” Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation leaders and health experts from across Australia will come together in Canberra this week to examine key policy issues and projects that are making a difference in closing the gap in Indigenous health.

The theme of the conference is Our Health Counts: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.

NACCHO would like to acknowledge that we will be gathering on the traditional Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands and acknowledge owner’s past, present and future “

Download the full conference program here https://www.nacchoconference.com.au/program/

 The NACCHO Members’ Conference and AGM will provide a forum for our Aboriginal community controlled health (ACCHO ) services workforce, bureaucrats, educators, suppliers and consumers to:

• Present on innovative local economic development solutions to issues that can be applied to address similar issues nationally and across disciplines
• Have input and influence from the ‘grassroots’ into national and state health policy and service delivery
• Demonstrate leadership in workforce and service delivery innovation
• Promote continuing education and professional development activities essential to the Aboriginal community controlled health services in urban, rural and remote Australia
• Promote Aboriginal health research by professionals who practice in these areas and the presentation of research findings
• Develop supportive networks
• Promote good health and well-being through the delivery of health services to and by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people throughout Australia.

Social Media

Follow on Twitter: #NACCHOagm2017 @NACCHOAustralia

Facebook : A limited number of sessions and interviews will be broadcast via our FACEBOOK Page @NacchoAboriginalHealth

National Media Contact: Jenny Stokes 0478 504 280

NACCHO Social Media: Colin Cowell 0401 331 251

NACCHO Contact at Conference: Oliver Tye 0450 956 942

Download the full conference program here https://www.nacchoconference.com.au/program/

The conference will also:

• Launch a new Memorandum of Understanding between NACCHO and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia to improve access to medicine for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
• Reveal what the 2016 Census statistics tell us about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health
• Launch the Mayi Kuwayu Study – an Aboriginal led longitudinal survey of more than 400,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults to provide the first large scale evidence of relationship between cultural engagement and health
• Highlight PWC’s landmark report into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island incarceration rates.

The conference will be opened by the Secretary of the Department of Health, Glenys Beauchamp and Professor Brendan Murphy will later address delegates about an Enhanced Multijurisdictional Response to Sexually Transmitted Infections and Blood Borne Viruses in Indigenous Communities.

Background : We honour on our conference poster  the first Aboriginal ” Voices to go to Canberra”

 ” Jimmy Clements and another Wiradjuri man, John Noble were one of the earliest practitioners of what the politics of visibility, of being present where you are not meant to be and where your presence creates discomfort.

Regardless of whether they were as unaware or indifferent to the meaning of the event, as is often suggested, their presence was a powerful act, contesting claims of the erasure of Indigenous people from the land and place.”

For its poignancy and historical significance, is the image of Jimmy Clements, an old Wiradjuri man, sitting in the dust with his dogs and holding an Australian ensign, at the 1927 opening of Parliament House in Canberra.

A few days later the Canberra Times – again with an emphasis on Indigenous connection to country – reported:

“Where his dusky forebears have gathered in native ceremonial for centuries past, a lone representative of a fast diminishing race saluted visiting royalty. Despite the grotesque garb and untamed mane, the Aborigine comported himself not without dignity. With his three faithful dogs, he made an immediate target for a battery of cameras.”

Jimmy Clements (c. 1847 – 28 August 1927) was an Aboriginal elder from the Wiradjuri tribe , and was present at the opening of the Provisional Parliament House in Canberra on 9 May 1927.

He was also known as “King Billy”^[1] and also by Nangar or Yangar.^[2]

Clements and another Wiradjuri man, John Noble, had walked for nearly a week over the mountains from Brungle Mission near Gundagai, New South Wales.^[3]

The two men were the only indigenous people to attend the first opening of parliament.

Clements was initially told to move on by police at the ceremony due to his attire but due to popular support from other members of the crowd he was among prominent citizens who were presented to the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Elizabeth the Queen Mother).^[1]

The National Archives of Australia describes it as “possibly the first recorded instance of Aboriginal protest at Parliament House in Canberra”.

It was the precursor to so much activism – from the 1938 Day of Mourning, the fight for recognition and much else in 1967, and the ongoing battle for land rights that manifested with the enduring tent embassy, just across the road, on Australia Day 1972.

The sign out front reads: Sovereignty never ceded.

Monash University’s Maryrose Casey wrote of Clements and Noble in the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies: “Regardless of whether they were as unaware or indifferent to the meaning of the event, as is often suggested, their presence was a powerful act, contesting claims of the erasure of Indigenous people from the land and place.

Clements died on 28 August 1927, aged 80, in Queanbeyan, New South Wales near Canberra

See Guardian Article