Learning goals

This chapter will enable you to:

1. Develop an understanding of strengths-based approaches to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families

2. Understand the importance of cross-cultural partnerships when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families

3. Consider the cultural, social and emotional needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients when delivering services

4. Understand the need to take a ‘whole of family’ approach to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children

5. Recognise the characteristics of practitioners that are key to developing positive relationships with families.

Introduction

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families show remarkable strength and resilience. Australian Aboriginal culture is the world's oldest living culture, with knowledge systems evolving over many thousands of years and in adaptation to the changing Australian environment (Gostin & Chong, 1998). Knowledge about cultural practices (including childrearing), spirituality, relationships to land and nature, kinship networks, laws, lores, and rites, have been passed down within and between different cultural groups through ceremony, story, art, dance and song (and today through literature and electronic media) for millennia.

Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are estimated to make up 2.5% of the Australian population, with approximately half (53%) of the Indigenous population living in cities or inner regional areas (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008a). Children and young people make up a greater proportion of the Aboriginal population than of the non-Aboriginal population, with approximately half of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population aged 21 or under, compared to half of non-Aboriginal people being aged 37 or under) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008a).