disabilities. Through the sharing of Canada’s colonial history, and by critically examining the principles of care within special education, the author exposes its relationship with ableism, normalcy, eugenics, and white privilege to show how Indigenous peoples continue to be marginalized in the twenty-first century. This justice work asks educators to shift their perspectives of inclusion and wellness through the insertion of an Indigenous lens, one to help them see and hear the faces and voices of disabled Aboriginal children and their kinships. The chapter discusses the social model of disability, the psychology of Gentle Teaching, Indigenous ethics, and principles of natural laws through the voices of Nehiyawak and other knowledge keepers, in order to suggest an agenda for educators to come to an understanding of an emancipatory and gentle education. Spatial justice and Indigenous epistemologies merge as synergistic, inclusive, and holistic entities, to support Aboriginal children and youth as both they and those who teach learn to celebrate disabled ontologies. The chapter concludes by presenting how Gentle Teaching and Indigenous ways of knowing should be honored in this quest of creating an equitable, caring, and inclusive society for all disabled Indigenous children and youth.