Acknowledgement of Country and of First Peoples' ancestral breastfeeding on Country

Acknowledgement of Country

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands upon which I live and work, the Yuggera and Turrbal Peoples, and pay my respect to Elders, past, present and emerging.

I acknowledge that Australian First Peoples have breastfed their children on this land for at least 65,000 years. Australian First Nations are the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth.

I acknowledge my formative experiences working as a young general practitioner with First Nations' Peoples in the late 1980s. I saw urban First Nations' women breastfeeding their babies in consultations. I saw the way Anangu women breastfed and interacted with their babies when I stayed as a guest for a brief but impactful week on an outstation, sleeping in a swag in a dry creek bed. I read Professor Annette Hamilton's groundbreaking report Nature and Nurture on her collaborative work with Anbarra women, quoted generously three decades later by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care in Growing up our way.

The things I learned from Australian First Peoples have directly influenced the development of Neuroprotective Developmental Care or the Possums programs. This includes The Possums Baby and Toddler Sleep Program, the Possums 5-domain approach to infant cry-fuss problems, the NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to infant motor development, and the NDC concept of frequent flexible breastfeeding.

I acknowledge the generosity of First Peoples as they share the wealth of the land and their cultural life with us, despite the continuing intergenerational effects of a deeply silenced but genocidal colonial-settler violence.

Selected references

Hamilton A. Nature and Nurture: Aboriginal Childrearing in North-Central Arnhem Land. Canberra: AIAS P; 1981.

SNAICC. Growing up our way: practices matrix. North Fitzroy, Melbourne: Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, 2011.