Guest blog posts

Peer support and your PhD (2019)

My friend and colleague Michelle Redman-MacLaren and I write in this guest post on Pat Thomson’s blog about how peer support helped us through PhD journeys. We hope it might be useful for other PhD candidates and early career researchers.

As climate change hits home in Kiribati, leaders ask, “What do you care about?” (2018)

Three delegates from the southwest Pacific nation of Kiribati spoke at a Practical Justice Initiatives event at the University of NSW in March 2018. In this Croakey blog post, Darryl Cronin (Indigenous research fellow, UNSW) and I summarise the event, and convey the challenge issued by the speakers.

A place to call home: housing and its influence on health (2017)

The Australian Health Promotion Association New South Wales branch held an event to coincide with Anti Poverty Week, with speakers covering three aspects of the way housing is linked to health. I co-authored this Croakey post with AHPA NSW branch president, James Kite, to report on the event and highlight some of the initiatives taking place in Australia to improve health via housing, and what more could be done.

“The great Australian silence” in health promotion (2017)

Published as part of the Croakey Acknowledgement series, in this piece I urge the field of health promotion to acknowledge its complicity with colonising practices. This piece was published as nursing and midwifery professions were considering whether to follow the lead of the Australian Psychological Society in making an apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Dead or Deadly: Waminda women take their health into their own hands (2016)

In this Croakey post, Bronwyn Fredericks, Marlene Longbottom Faye Worner and I write about Waminda Aboriginal Women’s Health Service as an example of a health program grounded in community-identified need and priorities of Aboriginal women in the Shoalhaven area. The post provides a snapshot of a report we also wrote and published with Waminda.

Guest blog for Eliza Middleton’s blog (2015)

Eliza asked me to write about my experience of recovery and returning to cycling after a crash mid-way through my PhD, where I sustained a moderate brain injury. I unpack some of my experience in this blog post and share a little about what it taught me about perspective.

Deadly Choices: better ways of doing health promotion (2014)

In this guest post for the Croakey blog, I call for those of us working in health promotion to learn from strengths-based programs like the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health’s Deadly Choices. I completed my PhD thesis with Deadly Choices in 2015.

Skins for smokes and the use of cultural content (2013)

In this Health Promotion Quarterly piece, Chelsea Bond, Michelle Redman-MacLaren and I raise issue with the availability of "Skins" for purchase to cigarette packets with the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander flag. We argued that this use of cultural content and copyright' imagery on cigarette packets negates health promotion efforts. The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) also published this piece.