Editorial Issue 4 2014: Building evidence about effective health promotion in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities

The genesis of this issue of the Australian Journal of Primary Health occurred in October 2013, at the inaugural Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit’s writers retreat at the Mount Eliza Business School (Victoria, Australia). At this gathering, Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander academics fromuniversities acrossAustraliametwithnon-Indigenous researchers, editors and writers, all invested in the process of writing together. Over the courseof the retreat, communitypeoplehadachance to reflect and write up theirwork, and students and academics hadopportunities to build capacity together by participating in workshops, joint exercises and walks along the beach. Over dinner, we discussed the multiple ways in which we promoted health and well-being and what is possible through the active engagement of culturally sensitive researchers with people invested in community, innovations, capacity building and shared experience. What we quickly identifiedwas that there is no simple term to expresswhat we mean by ‘health promotion’. We know health is a universal human aspiration and a basic human right. We know there are people acrossAustralia, includingmembersofourAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, who may never achieve good health. We also know that there are many of us working to address the inequitable distribution of social determinants.Health promotion, we determined, is a complex interactive function of the ideas one has absorbed from others; others, in turn, whose ‘own’ ideas are a complex interactive function of the ideas they have absorbed, and so on. For some of us, such complexity is hard to tie down on a page through the act of writing. However, through the creative process of writing together, we identified some papers that we thought were worthy of publication so others could learn about the successes being discussed at this gathering. We are grateful to Ms Kate Silburn from La Trobe University (Melbourne, Vic., Australia) for putting us in touch with the editorial team at the Australian Journal of Primary Health. We also want to acknowledge the farsightedness of this team in dedicating a journal issue to health promotion with and by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In the pages of this special issue youwill see health promotion represented as a synthesis of people with their families and communities, people with the natural world, people transforming their service delivery systems, building capacity within their organisations and changing the way mainstream communities interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Others have developed key educational, practice-orientated and clinical tools and resources to engage people with their own and their community’s health and well-being. Other papers articulate the capacity of developments inAboriginal andTorres Strait Islander people’s health promotion work to inform and strengthen health promotion efforts targeted at other population groups. All work represented in this special issue of the Journal has been undertaken by people who are committed to the work of health promotion, to its social purpose and to concepts of social justice andequity for all. Importantly,manypapers start fromastrengthsbased position. A clear message from authors contributing to this special issue is that for too long Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been described as having problems that are toobig and complex to be solvedwithin communities themselves. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are starting to write back against these descriptions, changing the collective story of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities from one of deficit to one of strength and resilience. This ‘writing back against the deficit position’ is in itself a health promoting exercise, a call to which culturally sensitive researchers are starting to respond. If there is one behavioural change that wewouldwant as a result of this compilation it would be that researchers do not in the first sentence focus on our disadvantage; rather, we want them to focus on what is possible through a process of self-determination and of co-creating health and well-being. We took the responsibility of co-creating health andwell-being seriously. First, participants at thewriters retreat in Mount Eliza developed a call for papers and sent the invitation to participate through our networks. The editorial team, made up of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, maintained a strong commitment to ‘two ways together’. Second, we invested in a peer-review process that saw each paper reviewed by at least one Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander reviewer and at least one non-Indigenous reviewer. This meant the review process supported the authors of the articles with both academic and cultural rigour. Finally, we are delighted that there are first-time authors in this issue of the Journal. Although health promotion work is innovative and inspiring, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are employed in chronically underresourced contexts, are time poor and are not actively encouraged and supported to showcase their work in academic journals. We are proud that there are a high proportion of practice and innovation papers in this special issue of the Journal. We remained true to the principles in Indigenous scholarship to