Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Can we get real about what's required for true cultural safety in our services? Some of our healers spoke to us when we were doing some research on cultural safety, about walking together in friendship. That true partnership and working together is about walking together in friendship. So if we can't care for each other as people, how do we care for the people that need our help?
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Hello and welcome to this podcast episode, weaving indigenous wisdom into wellbeing. We are honoured today to be able to speak with Professor Helen Milroy, the first indigenous Australian to graduate with a doctor in medicine in Australia.
Throughout this podcast, we will hear Helens profound insights into the importance of social and emotional wellbeing. Underscoring the need for generational healing and advocating for genuine partnerships in service development, Helen seamlessly weaves together western and indigenous knowledge, promoting unity to enhance the wellbeing of Australia's upcoming generations. Thank you and welcome. Professor Milroy, I'm truly grateful to have this opportunity to speak with you today. Would you mind starting off with an introduction?
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Thank you for having me. So, I'm Helen Milroy. I'm a Palku woman. My mob are from the Pilbara region in Western Australia, so that's up around Port Hedland, and my mob are sort of marble bar down to Nullarghine. I grew up in Perth on the beautiful lands of the Wojaknunga people, and it is a beautiful country. I have to say very grateful that they took such good care of it, because I very much enjoyed growing up here on country on their country. And I'm very happy to be living here and working here and bringing up my children and grandchildren here professionally. I'm a professor of child psychiatry, so I studied medicine at the University of Western Australia. I was the first indigenous doctor to go through medicine in Australia. Didn't know at the time, but found out later on. And then I really did find a need to work in the area of trauma for children through various experiences during my training and early work, and so went back and specialised in child psychiatry with a focus on indigenous children and recovery from trauma.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: Helen, your story is truly remarkable and inspiring. Being the first indigenous doctor in Australia must have been an extraordinary journey. I can only imagine the challenges and triumphs you faced along the way. Could you share more about what that was like?
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Well, I didn't know, of course, at the time, but look, I had, you know, healers in my family and looking after people and understanding their stories. And this idea of wellbeing was something that was very much part of growing up in an aboriginal family. My grandmother in particular talked a lot about that when I was a kid, and we had a lot of time at home together. Growing up, I really sort of took, I suppose, her philosophy on, which was about being good to people and looking after people. And that was very much how she was. She always looked after us. And then I think that, you know, I just went through school and, you know, went through university, and there were no special programs for aboriginal students at that point. Afterwards, of course, some years later, the University of Newcastle got all the aboriginal graduates together across Australia. And that's when we found out that no one had graduated before me. But thank goodness we put in programs and pathways, because it's a lonely path to tread. And when you feel like you're a novelty or a bit out of place, you don't really know what to do, so you just do the best you can. And I was pretty young back then, of course, because it was an undergraduate course, so straight out of high school into university. But I think that, you know, my mum and nan had always said, you can do whatever you put your mind to. So I just kept going.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: That's an amazing story. During your studies, did you encounter any tensions between the healing wisdom passed down from your grandma and the approaches in psychology and psychiatry?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Well, there's nothing taught. I mean, when I went through psychiatry, I saw a lot of things that I didn't agree with. I saw things that were happening to aboriginal people in the system that just weren't right, that weren't right from a cultural perspective. And I remember going to my director of training at the time and saying, look, you know, we don't learn anything about aboriginal people, and yet some of their experiences are very different. There's no cultural aspects of care. And they said, well, go and write some curriculum. So I did. And then I developed a dance of life model, which is a wellbeing model. It's a more holistic way to work. And I started teaching, you know, all of that sort of stuff, ways of knowing, being and doing. And eventually, you know, we got the CDaM's curriculum up in medical schools, which was a curriculum devoted to understanding aboriginal culture and health in an aboriginal context for medical schools. And then that went up through to the colleges as well. So eventually there's a sort of curriculum framework that gets used in all of the specialty colleges, including psychiatry, but it's not enough. I mean, we still have a long way to go. I don't think you ever stop learning. And I think that's one of the issues is how do people get that more advanced learning about culture and cultural ways of doing things if there's no one to sort of further that training for them, it can be difficult.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: Is it possible to educate individuals outside the aboriginal community to engage in this field? Or does the real challenge lie in motivating practitioners to put the acquired knowledge into practice?
[00:05:04] Speaker A: We have some legislation, we have some policy frameworks, we have curriculum, but the translation of all of that into practice is different again. And I think what we haven't really done is support, I think the workforce to be able to implement some of these strategies and some of these ways of working in a safe way. And there's resources go into training, but they're not the implementation, which is always the problem. And then, of course, there's often not any evaluation either. So we don't really know how well the training is. Training may have been really well received, but then how is it then translated down the track? And I think what tends to happen with something like aboriginal cultural is we get the same cultural awareness program over and over again, a little bit like an annual fire safety lecture, and it starts to become old hat or people start to tune out. What they need is the base foundational knowledge, and then they need to build skills above that and become more sophisticated. And I think that's where we haven't quite met the training needs either.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: What would you think would be the things that would make a difference?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: I think we need to have more supervision, more cultural supervision, that sort of cultural mentoring as well. I think we could develop things like elders councils for certain services and then developing those really true, authentic, genuine partnerships with the aboriginal services. So we have that crossover. And I think that when you embed aboriginal staff within your services and they work in a cultural way, it does build up your cultural knowledge in the whole system. But if you never sort of progress it, it stays at a base level. So I think we need to really support all of those developments right throughout the whole system and also give people perhaps the chance to work more closely with communities. I mean, sometimes a cultural immersion can be a really good learning experience, you know, where people might work in a community for a period of time or develop those longer term relationships with communities. That's often the best way of really getting that on the job. Training is that cultural mentorship and experience of working with our communities sounds like.
[00:06:56] Speaker C: A lot of advocacy for social justice. What drives you to keep going?
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Got to be good to people. That was my grandmother's philosophy and part of that philosophy comes from saying, well, you've got to be good to people because you might be related. At the end of the day, we all want our families to do well. We all want our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren to do well. I'm a grandma now, so I want my little grandson to have the best life he can. And I think we've got a lot to offer. You know, I think we've got a ancient knowledge system that stood the test of time, kept us healthy and well for thousands of years. We've got some pretty cool things about our culture and the way of doing things and the way of being in the world that I think are good for everyone. It would be nice to be able to share that knowledge in a really positive way, an empowering way.
[00:07:39] Speaker C: That would be quite a unique set of skills and knowledges. You must feel quite fortunate being within the sector that you work, given its ancient roots.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: I think there's a two way sharing and learning thing that we have here in Australia. So we have this. We have this really the oldest knowledge system in the world. Aboriginal culture is very much that, and that's thousands of years of observational learning and living within the environment. And we had an extensive way of developing bush medicines and other sorts of knowledges around nature. And then we have this new knowledge system, which has some advantage as well. So we have new science and new ways of understanding life and wellbeing. And if we put the two together, then Australia is going to be the best place in the world. Best of both worlds.
[00:08:19] Speaker C: You've been quite prolific in your recent writing endeavours, and I understand it began with a dance of life. You mentioned earlier. Is that where your journey in writing began?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: So I developed that model purely out of need because there was no cultural training in psychiatry at the time. And then I developed further concepts around trauma and grief and loss and recovery and healing and all of those sorts of things. And they had more mental health type of concepts and understandings and experiences. And so there's, you know, there's a painting, there's a narrative or a story, plus a framework for an understanding of what that means and how you might think about that when you're dealing with these particular issues. But more recently, I guess, I have gone into writing stories more for children or for community, those more universal stories, very much from an indigenous storytelling perspective. So everything's alive, everything has spirit, everything's in relationship, and, you know, that's how you problem solve within those relationships. And I think also because many kids don't grow up with stories, those sorts of indigenous stories that used to be passed down. You know, for some children, they're very. They have those fragmented lives. They may be in out of home care or be in juvenile justice, and they miss out. So part of writing stories for children was also to embed them back in that sort of cultural knowledge and that way of being in the world.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: It's incredible how you initially developed your model, out of necessity, due to lack of cultural training in psychiatry, expanding into trauma and mental health concepts, and your recent focus on universal indigenous storytelling, especially for children, to reconnect them with cultural knowledge and a holistic worldview. What are the things that you would learn through storytelling that supported children's wellbeing?
[00:10:00] Speaker A: So there's a lot of science to storytelling, actually. And if you look at it from the value perspective, it's the oldest form of learning that we have in the world. If you think about your own life, you probably remember it through stories and through life lessons, which are part of stories, we also develop our own sense of, through knowing our own personal narrative. So being able to tell your own story is a really important skill so that you know who you are, where you come from, where you want to go. All that is part of storytelling. Storytelling also helps us to develop insight and our own judgment. So it's a gentle way to learn about life and resilience, rather than being instructional. It allows you to think about it and develop your own sense of problem solving or whatever, what the solutions might be for you. So it encourages autonomy. And we know that autonomy in children is a good thing. It also helps you to develop insight, which is also a good thing. It can develop empathy, cultural understanding, and it connects you back to culture and nature. It embeds you in an ecological framework so you can feel connected to things around you. So it has numerous benefits. If you look at it from a developmental perspective. It helps with language, with listening, taking turns, it helps with attachment with your parents when you do storytelling together.
So on a developmental level, it meets a whole pile of things that are good for development as well. So overall, it's one of the best ways for children to learn.
[00:11:20] Speaker C: How might a practitioner who might be working with children support these stories through, if they're using books, how might they support that with the child they're working with?
[00:11:30] Speaker A: So I think that with stories in general, most stories, there's a lot of stories for little kids, and we tend to think that, you know, stories is part of childhood, but stories is part of life. So stories can be used throughout your whole lifetime stories are good for older people as well. So to be able to tell, to listen, and to make up stories is using your imagination. And what we know from development is that when you can use your imagination and your creativity as a child, then you're far more likely to be resilient and innovative as an adult. So maintaining that developmental process throughout life is a good thing. So I think for anyone working with younger children to encourage that storytelling is a really important part, not only of their resilience lifelong, but also those other developmental tasks that we spoke about. And I think the difference with perhaps indigenous storytelling is that it does embed children within nature, that ecological framework that I spoke about. And so the importance of that is that then the child doesn't just feel attached to people, they feel attached to land, to animals, to nature, which means that they have a greater sense of who they are in the world. There's not. So that same sense of isolation, and they also have a role. So if your totem is a kangaroo, then you know you've got brothers all over the place in Australia, because that's the kangaroo. Brothers and sisters are your kangaroo and you look after them. So you've got an immediate role as well. And that can strengthen that sense of purpose and place. And for those children who don't feel purpose in place, that can help restore that sense of who they are and the value that they have in society.
[00:13:08] Speaker C: Absolutely. Your perspective on the lifelong importance of storytelling, fostering imagination, resilience and innovation from childhood to adulthood is profound. What was the process like for you?
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Well, people always ask me if the stories come first or the pictures come first, and it can be either or. So. Sometimes I get the story and I'm thinking about something and the story just comes to me and it's there. It's like in peripheral vision, and then it suddenly comes full circle and I kind of get the story. And when it comes full circle, I've just got to write it, you know, I've just got to be there and do it while it's all coming out. It's like a creative process, and it's the same with the images. If I get the image first or I see something and I'm thinking about it and that image is held in my mind suddenly, then this story forms around it, and sometimes they just come together. So it's a variable process. But I think the thing is, if you just spend a little bit of time and think about these things that you're observing, then the story comes. You don't have to create it. It creates itself, and so do the images, and that's the creative space that I think is the most important. It's the mindset you create where you free yourself up from control and you allow it to come out and you allow it to sort of be influenced by maybe things that you would normally not even think about, because you've got this logical sort of control going on all the time. And then things just come from the universe and create this unique or magic in the story, which is the best part of it. You know, when you kind of get to the end and you go, wow. And you kind of think, oh, that's really good. And you don't even know that you've done it. It's almost like it creates itself, and then that's the best part of it. It's a lovely experience to go through as a process.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: Your insight into the creative process, whether initiated by a story or an image, beautifully highlights the magic of narratives.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: The books have actually gone extremely well. All of the stories have been really well received. And one of the series that I did was called Backyard Birds, bugs and beasties. And it was about, I think, allowing children during lockdown with COVID you know, instead of kind of focusing on all the anxiety and worry that was about to say, hey, listen, you know, there's all these beautiful things that live in your backyard and come and visit you, particularly our beautiful birds. And I was sitting at the back one day, and I think I counted 19 species of birds that had come in one day to say hello. And I thought, isn't it a wonderful thing? You know, we've got all of these people or creatures, I should say not people, creatures around us that we can have a relationship with. So then I started riding the birds, and I think everyone knows birds visit their backyard. I think every kid in Australia looks out for birds in the park or at the school or in their backyard. And so it was about saying, well, don't just look at them. Think about them as a relationship. Think about, how do you look after the birds and the joy that the birds bring you? So it's a reciprocal relationship. And then I started thinking about the bird sounds and learning bird languages. So I think I've trained all of these kids in Australia to go out and warble to magpies, but that's in about then saying, okay, so as the world got smaller because of COVID suddenly the world in your backyard got bigger because there's all of these relationships you can have with the birds, with the insects, with the beasties. That come in and inhabit your backyard. And so suddenly that sense of connection, place, purpose again, is reinforced.
[00:16:17] Speaker C: What an amazing ability to be able to pull all that together. How does stress and burnout influence our creative capacity? And why is it crucial to tap into creative elements during challenging times?
[00:16:29] Speaker A: So what some of the science tells us is that when you're very stressed and perhaps not feeling so good or even feeling some sort of, or experiencing some sort of burnout, that's when we need to be our most creative. That's when we need those creative skills and those imagination skills. Because what comes with creativity and imagination and in storytelling is hope. There's always hope in stories, and you can always control the narrative, and, you know, the future can be whatever you want it to be. And so I think that what we tend to do is we shut down those creative mechanisms when we're feeling stressed, but that's actually the time when we should be looking for those creative elements. And it's not necessarily drawing or storytelling or, or, you know, music, which people tend to think. That's the creative arts, but it's the mindset that you create. So even gardening or cooking, lots of things can be creative if you allow yourself to be free and let your mind soar, really, and allow things around you to just to be present and to allow things to come into focus that you wouldn't normally focus on. Sometimes my most lovely times are sitting out in the garden and just listening to the birds, feeling the breeze on my face, looking at the trees. And then I get some kind of clarity comes into my mind, or I get a story, or I get an image, and then that spurs me on to do something else. And I think we need those moments, we need those contemplative moments, that deep listening to the universe.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: How could a non aboriginal practitioner, say, a youth worker, or somebody who is working with children, maybe an early education, what can they do to support these processes?
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Well, I think they're universal, you know, I think they're good for children of any culture to be able to have creativity and imagination, to feel like they connect, to feel a place and a purpose, to know themselves, to feel confident in the way they make their judgments and decisions. And that all comes from storytelling, and that's good for everyone. Indigenous storytelling embeds them more into an ecological framework, so it's another element. But I also think that's good for all children to know that they can have a relationship with nature. Nature can be healing in itself and is actually a common way for people to get healing. Is to be out on country or in nature. A lot of cultural groups will tell you that it's not just strictly aboriginal, but from our perspective, it was very, very important because our role in life was really to celebrate creation and to look after the earth and to look after everything around us that makes you connected forever. And it sort of also gives you this sense that you can't really be lost or alone in your own country because you've got all of these things around you in relationship and that you have a unique place. So you're irreplaceable from that perspective, which also helps you to feel stronger about your sense of life and your sense of purpose as you go forward. And I think reinforcing any of those sorts of thoughts or values is a good thing.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: How do you perceive the difference between the mainstream mental health services deficit based model and the aboriginal model, which prioritises a strength based approach centred on social emotional wellbeing?
[00:19:31] Speaker A: So I think the trouble with a lot of mental health services, and particularly some of the mainstream mental health services, we are very much focused on an illness model. So we're focused on what's wrong with you and what's wrong with your family, and it is that sort of deficit based model, and there might be a little bit of a talk about your strengths at the end of that, but it's focused on what's wrong. Whereas the aboriginal model comes from a strength based process, so it's a social and emotional wellbeing model and it's about what keeps you strong. And where have things gone sort of wrong, really, in a way that has allowed you to become distressed or unwell. So it comes from that strength perspective first. And I think that feels more empowering for people so that they kind of have a sense of, you know, this has all happened to me and, you know, I've got through it, so at least I've had shown some resilience. And I think to have that process of understanding what's happened and what their story is, is a much gentler and nicer way to deal with people. Otherwise it's very disempowering, isn't it, to sort of just be, well, this went wrong, you've got all of these problems, but in actual fact, wow, wasn't it fantastic that you actually got here after all of that, as opposed to, you know, this is your problem and this is what you need to do. It's too instructional and it's too disempowering. So I think some of the really important messages to understand is that children are our future. They always are. You know, the way we treat our children, the way we nurture them, how we empower them, how we, I think, support them. They're in our future because they're going to be our leaders, you know, tomorrow. And not only that, but they're going to be looking after us. So I've got a vested interest in making sure they're, you know, they're really well looked after. So the future doesn't rest with us. It rests in how we bring up our children. So the most important role that we have as adults in life is to bring about the wellbeing of our children, to safeguard future generations. That's the most important thing. And some of the ways that we do that is that we have to understand the magnitude of what happened in Australia. We are still recovering from genocide, and that is no easy thing to do. It is going to take generations of healing for that to actually occur in a good way. And we're not there yet. We're a long way off from that. So if we don't understand magnitude, then we're missing the mark in what's really required to restore families, to restore our population structure. At the moment, our population is very young. We have a lot of children, which is fantastic, but we have less adults and we have very few grandparents and elders, so we don't have a normal population. We've got to be able to have a generational program where we grow really healthy babies and they grow up strong and healthy and happy to become grandparents at the right age, not when they're 20.
Probably couldn't do that. But you know what I mean, not prematurely, but, you know, in their seventies and eighties and nineties, that's where we want people to live long lives for. And that way then we have that buffering. So at the moment, we're not buffering our families. There's not enough adults to go around to look after all the kids. And so the kids are bringing up kids and that's not fair. That doesn't allow them then those happy, safe childhoods to go up. They've got too much burden on their shoulders. So we need to understand magnitude. We need to understand the population, the strange structure that we have at the moment, what's required over generational recovery to do that? That's not to say we shouldn't also be taking care of the present. There's a lot of distress out there at the moment. There's, you know, high rates of suicide and self harm in some of our young people. We have to address that crisis then. But if we only put money into the crisis in, we're missing out on developing good families, strong families, nurturing families, safe families, and we've got to put that effort in there so that we build that population back up to a healthy level. I think the second thing that we need to also think about is the way we design our services as well. So at the moment, the services are very much built on western models, certainly our mainstream services. And yet some of our knowledge and our systems from a cultural perspective have kept us in good stead for thousands of years. Can't we marry these two? Can't we get real about what's required for true cultural safety in our services? Some of our healers spoke to us when we were doing some research on cultural safety, about working together in friendship, that true partnership, and working together is about walking together in friendship, the most important factor being friendship. So if we can't care for each other as people, how do we care for the people that need our help? And I don't think we ever see friendship written in any partnership agreements. That's authentic. Partnership is friendship. So I think that's a whole different way of thinking about how we sort of develop our services.
[00:23:57] Speaker C: You spoke earlier about the importance of seeing strength. Could you expand on that a little?
[00:24:02] Speaker A: At the moment, some of the press, you know, around aboriginal issues is, you know, kids running amok in communities, high rates of juvenile crime, high rates of drinking. That's not us. That's trauma. You know, that's the impact of generations of trauma. The real us is people who want to celebrate life, who want to have a holistic view around healing, who want to have strong, safe, stable, nurturing relationships. We have a lot of strengths. We have a lot of healing ways which are really, really good. For example, some of the sort of therapeutic massage that some of our communities do is amazing. You know, you would pay a lot of money for one of those, you know, services, but we tend to relegate a lot of the stuff in the aboriginal group as kind of myth or legend, and yet it's actually based on thousands of years of observational learning. So it's actually got a good science to it, but we don't see it like that. And so I think it's time we really thought about the strength side of things and bring that into our everyday practice to enrich what we do.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: How do you balance western concepts of evidence based and what community is saying works for them?
[00:25:08] Speaker A: When you look at a lot of the clinical trials or the science, it's based on small samples, it's based on only certain parts of the population. There's a lot of clinical trials that never include very complicated people or the sorts of people that we might have in some of our communities with lots of comorbidity. So, you know, the evidence base is actually limited for a lot of things. But we don't think of it like that. We think, oh, but it's evidence based. It depends what you think evidence is. There's no reason why thousands of years of observational learning would be considered any different than some scientific clinical trial. It's evidence. It's evidence of what works and knowledge that's been built up over a long time. The other thing is, is how knowledge and evidence is represented. So, for example, if you did a workshop, probably at the end of the workshop, you'd have some kind of survey that says, did you learn anything? One to five, some sort of Leichhardt scale that says, yes, I learned this, and blah, blah, blah. In our way of doing it, what a lot of people would do is they would draw pictures during the workshop and then at the end of that, they would tell you a story about what they'd learn. It's conceptual, it's deep thinking, it's much more comprehensive than a Leichardt scale. And yet we don't call that evidence. That's just nonsense, absolute nonsense. There was a famous painting done for a native title tribunal, I think it was up in the north west of western Australia. And instead of writing a 200 page submission that had, you know, genealogy and blah, blah, blah, what they did to prove continuity of culture was they painted their canvas that showed their country. It was a map of their country. They danced on the canvases, they did ceremony, they did songs, they did stories. So their whole body of knowledge about culture and land was there was all demonstrated in front of you. Now, that looks very, very different, but that was evidence, because you couldn't know that if you weren't from there. And that, to me, was far more powerful than a 200 page written submission. So I think we've got to get past this notion that western science knows best here tells them.
[00:27:11] Speaker C: So you're parting words of wisdom to whoever might be listening to this. What would you really encourage them to connect with?
[00:27:18] Speaker A: I guess what I would like to say to our listeners is that we have this beautiful country. Australia is a magnificent country, and part of the reason why it's a magnificent country is that our ancestors took care of it for you. We loved it, we looked after it. We loved everything about it and everything in it. We looked after the animals, the waterways, the sky, the sea, and we still do today. And there's nothing wrong with you taking part of that with us now. We live together, and learning to live together well is going to be something we need to think about a little bit more. But it's the way of the future. We can learn from you, you can learn from us. A culture that survived so many environmental changes over thousands of years must have some pretty good ways for understanding how to care for country. How to understand caring for country during climate challenges, for example. We can learn from that. It's really interesting to me that as we develop more science, we go back to saying, wow, the indigenous ways of doing things was actually right. Let's stop doing that. Let's just say it's a given. We actually were pretty good at this stuff. Why don't we just use that knowledge base now to go forward together? Everyone is welcome to be here because you've been born of this country now and you are part of mother Earth. So let's take our places up together, stand together, united and go forward. Combining both cultural knowledge bases, western and indigenous, and move together for the benefit of all of our children. Every child born in Australia now, every child who comes to live here now, should benefit from everything Australia has to offer. And that includes us.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: This has now concluded this podcast as we draw to a close. I find myself enriched by the profound insights Helen generously shared. Her wisdom illuminated the healing power of creativity, crafting a narrative of hope amid challenging times. Thank you Helen, for sharing your invaluable insights. It has been an honour.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com dot au to access a range of resources to assist your practice brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health program.
