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INTRODUCTIONIn year 2070, first chroniclers were beginning to record the dimensions of the problem. Their accounts began in 2020, when forces from north landed in strength on Australia's shores, and country capitulated. The foreigners closed Australia's parliaments, social services, business houses, schools, churches, theatres and sports-fields, transferred all private property to their own immigrant settlers, and permanently relocated entire population in tent encampments in arid country areas. By time Australians attracted interest and concern of the chroniclers, their camps were in dispirited disarray. Ragged and rotting tents scarred landscape. Although fifty years had passed since their establishment, camps had none of water, sewerage, sanitation or garbage-disposal facilities of towns. The rations, available from distribution points in exchange for work tokens, were polished rice and weekly supplements of vegetables. Inspectors from Health Ministry were concerned at prevalence of malnutrition, gastroenteritis, anaemia, leprosy, tuberculosis, parasite infestations and respiratory tract infections. The lifestyle conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease contributed heavily to premature mortality of adult population. The babies generally were dying from acute infections. Emotional illness was widespread. Even relatively well-balanced Australians — among them former doctors, teachers, managers, tradespeople, politicians and students — passed days in a depressed malaise, or buoyed up by intoxicants or transient excitement of games of chance. There was some discussion among authorities about whether the high suicide rate and psychological disorders were products of the Australian culture or were a post-invasion phenomenon. Most experts favoured a cultural explanation and rejected suggestions that stresses of camp life might be implicated. Early on, some camp-dwellers had aspired to lead and organize community improvement campaigns, but lost interest when officials, while giving their blessing, refused to relinquish control of any administrative or political functions. Field officers of Department of Australian Advancement made many attempts to solicit co-operation of Australians in running projects devised by Ministry for betterment of the camps. The populace, however, evinced little interest in dog-farming, medicinal-herb cultivation and dry-rice agriculture. The Australians continued to reminisce perversely among themselves about study, books, free enterprise, salaries and job promotion. The officials were kindly, but bewildered. They regretted violent excesses of early days of invasion, but they could not understand the present recalcitrance of Australians; their indifference to the government's exhortations to work fields and improve themselves. Only children, many of whom had no patience for memories, values or traditions of their elders, had mastered new tonal language and its alphabet of characters. Their English-speaking parents seemed either unable or unwilling to master these simple skills themselves. The adults consistently resisted adoption of introduced language, culture or agrarian lifestyle. They also undermined official efforts to recruit the young to a new ideology by covertly teaching them history, English literature, writing and arithmetic. Even more troubling was the failure of people to embrace state religion, a synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist theologies. Most Australians irrationally retained more primitive Christian or agnostic beliefs and seemed foolishly unconcerned about their own enlightenment. The spirit of camps was no less a concern to administrative staff. They deplored internecine strife among camp segments, and extolled the virtues of co-operation between families, whether or not they had known each other or come from same social strata before settlement. And they despaired of propensity of residents to go wandering from camp to camp for no apparent reason, or, at best, to join relatives for archaic festivals, which Australians called birthdays and Christmas. Perhaps most disruptive force within camps was the core of people who talked about their former houses, suburbs and jobs, and about going home. These 'fomenters were few in number, and so were watchfully left alone. However, young dissident settlers in the towns who agitated for home rights for Australians were subject to the attentions of security services. One of government's greatest concerns was health. The new leaders were discomforted by discussions in World Assembly about inferior health status of subject peoples and frequent references to Australians. They argued strenuously that every effort had been made to promote health, that infant mortality, rate was now only four times the national average, and that average life expectancy was only ten to twenty years shorter. Everything that a health service could do had been done — even to training some medical assistants to give out medicines, weigh babies and dress sores. The residual morbidity and mortality, they insisted, was result of conditions in camps, which were not their responsibility, and deleterious customs of Australians. The initiatives of health authorities, government explained to its overseas critics, were being undermined on several fronts. Illicit bands of doctors and nurses (pre-invasion professions no longer recognized) moved among tents at night, tending sick. The patients often failed to come to camp aid stations, where excellent practitioners from mother country offered medical care. Most people seemed unable to grasp the principles of disease causation, patiently explained (though not in English) by health educators. They did not, or could not, appreciate the logic of elemental theory of disease (the bodily balance of earth, fire, air and water) and clung doggedly to a belief in germs, public health, physiological dysfunction and such mystical entities as cancer. Indeed, in all ways, Australians, through ignorance or defiance, thwarted efforts to help them. It was generally agreed that governments can only help those who will help themselves: until Australians recognized manifest benefits of the post-2020 civilization and its medicine, Australian problem would continue to challenge nation. . . It has been said that Western medicine's epitaph will be that it was brilliant in its scientific discoveries, superb in its technological breakthroughs, but woefully inept in its application of knowledge to those most in need. This book is about one of world's societies most in need: Aborigines. It explores the social and ecological disjunctions that have eroded their health, the traditional knowledge and resources that supported health and guided healing, and ways Aborigines are dealing with the changes imposed on them. Since Europeans colonized Australia, Aboriginal health has been the subject of government inquiries, political rhetoric, learned dissertations and classroom exercises. Assaults on Aboriginal health problem have been directed by health departments, specialist teams, missions and Aboriginal health services. But in Australia of late twentieth century, as in apocryphal Australia of the late twenty-first, Aborigines remain sickest people in Australia — a developing nation within a developed country. Why? What are authorities doing wrong? Is it fair to say, as an eminent physician said of one state health department, Aborigines were animals, R.S.P.C.A. would prosecute? Is health the responsibility of health authorities? If not, who is at fault? The white settlers and their descendants? The Aborigines? Is it, perhaps, true that Aborigines' diet, their culture and their lifestyle are inimical to good health?....
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