Gary Foley, July 1972. Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy / SEARCH Foundation
Expelled from school at the age of 15, Gary Foley is today a history professor at Victoria University. As a Gumbainggir man born in 1950s Australia, he’s also a living witness to history.
Instrumental in the foundation of Australia’s first Aboriginal self-help organisations including the original Aboriginal Medical Service – as well as Redfern’s legendary Aboriginal Legal Service and the Tent Embassy in Canberra – Dr Foley is also an actor, activist and archivist as well as an academic.
Dr Foley recently spoke with ANMF about what it took to set up the Aboriginal Health Service(s) and their legacy, as well as reflecting on Victoria’s current Treaty process and the Yoorrook Justice Commission.
600 reasons why it was impossible…
‘In 1970 the Aboriginal community of Sydney was the largest in Australia,’ Dr Foley writes in Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service 1971–1991, ‘and yet a Koori person seeking medical help had only two options – to visit a general practitioner or attend the outpatients’ department of a public hospital. Neither option was satisfactory. At that time GPs and hospitals insisted on cash in advance from Kooris, and the overt racism experienced in all local hospitals discouraged Kooris from attending in all but emergency cases…
‘The situation was so grim [that] in some cases Kooris would literally rather die than be subjected to degrading, humiliating treatment at the hands of non-Aboriginal health workers.’
In response, Foley and others such as Wiradjuri man Paul Coe set up ‘a free shop-front medical service in Redfern, adopting a similar community-controlled structure to the Aboriginal Legal Service’ they had established the year before.
‘After we set up the legal service,’ Foley tells ANMF, ‘we got approached by Mum Shirl [Wiradjuri social worker and activist Coleen Shirley Perry Smith], the reigning matriarch of Redfern. She put it to us that there were serious health problems in the local community. She said: why can’t we set up a medical service like the legal services you blokes have set up?’
Alongside Mum Shirl, Foley, Coe and co got to work, despite even supporters telling them they would fail: ‘The mad, communist, mountain-climbing New Zealand eye doctor Fred Hollows gave us six hundred reasons why it was impossible to do such a thing. Six weeks later, we opened the doors of the first Aboriginal community controlled medical service in Australia.’
‘We produced cost-effective, cost-efficient results … We proved that what was needed was local Aboriginal community-controlled self-determination.’
Initially staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses, Foley says that the service proved so successful – despite their underestimating ‘the enormity of the health problems confronting our community’ – that they started fielding requests from other communities around the country who wanted to establish their own health services. First came Victoria’s original Aboriginal Health Service, then Foley and friends began assisting other communities with their own local community-controlled health services.
‘That eventually led us into creating a national umbrella organisation for all these new health services, called the National Aboriginal Health Organisation (NAHO).’
NAHO was later superseded by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO), which Foley had no involvement in, but he remains rightfully proud of what NAHO achieved.
‘We knew it could be done,’ he said, ‘because these institutions already existed in America and there was no reason why we couldn’t do the same thing. It was a question of us talking the white professionals around to understanding a different way of doing things.’
A different way of doing things
Speaking of a different way of doing things, Dr Foley says most government efforts over the decades have not succeeded because they’ve got the wrong approach.
‘Virtually everything that governments have tried to do since the 70s has failed. The proof is in the Closing the Gap reports all the time. They keep reinventing the wheel creating government programmes that are copies of what we were doing, but they never work because they’re not local, community controlled – which is the key to self-determination,’ he says.
‘We showed [how it could be done] with NAHO, and the 100 or more Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services we helped set up. We produced cost-effective, cost-efficient results. We were bringing about a discernible improvement in the health of Aboriginal communities. The evidence was there: Malcolm Fraser commissioned a report that clearly showed the only areas in Australia where Aboriginal health was improving was within a certain radius of our Community Controlled Aboriginal Health Services.
‘We proved that what was needed was local Aboriginal community-controlled self-determination.’
Improving the future by learning from history
As a historian, Dr Foley is not hopeful about the future. ‘One of the major problems confronting us in Australia is ignorance of the history of Australia,’ he says. The racial paranoia behind the White Australia policy combined with ideas of eugenics ‘led to the racist policies that affected Aboriginal peoples until I was 17 years old. Australians know nothing about this. Until they have a better understanding of the ideas that led to the creation of their country and the ideas that were dominant for the greater part of the 20th century, things won’t change.’
The recent Yoorrook Justice Commission, established as part of Victoria’s Treaty pathway, was designed to shine a light on the history that most Australians haven’t been taught, through a process of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander truth-telling. While Dr Foley believes truth telling is ultimately more important than Treaty, he feels the Yoorrook process didn’t go far enough.
‘I wanted the truth commission to haul Jeff Kennett before them and … be held accountable.’
He gives the example of former Premier Jeff Kennett, whose arbitrary closure of Northland Secondary College left ‘some [Aboriginal] kids in such a vulnerable situation that it … cut off the only real opportunity they had in life’.
Northland Secondary College at the time had the highest Aboriginal student population of any secondary school in Victoria, and was the only school in the state that embraced and encouraged those students’ Aboriginality and culture. For this, it was nationally, and internationally, recognised. Following its closure, the students went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ordered the government to re-open the school.
‘I wanted the truth commission to haul Jeff Kennett before them and make him sit there and hear the stories of the families of the people whose lives he destroyed. And be held accountable.’
Education is so important, Dr Foley says, that he believes the only real way to change the current status quo for Aboriginal peoples is through a revolution in Australia’s education. ‘What’s needed is a broad educational approach, across the whole system, starting in primary school. When you have a better understanding of your own history, you’re in a position to make better decisions about the future of this country.’
