CANBERRA. For 50 years, NAIDOC has honoured the people who refused to wait to be looked after, the Elders who stood firm, the organisers who made the space, the communities who kept showing up year after year. The Aboriginal community-controlled health sector is what those people built.
This year’s theme, 50 Years of Deadly, is our sector’s own story, told another way. The same fire that filled the marches and the meeting halls opened the first Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern in 1971: care designed and delivered by community, on community’s terms, because the mainstream was not working and our people decided to do it themselves. Within a few years, communities in Albury came together to form the national body that became NACCHO. The march and the medical service came from the one source, and they have never been separated since.
Fifty-five years on, that decision has become 148 Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and more than 550 clinics, reaching over 410,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a year in cities, towns, and some of the most remote communities in the country. The ACCHO sector is now among the largest employers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. None of it was given. All of it was built.
When the question is asked, what do our communities build when culture leads, we answer with the sector. The proof is not a matter of opinion. It is in the outcomes ACCHOs deliver every day, in the trust communities place in services they control, and in the model that the rest of the country now looks to.
NAIDOC is a celebration, and it is also a statement: our people are not waiting to be led.
Fifty years of deadly is not a finish line.
The next 50 belong to the young ones growing up proud, into a sector their grandparents built, ready to take it further than this generation could. The work now is to back what already works, and to resource community-led, community-controlled care for the long term, so the next generation inherits strength rather than a fight to hold on to what we have already proven.
We honour what came before by getting on with the work. That is the deadly part – not where we’ve been, but the sector we keep building, clinic by clinic, community by community.
Our health, in our hands. Fifty years on, and we are only getting started.
NACCHO Chief Executive Officer Dr Dawn Casey PSM FAHA said the sector was proof of the theme.
“People ask what our communities can build when culture leads. They do not need to imagine it; it is already here, in 148 ACCHOs and the outcomes they deliver. We have spent fifty years proving what works. The next fifty are about backing it properly, so the young ones inherit strength, not a fight to keep what we have already earned,” Dr Casey said.
NACCHO Chair Donnella Mills said the milestone was an inheritance for the next generation.
“Fifty years of NAIDOC is fifty years of our people showing up, and our young ones are watching. They are growing up seeing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people run their own health services, sit at their own board tables, and lead in the way their grandparents marched for. That is what we are building: not just strong services, but a generation who know the sector is theirs to carry. We honour the ones who came before by making sure the next mob inherits something even stronger. When we back our young leaders, we keep the fire going,” Ms Mills said.
