Respected journalist and film-maker Jeff McMullen discusses his work with Ian Thorpe and his Fountain for Youth Trust, to help in the alleviation and treatment of Australia’s sick children.
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This year about 10,000 Indigenous children will be born in Australia. These are the Children of the First Sunrise, descendants of the world’s oldest continuous culture. Our greatest challenge is to see that every one of them has the same opportunity for a long and healthy life as all other Australian children.
When I think of how my own girl and boy came into this world, with all the expert health care for mother and child from pregnancy through infancy, I am struck by the contrast with the conditions so many Indigenous mothers and children are forced to endure.
It is true that in the 1960s, as I started out as a reporter, some things were beginning to improve. Water was connected and health services began to reach many remote Aboriginal settlements. By the 1970s, infant mortality among Indigenous babies had dropped rapidly. But did you know that since then there has only been a very slight improvement?
| The infant mortality rate is still two-and-a-half times the rate of deaths among white infants. Indigenous children are born into deep disadvantage and many will die that way, their adult lives cut short by about 20 years, due to illnesses that are preventable and treatable. |
In the heartland of our country there is a plague of chronic illness, a new Black Death, scything through several generations of Australian citizens. ‘Syndrome X’ the doctors call it. This cluster of illnesses—diabetes, end-state renal disease, strokes, hypertension and heart disease—is cutting the heart out of Indigenous culture.
In most of the remote communities, at 58, I am usually the oldest man in the street. I see a regular procession of Aboriginal funerals and almost constant grieving.
‘How can this be?’ Ian Thorpe asked, while accompanying me to the Northern Territory and witnessing some of the poorest and sickest children. After the Sydney Olympics, Ian set up his Fountain for Youth Trust to try to improve health and nutrition for all Australian children. In the remote communities he saw infants who were stunted and malnourished, and countless others who could not hear him. After listening to the Aboriginal elders, Ian asked, ‘What can we do to help?’ They replied that we must begin by asking our nation to face the truth. Indigenous children are now facing their gravest health threat since the arrival of European-borne diseases over two centuries ago.
The first dangerous misconception we must dispel is that this plague of chronic illnesses cutting short the lives of Aboriginal children is the result of a ‘weak gene’, or some other variation of that convenient excuse for us failing to deal with a genuine health emergency. Thirty years ago as I filmed in the USA I heard many claim that the diabetes and kidney disease among Native Americans and African Americans was ‘genetic’. The truth is far more provocative.
Professor John Bertram, one of the leaders of an outstanding research team from Monash University, the Menzies School of Health Research in the Northern Territory and the University of Mississippi, says that there is a tantalising common link among many people who have died of the Syndrome X illnesses—dangerously low birth-weight.
Malnourished young mothers in a poor state of health, whether white, black or Native American, are giving birth to babies whose kidneys are programmed for failure. In utero, the kidneys develop too few nephrons—the organ’s filters—and then have to overcompensate, leading to scarring and life-threatening disease.
In Australia, Indigenous mothers are giving birth to dangerously low birth-weight babies at double our national average. Here is the key to dealing with Syndrome X.
While Australia exports food to the world, we have hunger here in the heartland. I watch children wandering out of school looking for a bit of damper to fill their rumbling stomachs. Damper, made from big, ration-sized sacks of flour and plastic barrels of sugar, is the staple many survive on.
As Noel Pearson has said in a challenge to this whole nation, ‘The rights of our children can only be achieved in practice if they can sleep peacefully with a full stomach at night.’
I believe that the key to improving health at the community level is education that empowers Aboriginal children to make healthy choices.
Doctors tell me that every extra year of education for a young teenage mother may add up to four years to the life expectancy of her child. Ken Wyatt, of NSW Aboriginal Health, adds that every year of education can reduce the risk of that young mother losing her first baby by 7–10 per cent.
In this sense, literacy can mean life for Aboriginal children. Close the gap in learning and we will begin to close the gap in life expectancy.
Jeff McMullen
Honorary CEO
Ian Thorpe's Fountain for Youth Trust
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