From nurse to Indigenous rights icon, Aunty Dulcie Flower earns NAIDOC lifetime achievement award
By Christopher TestaDulcie Flower was just a few months into her nursing career when she encountered a patient she knew had suffered a grave injustice.
A revered elder in the Torres Strait Islander community of Cairns, the man was known affectionately to his kin as "Old Pop".
But on this day in 1950s Cairns, he was in the custody of a policeman who Dulcie says had given him a split and bloodied lip.
Aunty Dulcie recalls that in those days, calling out police brutality wasn't the done thing.
"Mum just said there was nothing we could do at that time.
"That's when I thought, 'Oh, yes there is, Mum'," she says.
The young nurse's formal complaint at the police station led to an abrupt end to her stint in the emergency department.
But far from stunting her career in health care, it set the then 18-year-old on the path to bringing about great change in the way First Nations people are looked after.
Having been made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2019, the now 85-year-old is the recipient of this year's NAIDOC lifetime achievement award.
"There was just this feeling that I wasn't going to accept being treated in a way that was, to me, disrespectful," she recalls.
"The old people always talked about disrespect, and Mum did too. To me, respect was a two-way process."
Aunty Dulcie says her people's Meriam culture was, and remains, "the whole core of my being".
"In the early days, when the old people were sitting, we could not have our heads higher than theirs so, when you were approaching them, you took a physically lower position."
Taking up the fight
Growing up in the 1950s, an era of few Indigenous nurses, Aunty Dulcie saw clinicians seek counsel from her mother — "a fountain of knowledge and a strong woman".
Her mother wasn't a healthcare worker but she was often asked to encourage people to get immunised and provide remedies for ailing youngsters.
Tragedy also helped spark Dulcie's desire to push for change.
She recalled a female relative who died young, having developed septicaemia following a miscarriage, leaving two little girls motherless.
"The health system just didn't seem to look after the people in the north in the same way that they did the people of the south," Aunty Dulcie says.
"I guess we're just so many thousand kilometres away and just, out of sight, out of mind."
Even decades later, Aunty Dulcie was shocked to see photographs on the walls of a Cairns Hospital ward showing Torres Strait Islanders who'd had legs amputated because of diabetes.
Again, she spoke up, and was incensed by a nurse's ambivalent response.
She took up the fight for a greater focus on preventative health care, arguing that lifestyle changes and better diets would lead to fewer Indigenous people losing limbs.
It was a point she even made in her own Redfern speech, delivered moments after then prime minister Paul Keating gave his famous address on the same stage in December 1992.
It was about six months after the High Court had rejected the doctrine of terra nullius, a win for Eddie Koiki Mabo on behalf of the Meriam people.
"That was also in its own way very significant for Torres Strait people because, up until then, we were not recognised as being part of the First Nations peoples in this country," Aunty Dulcie says of her speech.
"We had been ignored for many, many years — generations."
A powerful voice
Aunty Dulcie also remains on the board of the nation's first Aboriginal community-controlled health service, of which she was a founding member more than 50 years ago.
She says setting up the Aboriginal Medical Service at Redfern in inner Sydney was "an act of self-determination".
"It was … saying, 'OK, the mainstream is not doing things, there's a need for a special health approach for the Aboriginal people'."
There were more Indigenous nurses in Sydney than in Cairns, but discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients was still a problem.
"A lot of the ones going into hospital were facing a very ignorant attitude on the part of nurses and doctors who would say, 'the people are uneducated; they don't know any better and they haven't got the ability to look after themselves'," Aunty Dulcie recalls.
"And you think, 'That can't be right, that can't possibly be right'."
The Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) started in an old house, initially operating for a handful of hours in the evenings — and for the first few days, nobody turned up.
But its role as a vital frontline healthcare provider for the Aboriginal community grew quickly and, in the 1980s, AMS began training Aboriginal health workers too.
Aunty Dulcie says the training program began in a small hut, and she beams with pride at what its alumni have gone on to achieve.
She is also "spellbound" by the fact there are now almost 3,000 Indigenous nurses nationwide, up from a few dozen in the 1990s.
"We hope, we anticipate now, the health of [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] people will improve, because health status still isn't the best," she says.
Better dental care is a focus of Aunty Dulcie's advocacy nowadays, having retired to Cairns, maintaining the same spirit and passion for culture she espoused in the final line of the speech she delivered that historic afternoon in Redfern some three decades ago.
"A fire burns within our people and our struggle will be continued from a new and sturdy horizon — we will not be held back."
Stream the 2024 NAIDOC Awards Ceremony from 7.00pm, July 6 on ABC iview and ABC TV.