An Overview of Statutory and Administrative Datasets: Describing the Health of Victoria’s Aboriginal Infants, Children and Young People

Published in 2009 by Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit, The University of Melbourne

The Real Oliver Twist, Robert Blincoe: A Life that Illuminates a Violent Age

by John Waller

published in 2005 by Icon Books Ltd, Cambridge , UK

In 1972, as revolution, riot and sedition spread across Europe , Robert Blincoe was born in rural St Pancras parish. At four he was abandoned to the workhouse; at seven, he was sent north to the cotton mills of the dawning industrial age where he suffered years of unrelenting abuse. But like Dickens' most famous character, Blincoe remained unbroken and fought back against those who put profit before humanity. The Real Oliver Twist provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of labouring men and women in Georgina and Victorian England. And it tells the remarkable story of a man who, despite terrible suffering, became a devoted father and benevolent employer, and who helped secure changes in the law to protect other children from unscrupulous factory masters.

Sex and Suffering: Women's Health and a Women's Hospital, The Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne , 1856–1996

by Janet McCalman

published in 1998 by Melbourne University Press, Carlton , Vic.

Sex and Suffering is a vivid and absorbing social history of women's health, seen through the work of Australia 's oldest women's hospital. It offers an illuminating and graphic history of childbirth in Australia; of the medical care of women; of nursing work; of revolutions in sexuality, fertility control and gender roles; and of the impact of immigration on Australian society. For the first time in the English-speaking world, a historian has been permitted to work directly from patient records. Thousands of detailed case notes, from the 1850s to the 1930s, have remarkably survived intact.

Killer Commodities: Public Health and the Corporate Production of Harm

Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health

On the World of the Sixty-Nine Tram

by Jane McCalman

published in 2006 by Melbourne University Press, Carlton , Vic.

Janet McCalman writes about people and the environments, events and forces that shape them this extract from her award-winning book Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle-Class Generation 1920–1990 is a vivid account of the school years of Australians who were young in the 1930s, and are grandparents and great-grandparents now.

Settling with Indigenous People

by Marcia Langton, Odette Mazel, Lisa Palmer, Kathryn Shain and Maureen Tehan

published in 2006 by The Federation Press, Annandale , NSW

Settling with Indigenous People describes the making of ten contemporary, mostly Australian, local and regional agreements and details the avenues through which such agreements can be implemented and sustained. The Australian regional agreements concern South West Australia, the Murray–Darling Basin , and Cape York . There is a chapter about the return of the Maralinga lands to its traditional owners and one detailing two local government agreements in central and southwest Australia . Urban agreements in Darwin and Vancouver are compared and there are also chapters on the North West Territories and Northern Quebec in Canada and the Ngai Tahu in the South Island of New Zealand.

Women Miners in Developing Countries

edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt & Martha Macintyre

published in 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot , UK

Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, capitalized operations as the only form of mining when mines move into new areas of developing countries, it is no surprise that the construction of mining as a masculine area of work generally helps men to grab the economic benefits leaving women to bear the many negative impacts. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific Region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners it also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American ones. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and, in doing so, it illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.

Technologies and Health: Critical Compromises

edited by Jeanne Daly, Marilys Guillemin & Sophie Hill

published in 2001 by Oxford University Press, Melbourne

Technologies have become part of everyday life, impacting on our health, on health care, and on the way in which health is understood and managed. Technologies and Health: Critical Compromises raises important sometimes troubling questions about the role of technology and its relation to health. Using the notion of critical compromise as an organizing framework, the potential benefits and detriments of a broad range of health technologies are debated. The technologies addressed range from more obvious medical technologies used in diagnosis surveillance, and treatment of disease to more general technological systems and social processes, such as public transport and the incarceration of patients.

Lookin' After Our Own: Supporting Aboriginal Families through the Hospital Experience

by Angela Clarke, Shawana Andrews & Neville Austin

published in 1999 by the Aboriginal Family Support Unit, Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne

At the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne a partnership between the hospital and the Aboriginal community has driven change and improved access of Aboriginal children to paediatric health services. This book frankly describes the journey, details the combination of top down and bottom up strategies and outlines an enhanced Aboriginal liaison role. It is not a recipe but it will provide ideas for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians interested in improving the use of mainstream services by Aboriginal people.

Talkin' Up Good Air Kit

by the Centre for Excellence in Tobacco Control

published in 2007 by Onemda Koori Health Research Unit, The University of Melbourne

This is a tobacco control resource kit for Indigenous Australian communities that assists health professionals and community and education workers to become community leaders in tobacco control. It also aims to raise tobacco control as a priority in Indigenous communities and to build community ownership in tobacco control. This is a practical manual that encourages community action and is full of information for health professionals, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workers.

Nyernila Koories Kila Degaia: Listen up to Koories Speak about Health

edited by Joan Vickery, Angela Clarke & Karen Adams

published in 2005 by the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc., Melbourne.

Nyernila Koories Kila Degaia: Listen up to Koories Speak about Health documents the struggle—in the words of Koories who led the struggle—to provide responsive health care to Koorie people throughout Victoria . In tracing the development of Koorie health care from the haphazard, remote and imposing mainstream services to the formation of today's more culturally responsive and community controlled services and programs.

Leaps in the Dark: The Making of Scientific Reputations

by John Waller

published in 2002 by Oxford University Press, Oxford , UK

Leaps in the Dark offers a refreshing and eye-opening look at scientific discoveries and at the shaping of scientific reputations from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. John Waller challenges many of our received views about how scientific discoveries occur and how great scientific reputations are won.

Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives

edited by Anne-Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre, Vera Mackie & Maila Stivens

published in 2000 by Routledge , New York .

In recent years, the slogan ‘women's rights are human rights' has become a central claim of the global women's movement. Human Rights and Gender Politics examines the critical issues raised by this embracing and expansion of the human rights discourse by feminists world-wide. Through detailed case studies drawn from the Asia-Pacific region, this book explores the tensions between an apparently universalizing discourse of human rights and increasing awareness of the complexities of women's politics of difference. It questions how feminists negotiate controversial issues such as ‘rights' and ‘cultural relativism', and argues for an increased focus on the ways in which human rights claims are embedded in highly specific local contexts, histories and struggles.

Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the Health of Aboriginal Men

by Brian F. McCoy

published in 2008 by Aboriginal Studies Press, Acton, ACT.

Holding Men is an accessible work that explores how Indigenous men understand their lives, their health and their culture. Using conversations, stories and art, McCoy shows how Kimberley desert communities have a cultural value and relationship described as kanyirninpa or holding (one of the key values that has sustained Aboriginal desert life for centuries). The author uses examples from Australian Rules football, petrol sniffing and imprisonment to reveal the possibilities for lasting improvements to men's health based on kanyirninpa's expression of deep and enduring cultural values and relationships. While young Indigenous men's lives remain vulnerable in a rapidly changing world, McCoy believes that an understanding of kanyirninpa may provide the hope of change and better health for all. It also offers positive insights for all who wish to ‘grow up' their young people.

Health Policy and Politics: Networks, Ideas and Power

by Jenny M. Lewis

published in 2005 by IP Communications, East Hawthorn, Vic.

Health Policy and Politics employs leading-edge thinking about governance, policy and administration, and provides a new framework for thinking critically about health policy. Lewis' approach characterises health policy as a network of interactions between people, organizations, structures and ideas. The formal and informal interconnections between people and organisations, the structuring of which ideas can be discussed and in what terms, and the location and use of power are central to the analytical framework.

by Jane Freemantle

published in 2004 by the Advisory Council on the Prevention of Deaths and Children and Young People, Department for Community Development, Government of Western Australia, Perth .

This report provides a comprehensive description of the patterns and trends of deaths of Western Australian born infants, children and young people, from 1980 to 2002. It establishes ‘how' and ‘where' they dies and some possible important risk factors. It invites further research into the ‘why' they died in order to discover common pathways to these deaths and to identify pathways to prevention.

edited by Ian Anderson, Fran Baum & Michael Bentley

published in 2007 by the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, Darwin.

This collection of papers presents a perspective on how a range of social and economic factors—including culture, law, education, employment, models of governance, and social and community interactions—affect the health of Aboriginal Australians. They also suggest fruitful directions for further inquiry into how these factors can be made more health promoting.

by Jane Freemantle, Kirsty Officer, Daniel McCaullay & Ian Anderson

published in 2007 by the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, Darwin.

This report considers published peer-reviewed and government accounts of health outcomes for Aboriginal people over the past decade. It particularly focuses on the aboriginal peoples of Australia , New Zealand , Canada and the USA . It places the reports in the context of the history, structure and data quality of the countries considered. The report also includes selected case studies that outline Indigenous programs that have had a impact in improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people.

by Merrill Singer and Hans Baer

This new text provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical anthropology. It is structured around three unifying themes. First, medical anthropology is actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the world through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives. Second, illness and disease cannot be fully understood or effectively addressed by treating them solely as biological in nature; rather, health problems involve complex biosocial processes and resolving them requires attention to a range of factors, including systems of belief, structures of social relationships, and environmental conditions. Third, through an examination of health inequalities on one hand, and environmental degradation and environment-related illness on the other, the authors emphasize the need for a comprehensive medical anthropology that integrates biological, cultural, and social factors in order to understand the origin of ill health and to contribute to more effective and equitable health care systems.

Trachoma: A Blinding Scourge from the Bronze Age to the Twenty-First Century

by Hugh R Taylor

Hugh Taylor presents a fascinating and comprehensive review of Trachoma, from ancient times through to the present. He includes predictions and recommendations for its elimination. Trachoma, has been targeted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for elimination by 2020 and currently affects 84 million children in 56 countries and blinds 1.5 million adults. This seminal and highly readable work will be invaluable for anyone who is interested in trachoma, but will also appeal to those interested in the interface of public health and development, the history of medicine or health care development.

written in collaboration with a group of Aboriginal healthworkers in WA, Bill Genat’s book documents the day-to-day practice of Aboriginal healthworkers.

The book looks at the unique way in which healthworkers bring health care to the Aboriginal community and describes how, almost every day as they visit clients in their homes, AHWs face the consequences of history—the exclusion, cultural oppression and racism that still undermine the health of Aboriginal people.

It also describes how often healthworkers find themselves responding to clients caught up in personal and family problems, often related to housing and lack of income, that demand immediate responses and shift their own and the client’s attention away from clinical health management. There are also detailed accounts of how, despite a serious lack of professional recognition and support, AHWs respond to their important work and have developed their own unique, Indigenous healing practice.

The book is published by the University of Western Australia Press.

Telling Moments
Everyday Ethics in Health Care
 
by Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne

published by IP Communications

Telling Moments explores ethical practice across the range of health care disciplines. It focuses not only on ethical analysis and decision-making, but also on the more subtle, and often more important art of ‘ethical mindfulness’.

The book presents five very personal stories of health care practice, and engages in depth with each of them. Through these stories, readers are introduced to a narrative approach to health ethics that first acknowledges everyday ethics in health care as significant. The approach combines conventional bioethics principles, sociology, and narrative analysis to understand what is ethically at stake in these stories, and provide a way of engaging with the stories. The aim is to promote ethical mindfulness and enhance ethical practice in health care, in ways that are informed not just by abstract ethical principles but by real life events.

An Introduction to the Psychotherapies
Fourth Edition
 
edited by Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, St Vincent's Hospital, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

published by IP Communications

Psychotherapy is a nebulous term with widely different connotations. Anyone embarking on training in psychotherapy will find themselves faced with a bewildering range of possible therapies from which to choose. Which treatments are effective? What theories underlie a particular treatment method? What techniques are used in a particular treatment? In what circumstances is a particular treatment appropriate? In what circumstances is it inappropriate?

In the past thirty years, Sidney Bloch's Introduction to the Psychotherapies has established itself as the leading introductory text to the field. In short, accessible chapters by leading practitioners, it outlines the leading therapies, noting for each one the definitions, aims, assessment, and practice, coupled with the essential references.  For the 4th edition, the chapters have been extensively revised and updated, taking into account the developments in the 10 years since publication of the 3rd edition.  Chapters have been added on research in psychotherapy, cognitive-analytic psychotherapy, the conversational model and psychotherapy with older adults and on a rather different note, a chapter setting the psychotherapies in an historical context.

This book will remain the core text for undergraduate students in psychology, who are considering training in clinical psychology, along with anyone in the fields of mental health and general medicine looking for an accessible overview of this huge and often confusing field.

Blood Matters: A Social History of the Victorian Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service

by Matthew KlugmanPublished by Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd

In 1929 the Victorian Red Cross Division established Australia’s first major Blood Transfusion Service. Blood Matters explores what it means to rely on the gift of blood, interweaving the stories of donors and recipients, the Red Cross and its Blood Service, metropolitan and rural communities, and hospitals and governments.

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

by Warwick Anderson
Published by Basic Books

Health and History Special Issue: Aboriginal Health and History

Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine

edited by Ian P. S. Anderson & Kim Humphery in 2007

This edition includes an editorial introduction to the edition, and articles on ‘The “Colouring of the Psychosis”: Interpreting Insanity of the Primitive Mind' by Caitlin Murray; ‘Psychiatry at the Frontier: Surveying Aboriginal Mental Health in the Era of Assimilation' by Edmund McMahon; ‘“They Weren't Separated”: Missions, Dormitories and Generational Health' by Brian McCoy; ‘Fear, Trust and Aborigines: The Historical Experience of State Institutions and Current Encounters in the Health System' by Leonie Cox; ‘Australian Aboriginal Women's Health: Reflecting on the Past and Present' by Bronwyn Fredericks; ‘The Historical Context of Developing an Aboriginal Community-Controlled Health Service: A Social History of the First Ten Years of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress' by Clive Rosewarne, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, Stephanie Bell, Elizabeth Carter, Margaret Liddle and Johnny Liddle, and ‘The Colonial Medicine of Settler States: Comparing Histories of Indigenous Health' by Warwick Anderson.

Honour Among Nations: Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People

edited by Marcia Langton, Maureen Tehan, Lisa Palmer and Kathryn Shain

published by Melbourne University Press

Honour Among Nations contains contributions from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors from Australia, New Zealand and North America. It covers topics as diverse as treaty and agreement making in Australia, New Zealand and British Columbia; land, the law, political rights and Indigenous peoples; maritime agreements; health; governance and jurisdiction; race discrimination in Australia; the Timor Sea Treaty; copyright and intellectual property issues for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.