Case story

Strong Research Built on a Long Relationship

Not many ‘outside’ researchers have the opportunity to sustain long relationships with research participants. The long and close relationship between the researcher and the community in this story led to deeply engaged, sensitive and robust research.

Brian McCoy’s research project was built on a relationship of more than 30 years with the people of the south-east Kimberley in Western Australia (the Kutjungka region).

It was from this relationship, and from relationships with other Aboriginal men, that my interest and motivation to explore men’s health arose.

In 1973 I first arrived in the Kimberley as a lay missionary for the Catholic Diocese of Broome… I spent one year on the community and… I revisited the region over the following years and accompanied some of the men to the ‘hand-over’ of Uluru to Anangu in 1985. In 1990 I also conducted research with some of the men as part of the Western Australian component of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Finally, in 1992 I was asked to return to the region in a formal church capacity as parish priest… and stayed there until April 2000.

In the more than seven years that I lived in the Kutjungka region in the 1990’s I found myself being increasingly drawn into the culture of the people and issues around men’s lives and health… (McCoy 2008:2–6).

Prison, court, petrol sniffing, music, football, and hunting formed an increasing part of the realities I had to deal with, and issues that most interested me. I discovered, as I had with other Aboriginal men, great friendship, energy and humour in being with them. Between 1992-2000 I shared in around 100 funerals, a number of them involving tragic and premature deaths of men and women. During this same period there was increasing involvement of myself, and some other kartiyas (non-Aboriginal people), in the ceremonies around cultural ‘sorry business’.

I had witnessed deaths within communities, ritual payback, and had been part of the … memorial of an earlier massacre (Purrkuji). I had shared in sporting carnivals, hunting trips, marriages, birthday celebrations and many other occasions when people gathered and enjoyed each other’s company. I had come to learn a lot about Aboriginal people and they also had come to know a lot about me. They had significantly shaped our relationship. (McCoy 2008: 3-5).

Through long and close relationships, Brian came to realise that while the poor health of Indigenous people had been well documented, little was known about Indigenous men and how they perceived wellbeing and illness. Little was known about those deeper values that sustained, and continue to sustain, desert people’s health. His thesis ‘Kanyirninpa: health, masculinity and wellbeing of desert Aboriginal men’ set out to construct an ethnography based on the stories and experiences of men living in the Kutjungka region of the Kimberley.

The opportunities that arose from such a long and sustaining relationship offered the possibility of research that could be beneficial to people in the Kutjungka region of the Kimberley and, hopefully, other Aboriginal men. However, Brian’s history also raised a number of ethical issues around the appropriateness of doing health research in this location. He was a kartiya (non-Indigenous), male and had been involved locally in a church capacity and as a volunteer in local health agencies. Questions were raised about blurring the boundaries between his previous roles and the role of researcher. Before starting, Brian sought the advice of the regional Aboriginal health Corporation and other Indigenous people involved in health and research outside the region. It was agreed that he would need to work in a flexible way if his help was needed by local people, church or health services in this remote area. In reality, his changed role was more of a concern for kartiya than for Aboriginal people (McCoy 2008: 2-6).

Brian’s research was conducted successfully to ‘sensitively and poignantly capture the social realities for Aboriginal men growing up in contemporary desert communities’ (Ian Anderson in McCoy 2008).

See bilbliography for full references.