Health care for Indigenous Australians

The health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been consistently reported as far poorer than that of the rest of the Australian population. This disparity can not be explained by biomedical reasoning or scientific extrapolation alone. There is an assumption that all who read about Indigenous health will have knowledge of who Indigenous Australians are. However, this assumption will be challenged. Many non-Indigenous Australians have had very little contact with Indigenous Australians and know little about the historical context. This issue may lie at the very heart of the debate about Australian Indigenous affairs (McCorquodale 1997). Much of this debate has been entrenched in Social Darwinism — a social theory that attempted to apply Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection with survival of the fittest and adapt it to human populations in an attempt to stratify human cultural and evolutionary development (Attwood 1989: 87 – 8)