Prolonged drought presented substantial and unique adversity for rural NSW Aboriginal communities, compounding existing, underlying disadvantage. Drought-induced degradation of and, sometimes, the necessity to leave traditional land drove people apart and disrupted Caring for Country activities. Some people reported despair at not being able to discharge cultural obligations. At the same time, the drought prompted increased love of and concern for land and a renewed enthusiasm for expressing connectedness to land through all forms of art. Modern Aboriginal and wider community well-being programs helped frame a response to drought alongside traditional Aboriginal dreaming and cultural approaches to emotional health and well-being.
The evident and unresolved health disparity between Aboriginal and other Australians is testament to a history of systematic disenfranchisement. Stigma, lack of appropriate services and the expense of delivering services in remote settings make it impossible to adequately address mental health needs, including suicide, solely using a mainstream medical approach. Nor do mainstream approaches accommodate the relationship between Aboriginal health and connectedness to land, whether traditional or new land, remote or metropolitan. This review describes how caring-for-country projects on traditional lands in remote locations may provide a novel way to achieve the linked goals of climate change adaptation with co-benefits for social and emotional wellbeing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.