District 9710

The Rotary Club of Woden

The Rotary Western Desert Project

A Rotary Australia World Community Service Project (RAWCS): Project number 30/2007-8

The background to the project, a summary of the proposed work and progress over time are described in the page below. Other aspects of the project can be found on the following links:

Donated paintings by Kintore artists - Click here

Working party visit in November 2008 - Click here

Western Desert Project: Bulletin No 1 (Nov. 2009) - Click here

Western Desert Project: Bulletin No 2 (Feb. 2010) - Click here

Western Desert Project: Bulletin No 3 (June 2010) - Click here

Kintore country ..................................The Management Committee - WDNWPT

In 2006, David Fox, as International Service Director, proposed that the Club should consider changing from its previous focus towards a major project, having the following characteristics:

* Multi year timescale
* Involvement of all club members
* Community acclaim
* Involvement of concerned community
* Large scale financial commitment.

This was enthusiastically adopted by the Club, and after much consideration, the Rotary Western Desert Health Project was born.

Background
The Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation Inc (WDNWPT) is an Aboriginal Corporation under the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976 and is a registered not-forprofit organisation. The membership of the organisation is open to all adult Aboriginal people (Yanangu) living permanently in the Haasts Bluff Land Trust and Kiwirrkurra Community in the Western Desert Region of Central Australia. The WDNWPT Governing Committee is made up of 12 Yanangu members who are drawn evenly from the area of its membership. Despite being geographically dispersed, Yanangu maintain strong links through kin, language and extended family networks, alongside shared rights incountry. Currently WDNWPT patients are drawn from a diverse range of Western Desert communities including Mt Liebig, Hermannsburg, Haasts Bluff, Papunya, Mt Liebig, Walungurru (Kintore), Docker River and Nyirrpi in the Northern Territory and Kiwirrkurra, Tjukurla, Blackstone and Warakurna in Western Australia. The membership of this WDNWPT client group is determined by the Yanangu Governing Committee and is based on family relationships.

Summary of Proposed Project
WDNWPT is working with the Rotary Club of Woden in developing a Renal Dialysis Health Unit at Kintore in the Northern Territory. This is a direct response to the critical and expanding problem of the dislocation of senior Yanangu community members who, after being diagnosed with end stage renal disease, are taken to Alice Springs for life-long dialysis treatment many hundreds of kilometres from family, community and traditional country.
The impacts of this dislocation are devastating at a personal and community level with significant disruption to cultural practices and the passing on of knowledge to those “coming up behind”. The consequences are all the more critical in a region where Aboriginal people who had lived a nomadic and traditional life into the very recent past, were brought into centralized settlements through government assimilation policies and after a long struggle, only gained the capacity to return to traditional country in the early 1980’s. Remarkably, a number of Yanangu from the patient group walked in from the desert and had their first contact with Europeans as children and young adults.

The reactions of patients to the most recent wave of dislocation through end stage kidney disease clearly highlight the passionate desire of Yanangu to return to their home communities for extended visits in order to fulfill their cultural obligations and to pass on their considerable cultural knowledge and experience to their kin. It is only in the context of traditional country and the relationship with place that these cultural practices become meaningful, and the Western Desert languages can be fully used, and hence maintained. Across all social registers WDNWPT has successfully established Central Australia’s first renal dialysis clinic in a remote community, 550km from Alice Springs, and regularly returns patients there for extended visits.

However, for those who previously lived in other communities throughout the region, there is no opportunity for returning home for trips longer than one or two nights. Indeed, there are many Yanangu patients who have not been home since the commencement of renal dialysis treatment and have no prospect of ever returning.

A new renal dialysis unit will be able to quickly start returning people to these communities and enable the fulfilment of this project’s primary objective which is to reengage these significant community members with extended family (walytja), traditional Country (ngurra), and culture through Dreaming stories (tjukurrpa), songs and ceremonies (tulku) and painting.

The Dialysis Health facility will be constructed in a pre-existing building (the Blue House) and will include bedrooms, kitchen, laundry, offices as well as the dialysis unit and medical store rooms. All plans and drawings have been completed by Suters Architects free of charge. Rotary Clubs will provide all labour (in the form of work parties) to convert the Blue House into a Dialysis Health Unit. The photo on the left shows the pre-existing building before any work was started. The picture on the right gives a perspective of what the facility will look like on completion.

WDNWPT came into being through the unique auction of four collaborative community Yanangu paintings depicting traditional Dreaming stories from the Western Desert. The significance and cultural value of these paintings was reflected in the AUS $1 million raised at auction in 2000. The initiative and self-determination demonstrated in raising these funds has garnered the organisation considerable support and given us a strong foundation for negotiating additional operating funds from government and ensuring the sustainability of all of our project initiatives. There are two additional objectives to this project. The first is educational and aimed at providing culturally appropriate information in language to remote community members regarding renal health and preventative options including regular checkups, healthy lifestyle and medication. WDNWPT’s experience in the remote dialysis clinic also tells us that the presence of dialysis machines and patients in the community is one of the most powerful educative tools at our disposal.

The other objective is to use the new dialysis unit, as a regional prototype, to encourage and inform similar initiatives for other remote or rural contexts without renal facilities and demonstrate the tangible cultural benefits of returning senior aboriginal people to their traditional lands, communities and culture. The new renal dialysis unit will be a highly visible and symbolic project that will reinforce the strong public awareness and media campaign that WDNWPT has developed over the last seven years. This third objective extends beyond the Kintore region and recognizes that chronic renal failure is a problem that is threatening diminishing indigenous communities in other remote regions around Australia and beyond, where lifestyle has rapidly changed, accompanied by poverty and a lack of resources.
WDNWPT has previously systematically evaluated all aspects of service delivery and will continue to do so with this initiative to ensure the project’s tangible benefits are measured and can be utilised by other indigenous organisations.

The governing role of the indigenous Committee will ensure ongoing indigenous control and input to the project and guarantees that this project remains firmly an indigenous initiative responding in a flexible way to Yanangu expressed needs and desires.

However, having finally achieved this return to country, a new crisis has emerged in the last decade for Yanangu in the form of chronic diseases such as kidney failure, diabetes, heart disease, etc., with evidence of a correlation between kidney deterioration and childhood malnutrition, skin disease and low birth weight. While kidney disease is an escalating problem in indigenous communities across Australia (and indeed, overseas), Yanangu from the remote and vast region of the Western Desert in Central Australia endure the highest rates of kidney disease in the country at up to 30 times the national figure.

Until recently, those suffering from end-stage renal failure had no choice but to move hundreds of kilometres away from their home communities for treatment at the Renal Dialysis Unit (RDU) in Alice Springs (the largest single dialysis complex in the Southern Hemisphere). Typically, an individual becomes increasingly ill in their community, often reluctant to leave, and is then abruptly evacuated to Alice Springs Hospital. They then receive a diagnosis of end-stage renal failure and are placed on haemo-dialysis via a dialysis machine for five-hourly treatments on alternate days for life. Until 2001, all Yanangu received institutional haemo-dialysis by default within the RDU. This, the most expensive renal replacement therapy option, required patients to live permanently in Alice Springs, with limited options for suitable available shelter not only for them but also for any accompanying family and carers in indigenous town camps or hostels.

Members of the Woden Rotary Club can be proud that soon a Dialysis Centre will be operational in Kintore. We have risen above the ordinary, defied the naysayers, stepped well outside our comfort zone and as a consequence our brothers and sisters, indeed our fellow Australians, will have a life saving facility in Kintore.

As of October 2009, the project has:

* Received Board approval
* Received Club approval
* Received Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku (WDNWPT) Board approval
* Is an approved Rotary Australia World Community Service (RAWCS) Project
* Woden Rotary has donated $30,000
* Suters Architects have undertaken all plans for free
* Marline have completed all Engineering drawings for free
* Northrop have completed all external engineering drawings for free
* NT Government Departments have approved all plans
* Commonwealth Government Agencies have approved the plans
* Commonwealth Dept. of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FCHSIA) has granted $140,000
* Site visit undertaken (November 2007)
* First work party undertaken (November 2008)
* Second work party (June 2009)
* Third work party (August 2009)