Speaking of Science - Being All In: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, research sovereignty and systems change

From the Quandamooka community in Minjerribah, Associate Professor Matthews joined us for our May Speaking of Science webinar in recognition of National Reconciliation Week. Leading research out of the University of Sydney in Lismore, Associate Professor Matthews reflected on the evolution of Indigenous health research, drawing from her personal experiences of NHMRC investment across both the CRE-STRIDE project and the STAUNCH Synergy Grant.

She also discussed what being ‘All In’ means to her and how we can all commit to reconciliation each and every day to continue to help shape the health, wellbeing and equity among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Recorded on Friday 22 May 2026 at 11:00AM–12:00PM.

Video transcript

1:35 Prue Torrance

Good morning, everyone. I'm aware some people are still joining, but let's make a start.

Thank you everyone for joining us today. This is a special instalment of Speaking of Science in acknowledgement of National Reconciliation Week.

I would of course like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which each of us are meeting today. I would personally like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional custodians of the land where I am today. I acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contributions they make to the life of this nation. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us online today. I encourage you to also take a moment and reflect on the land on which you stand or sit today, and to recognise and acknowledge the deep connection that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have with that land where you are today.

My name is Prue Torrance, and I am the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of NHMRC.

Before we get started with today's presentation, just a little bit about how the Speaking of Science webinar works. We will have a presentation from our guest speaker, who I will introduce shortly. There will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the session, and we have a Q&A function within Teams so you can enter your question at any time or you can save them up for the end, but that function is there available for you to enter your questions at any time as they come to you.
The webinar is also being recorded, so also a reminder that if you're unable to attend a webinar or you'd like to go back and rewatch your favourites, all our recordings are available on NHMRC's website after the event.

Alright, as I mentioned, this Speaking of Science event is an acknowledgement of National Reconciliation Week, which is fast approaching. National Reconciliation Week is nestled in the middle of 2 significant dates in Australia's reconciliation journey. The successful 1967 referendum on the 27th of May, and the High Court Mabo decision on the 3rd of June in 1992.

Two dates, a week apart, but also years apart, symbolising the length of this journey, but also a journey that's not yet over.

For 2026, the National Reconciliation Week theme is All In, which is a call for all Australians to commit wholeheartedly to reconciliation every single day. All In makes it clear that reconciliation is not a spectator sport and that all of us must step away from the sidelines and take action to make real change. We all carry the responsibility of championing reconciliation and advancing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's rights, including to self-determination.

One small way that we can do that is by spotlighting research that is led by and relates to the health of Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander people, and that brings together their unique skills across culture, knowledge and health research to address the health priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

This brings me to our guest speaker today, Associate Professor Veronica Matthews. Associate Professor Matthews is a valued member of 2 NHMRC advisory committees that we share with the Medical Research Future Fund, our Indigenous Advisory Group and our Public Health and Health Systems Committee.

From the Quandamooka community in Minjerribah, Associate Professor Matthews is a principal research fellow based at the University Centre for Rural Health at the University of Sydney in Lismore. She facilitates community-led research embedding First Nations knowledges and rights as the original custodians to revitalise holistic healthcare systems centred on country.

Her background is in ecology, environmental toxicology and primary health care systems. With this experience, she's been able to blend her passions for a healthy country and a healthy mob. She is the co-lead investigator of the STRIDE Centre of Research Excellence and the chief investigator of the STAUNCH Synergy Grant Project. No doubt she'll touch on some of those research things today.

With a focus on being all in, Associate Professor Matthews will be reflecting on how Indigenous health research has evolved over the years and how this evolution has transformed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, research, sovereignty and systems. If you could join me today providing the warmest welcome to Associate Professor Matthews.

I'm so excited to hear your reflections, Veronica. Welcome, over to you.

6:06 Associate Professor Matthews

Thanks so much for that introduction, Prue, and also thanks so much to the NHMRC for the invitation to speak today. Thank you for everyone for joining in.

I'm going to share my slides so everyone can see them. Just let me know if not.

As Prue mentioned, I'm sharing this talk in the lead up to National Reconciliation Week with its theme All In. It has been almost 3 decades since the first official Reconciliation Week, and this year's theme is a powerful reminder that reconciliation can't be passive. It is not a spectator sport, as the Reconciliation Week website emphasises, and it isn't the responsibility of First Nations people alone. It asks something of all of us, of institutions, of systems, of people who make up those systems, to take responsibility, take action for meaningful and sustained change.

Today, I want to reflect on my research journey, a journey that mirrors a broader shift in our research systems, but also our governance systems. A shift from Indigenous participation in agendas that have been set by others towards Indigenous leadership and increasingly towards research sovereignty. In doing this, I want to emphasise that change is possible and that being all in means not whether we are committed, but what we are willing to advocate for and to change to support Indigenous community self-determination.

Before I go much further, I too would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unseeded lands on which we meet today. For me, that's the Widjabul mob of the Bundjalung Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I also acknowledge the enduring connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to country and the knowledge systems and governance structures that have sustained wellbeing for our mob for tens of thousands of years.

I acknowledge that these systems have too often been ignored or overlooked in the design of our research, policy and governance systems. As we reflect on what it means to be all in, the responsibility really sits with us to listen, to learn and to act differently.

As I mentioned, to illustrate how such a shift can look, I want to share my journey through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research, a journey in 3 parts, enabled by successive NHMRC funding, but also the First Nations leadership within the NHMRC who pushed the research system and funding system to change for the benefit of our communities. Really this is a systems story and each of these projects phases as I go through them was driven by a question about what was absent or what wasn't changing in the systems to improve health outcomes.

Starting back almost 15 years following the completion of my PhD, I joined Professor Ross Bailey's team and the Audit and Best Practice in Chronic Disease Project, which subsequently became a Centre for Research Excellence in Indigenous Quality Improvement. This was a long-running, continuous quality improvement research collaboration in primary health care that began in the early 2000s.

In its early phases, this work focused on improving clinical care through CQI and I just want to shout out to Aunty Lynn Feeney, who was a critical member of the team during these days as an Aboriginal CQI coordinator in the Northern Territory. This was extremely important work, done in conjunction with over 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services across the country. These health services supported the development and implementation of CQI tools and processes.

Results showed that systematically embedding CQI improved systems strengthened quality of care across the comprehensive care spectrum, the NACCHO motto. However, despite these achievements and decades of sustained effort, the research uncovered broader system challenges. CQI worked well when there was a dedicated CQI workforce, which depended on state and territory government support. But community engagement in CQI was limited and the determinants of health sat largely outside the scope of work.

I joined the collaboration in 2011 during the ABCD National Research Partnership days. At that time, I was the only Indigenous member of the research team. As we moved into the CRE IQI phase, there were important conversations that were being had within the collaboration itself on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation and leadership. The collaboration really took on its own CQI process, I guess, through an all teach or learn approach that appreciated and valued different experiences and knowledge systems.

But across a large national collaboration, there was only one Aboriginal chief investigator and one junior researcher, which was me. There was an obvious gap, not so much in commitment, but in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership within the research itself.

Indigenous health services were engaged, but the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership wasn't structurally embedded in the collaboration. This matters because leadership and governance shapes the questions that we ask, the decisions that are made, the research methods that we use, the approaches we make to community and service engagement, and ultimately what changes.

CRE STRIDE was the point where leadership began to shift deliberately through various mechanisms, including co-leadership models. Half of the investigative team was Indigenous, which included me as an academic level B positioned as CIA of CRE STRIDE, which is fairly daunting, but I did have the support of the other CIs within STRIDE and IQY before that.

But as a result of the shifting Indigenous leadership, moving from the margins into the centre of decision making, things started to change. But I want to emphasise as well that this shift didn't happen in isolation. It was enabled by changes in the research system itself in ethics, funding and assessment processes over time. The NHMRC Indigenous Ethics Guidelines evolved, more recently driven by the Principal Committee Indigenous Caucus of the NHMRC, from regulating research behaviour in the early days, to embedding Indigenous values and relational ethics, keeping research on track, to enabling Indigenous governance of research and data sovereignty.

Ethics move to foregrounding community relationships and to shared government and authority. What this demonstrates is that systems can change when the rules and expectations governing them are reshaped. Importantly, these shifts are also built into funding assessment systems. We have the mandatory Indigenous Research Excellence Criteria for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health projects, requiring applicants to demonstrate benefit, community engagement, capacity building, and sustainability.

When expectation shifts and when stakeholders are willing to change, what research looks like begins to change too. For STRIDE, the scope of work expanded, our partnerships with communities deepened and also methodologies changed.

This diagram here represents the CRE STRIDE programme of work. As mentioned, we expanded the lens of primary health care and CQI to factor in health determinant sectors including environment, education and prevention services. It systematically centred community in research design, taking direction from communities about research priorities and solutions, and to support intersectoral collaboration and capacity strength.

There were also instrumental partnerships with other NHMRC initiatives, such as the Healthy Environments and Lives National Research Network and our Collaboration in Health Research or the Open Network, growing the number of Indigenous health researchers through focus support and STRIDE alongside OCHRE, and prioritise strengthening Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander career development. We prioritised employment of Indigenous research fellows, provided scholarships to Indigenous PhD students, and provided funding to Indigenous-led seed projects, again prioritising Indigenous early career researchers.

From this effort, we can see the results, the shift clearly in at least our authorship data from each of the collaboration phases. Phase 5 here is CRE STRIDE, so we can see a threefold jump in individual First Nation authors from phase 4 and almost all publications having at least one Indigenous author. Our capacity strengthening
initiatives were demonstrated through over half of publications with lead authors or senior authors at the end, and an expansion of paper topics as well, including Indigenous research methodologies and social and environmental determinants of
health.

What this demonstrates is that it's not just about increased participation, but a redistribution of intellectual and decision-making authority. The Indigenous leadership grew, authorship grew, and the nature of research itself shifted. Importantly, as we know, this work doesn't stay within academia. It's not just about journal papers. Research impact is much broader than that. It's largely dependent on the advocacy work and the policy change.

CRE STRIDE focused on other research translation products, discussion papers, policy papers, arts informed research outputs, including a poetry anthology and public discourse. This is an example of us working with the Warumungu and Wilya Janta people from Tennant Creek. This is a forum in Melbourne highlighting injustice with remote community housing and impacts of climate change on culture and health and wellbeing. But this advocacy work, as Warumungu Elder Uncle Norm there with the microphone, says that shaking the bush is hard work. Even when we demonstrate change in research and practise and evidence of what works, the broader system of power can still resist it.

This was clearly evident as well in 2023. We were reminded very clearly how difficult it is to shift the system. The voice referendum reminded us that there are deeper determinants of health and that power, voice and control remain unresolved, essentially. I think this is a large factor behind why the health gap persists. It's not just about individual health behaviours or what health services do, but because of structural determinants, because of colonisation, because of dispossession from traditional land, from systemic racism and ultimately, from a lack of decision-making power.

These are sometimes called the settler colonial determinants of health which effectively means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have a fundamental lack of authority to make decisions about their own lives, their own communities and futures. I think what this points to is that the root of the health gap of poor health is powerlessness. No amount of effort within current systems will close the gap. We need system transformation in relation to who makes those decisions and this is where our next phase of work is heading.

The disappointment of the referendum was the driver for the creation of STAUNCH which takes a place-based Indigenous nation-led approach to self-determined health and wellbeing. Again, the research system supported this. We were a bit unsure if we were going to be successful by placing, essentially, research sovereignty into the hands of the nations. But we won an NHMRC Synergy Grant with almost 100% Indigenous investigator team to work alongside 5 Aboriginal nations, supporting their self-governance, the design of their health and wellbeing services, and in the process, redesigning standards to which CQI is applied.

Importantly, each of these nations are represented in the investigator team. These nations are structurally embedded in the research. We have distributed the resources out to the nations as well so what we've done here is shift the decision-making power to nations themselves.

The programme is called Stronger Together as Unified Nations for Community Health or STAUNCH, which I think is an appropriate word to describe what we're attempting to do with this phase.

At the heart of STAUNCH is Indigenous nation building or rebuilding scholarship, which was developed in North America and also has a history here in Australia led by Professor Darryl Rigney and his team at the Jumbunna Institute. It is about rebuilding governance at the level where cultural authority and legitimacy sit, which is with the nations. It’s about stepping beyond government and policy processes to support Indigenous nations' self-determination.

This is the first time that we've had a health and wellbeing focus to Indigenous nation building, which is exciting. We are moving beyond research systems to reshape relationships with western governments. How western governments relate to Indigenous nations to bring about the system transformation that's so desperately needed to support their self-determination. At its core, STAUNCH is about 3 shifts. As discussed, shifting where the decision making power sits, strengthening First Nations governance at the level of the nation to determine health and wellbeing needs and also redefining what counts. Communities decide what success looks like as evidence of outcomes and importantly, preparing governments to work differently through new relationships, place-based approaches, new models, encouraging greater cross-sector collaboration within government to deal with complex challenges which do require sort of that multi-sectorial approach to address.

Again, this isn't happening in isolation. Our policies are now talking about being all in for systems change. We have the Closing the Gap priority reforms around shared decision making, strengthening the community control sector, transforming government institutions as well as shared access to data and foreground in Indigenous data sovereignty and governance.

Part of the part of the policy sphere is also new accountability architecture, largely driven by the Coalition of Peaks and NACCHO that all governments have signed up to recently. The establishment of an independent Indigenous monitoring and accountability group who will assess whether governments are delivering on their commitments and achieving meaningful systemic change for our communities. There is also a push for jurisdictions to establish similar independent mechanisms as required under their commitment to the National Health Reform Agreement.

Again, following the pattern of the research system change that I've spoken about, there is mechanisms in place for transformational change within our broader governance systems. There appears to be commitment from governments. But the next step is probably the hardest. The power shifts are never easy. But in going back to the All In theme, it's not really about whether we are committed, but what we are willing to change.

This is my final slide, and again, just to emphasise the reconciliation theme of being All In. It's about changing who decides, changing models and what counts as evidence. Changing how accountability works and again, as my research journey has demonstrated, change is possible but only when we are willing to confront the deeper systems that lie behind the work we do. The enduring impacts of colonisation, where power sits, the way those systems continue to shape health, wellbeing and opportunity today.

I want you to consider the system that you work or operate in. Where does that power sit? How can you be a participant in change in ways that enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to determine their own futures? Because when Indigenous communities lead health systems reform, it becomes a tool for wellbeing, for justice and self-determination.

I would like to acknowledge that this work would not be at all possible without the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and health services who have supported and directed the research. All of the wonderful researchers who have been involved over the 2 decades of work, including certain influential figures guiding my career trajectory who have listed there. The STRIDE and STAUNCH fellas, which is a beautiful network of early, mid-career and later career research who provide necessary peer support for the ups and downs of academic life. The NHMRC and its Indigenous leadership who made research system transformation possible and also my family is on Quandamooka and Bundjalung country for their ongoing love and support.

I know that I haven't really gone into too much depth relating to the actual research programmes across CRE, STRIDE and IQI. I've just added here a couple of links to those if you're interested in checking that out, assuming that the slides are going to be shared. Thank you so much for listening. Got a bit of time now for Q&A

29:45 Prue Torrance

Thank you so much, Veronica. What a fabulous presentation. I love it that you posed a question back to everyone else to be self-reflective about our own role in change going forward.

I'm open to the floor now for anyone who has questions. Please put up your hand or put your question in the Q&A forum, but I might just kick off with one while we're waiting for others.

I'm interested in what your view of the long-term future looks like. A slightly related one is just with your STAUNCH research project being place-based, and I think you mentioned 5 nations involved, do you see that being a model that needs to be replicated in other places, or do you see some other type of system transformation that might overtake that sort of model into the future?

30:40 Associate Professor Matthews

Thanks, Prue. I'm hoping that the future looks like what we're aiming to achieve in STAUNCH. The scalability aspect of STAUNCH, just to emphasise that it's not about uniformity in the way that we approach health and wellbeing across different nations, but it's the process that we undertake to enable self-determination. That's why I'm hoping, what I'm hoping STAUNCH can provide a blueprint for.

Now that we have the accountability mechanisms in place, at the federal level and also hopefully eventually across the state and territory jurisdictions, that STAUNCH may be able to offer a bit of a case study about how governments can apply their system transformation because it could come, it sounds really difficult, doesn't it? When you've had a system in place for so long, you've got policy makers scratching their heads about how to do this properly. I think this place-based approach that STAUNCH offers is a way to do that incrementally. It's not so big when you're focused on one nation and their needs. It could be seen as a bit of a pilot, a bit of a trial, if governments can work together to support the health and wellbeing aspirations of a nation or of 5 nations.

We document the outcomes of those approaches which I have no doubt will be extremely positive. If nations do back nation aspirations and governance processes and decision making processes, then I think that provides a blueprint of how we can scale it out across other communities as well.

32:56 Prue Torrance

I think there's a related question in the chat as well, but I'll give it to you in case you want to build on your answer.

How would other national health programmes engage with STAUNCH to build relationships and collaborations?

33:13 Associate Professor Matthews

It's just a matter of reaching out, I guess, and discussing with us.

We are foregrounding nation building processes in STAUNCH. A lot of the other work that's happening within STAUNCH, such as the relational aspects with the Western governments and also the design of new health and wellbeing standards to sit behind CQI processes. They're really guided by what nations decide. That's the whole point of STAUNCH, is that the research direction and power and decision-making sits with those nations.

As they develop up their ideas over time, we'll be looking to, governments will be looking to other health organisations to come in and to support what nations want.

That's where that power shift happens. It's been generated and driven by communities, and we just pull in the necessary supports required to see nations fulfil their aspirations.

34:41 Prue Torrance

Shifting their power dynamics is one of the hardest things, isn't it? It needs action from all fronts.

34:45 Associate Professor Matthews

Yeah, that's right.

34:49 Prue Torrance

The next question is really coming from a researcher engagement point of view here.

It's wonderful to see Indigenous leadership at such strength. What guidance can you provide to non-Indigenous researchers wanting to work with and alongside Indigenous researchers in terms of enabling this leadership to guide the process?

35:09 Associate Professor Matthews

Thanks for that question.

It's important to state that there have been so many non-Indigenous researchers walking beside us. I think that's what it involves. Being a good ally means supporting Indigenous leadership, not necessarily leading, walking alongside, rethinking roles in governance and other decision-making processes such as authorship, for instance, being accountable to Indigenous colleagues and Indigenous communities. Again, that comes back to the All In theme. It is changing how you work, really. There's so much support from our non-Indigenous allies. It's not just what you support, it's changing how you work.

36:09 Prue Torrance

There was a question about the volume thing, but I've lost it. I'll just go to the next one on the list.

Thank you for your presentation and sharing this amazing work and journey. Is it possible to share a little more on balancing the community led nation building local decision making with funder reporting needs, milestones and timelines?

36:34 Associate Professor Matthews 

Yeah, that's probably one aspect of the research system that still requires a bit of a bit of change. I think the long-term nature of the research collaboration, the fact
that we have received successive grants has enabled the work to become what it is now through STAUNCH because it has enabled those long-term relationships with communities.

The short-term funding of research projects, you know, the quick announcement of opportunities and then needing to submit a grant with evidenced Indigenous community support is hard. But I I think because of our long-term success in funding and developing these relationships with communities, it's made it easier.

I do think we need to re-examine, I guess, the way research funding happens. I think that is happening within the NHMRC. There is some thought being given to how, we can encourage the development of relationships with communities, factoring in that time is required, and also just factoring in the time required for Indigenous community-led research, as the question has pointed out. We can't rush these things.

A wise person once said that trust, the building of relationships happens at the speed of trust. Priorities change within communities as well, so what you might set out to do initially, with a research project may not be what you end up doing. I think that's the other beauty of STAUNCH, is that we're really handing the research agenda to nations to decide what it is that they want to do. It's going to look very different across each of the nations.

We have one nation, Gubhaju Batkin, who is quite experienced in nation building. They've been doing it for some time and so they're a lot further down the track in terms of the establishment of their governance structures and ideas about what they want to see in terms of health and wellbeing services. But then we have other nations who aren't so familiar with nation building.

It's going to look very different across each of the nations and as researchers, we just have to be comfortable with that and comfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing how things are going to progress.

39:41 Prue Torrance

Thanks.

As a representative of a funding agency, we also have to be comfortable with the fact that our funding system needs to evolve, adapt, continuously learn, and make sure we are actually enabling the community led and appropriate prioritisation of research to our systems.

39:58 Associate Professor Matthews

Thank you.

40:00 Prue Torrance 

Always good to be reminded.

Alright, the next question is, who have been your mentors and role models?

40:09 Associate Professor Matthews 

I have a few listed there on that final slide. We stand on the shoulder of giants.

There's been so many Indigenous research leaders before us that have enabled this shift in research systems. I'm very fortunate to have been guided by the likes of Professor Yvonne Cadet James, Roxanne Bainbridge, Monita Sherwood, and more recently, Professor Darryl Ridney, and the work that he's done in the nation building space.

It's not just about those that have gone before, but it's also about the colleagues that I work with now. There are so many inspirational people in the research sector. A lot of them are in the Indigenous Advisory Group of the NHMRC and I think those networks are so important to be connected with other black fella academics. It is so important for your own confidence and for validating your viewpoints and the direction that you want to take the research in. It was very different first starting out in research, as I mentioned, being the only Indigenous member of a research team, asking questions but not really being listened to. Having that critical mass is extremely important and the mentors, probably too numerous to list off.

41:50 Prue Torrance

No doubt you find yourself now in the mentoring role and with that in mind, what would be your one piece of advice, if you could encapsulate it into one, you don't have to, for the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers who are coming into the system?

42:08 Associate Professor Matthews 

I think it is about finding your peers. It's about connecting in with academic networks. That's what we've tried to establish as well through STRIDE and STAUNCH with this fellows group is to connect researchers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Not necessarily working within our research projects, but a disparate range of researchers as a peer support mechanism to reduce the isolation that academics can feel, particularly early in their career.

To find those mentors, I guess, to find those inspirational people, because there's lots, we're a growing cohort. There's lots of deadly researchers out there and it's just a matter of connecting with them and just developing that support.

I think what we could do better in is maybe reaching out to other sectors, as we propose to do in STAUNCH is that multi-sectorial approach. We need to connect health researchers with the researchers who are working in the environmental space or the education space, so we have this holistic approach to research. We've been talking about it for a while, but we need our own Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander University, I think.

44:05 Prue Torrance

There's an idea for government to set up.

Just following that theme of support for early career researchers, do you have any ideas or recommendations for funding bodies about what we could do to better support early career Aboriginal researchers? Any pathways that need strengthening?

44:26 Associate Professor Matthews

Well, I think I think the OCHRE Network was a fantastic initiative. I know that's coming to an end, so I would suggest supporting the continuation of the OCHRE Network. It's been effective in growing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research leadership. But maybe we could have an explicit request, perhaps, to include other Indigenous researchers from other sectors, as I've just spoken about.

45:05 Prue Torrance 

That multi-disciplinary type approach for the social and cultural determinants really incorporated here.

45:07 Associate Professor Matthews 

Yeah, multi-disciplinary.

45:13 Prue Torrance

I think I've missed one question.

Yes, going back to the theme of being All In and ensuring everyone's willing to change. For people working inside government systems and funding agencies, where do you think we should start if we want to move from good intent to structural change?

It's a big question.

45:36 Associate Professor Matthews

Yeah, it is a big question.

I have spent a bit of time in government in both policy and service delivery prior to starting the PhD. I'm a late comer to research, and I understand how difficult it can be working within the system, but I, I guess what happened in the research sector, it just starts with asking questions and offering solutions. They don't have to be major transformations. I think it is all about the small changes that can happen incrementally to bring about that transformational change.

Supporting initiatives like STAUNCH I think would be an awesome thing, but that's my personal interest. Just finding the initiatives that are happening already in community and putting your support behind them and not taking over, but showing how government can support what is working within community.

46:54 Prue Torrance

We do have a question about STAUNCH, again, about what specific mechanisms were put in place to ensure that it was community-led, self-determined approaches that were embedded in the program.

47:10 Associate Professor Matthews 

I think it is about having the nation, each of the nations represented in the investigator team. We purposefully redistributed funds directly to the nations themselves so effectively, facilitators of the nation building work will be happening across the five nations.

This first year is all about education, so providing nation building education to the nations about what it is and what it involves, largely led by Gouda Batkin and Janine Gertz, who is the expert, or one of the experts in Indigenous nation building here in Australia.

Those types of mechanisms are genuinely shifting the decision making to nations, the resources to nations, I think guarantees that it is nation led. We've already been pulled up, like nations have already told us directly that nation building has to take front and centre of this programme of work and everything else must be guided by what nations say. That's the way we operate.

I'm just excited to see what can happen. I know five years is a time and you're effectively trying to undo 200 plus years of colonisation. It's not like we're going to change everything in five years, but at least it's a start.

49:00 Prue Torrance 

The chief investigators, you've brought in people who have a research background into the collaboration, or is it a kind of mostly some experience in order to get the nations represented?

49:12 Associate Professor Matthews

It's a varying experience. Most have some experience and most are seasoned, some are seasoned researchers, some are not. They're more on the service delivery side of things, not just health services. Our community partners are also range of groups - housing organisations, native title groups. It's varied, as I said, across each nation.

Most of the investigators, yes, they do have some research experience and again, probably once upon a time, having investigators without that track record would have been a death penal and should have been successful, but I think our research funding systems are doing better in terms of recognising experience and lived experience.

50:16 Prue Torrance

Yeah, that's the intent. That's good.

Reflecting over your research career more broadly, what would you consider to be the most rewarding aspect of having been a health and medical researcher and perhaps what was the most challenging aspect?

50:34 Associate Professor Matthews

Definitely what is the most rewarding is working with community, working with mob, getting to know different communities across the country and being in awe of their knowledge systems.

For grounding those knowledge systems in in our work, I guess the most challenging part has been the transformation process within the research system itself. There is a lot of tension involved in shifting power. But again, it has occurred through long-term relationships. The fact that the collaboration has been working together for quite some time so there's relationships there, there's trust there. It's about proving that black fellas can lead research programmes and be successful.

I think at STAUNCH, we've sort of proven that, and I'm just excited to see what the outcomes will be.

51:57 Prue Torrance

Right. There is another question that's come up. It is similar to one of the earlier ones but phrased a little differently.

It is around how you are planning to translate the findings from your nation building with the five nations out to other nations and communities? I will recognise you're a year into the grant, so maybe you don't have the answer yet. That'd be great to hear.

52:22 Associate Professor Matthews 

Yeah, just through the sharing of stories, but in different ways. As what I described during the presentation, general papers aren't everything. They're certainly not to community and we do have a stream within STAUNCH that is arts-based, research translation to arts-based inform Indigenous research. We have creatives working with us within STAUNCH to share what is learned in innovative, creative ways, which is what traditionally communities used to do with art and dance and song. I guess through a variety of ways, not just reports, but what also speaks to community and it's also having the communities themselves tell their story.

53:21 Prue Torrance

Yeah, not rely on kind of traditional academic communication that won't reach the right audiences.

53:26 Associate Professor Matthews

Yeah, that's right.

53:30 Prue Torrance 

Alright. Well, I can't see any outstanding questions from the audience. I think partly because your presentation was so clear and comprehensive. It was very easy to follow. Thank you so much and thank you for sharing your journey.

That kind of story of how we're actually transforming the research system itself, and we recognise that there's a role for all of us to play to continue that journey and continue to strengthen the role of that self-determination around research, as well as into the health system and health outcomes.

Thank you very much for sharing. It's an important time with National Reconciliation Week coming up next week, but this would have been a most valuable presentation at any time of the year. Thank you so much for being here. It's been a great pleasure and honour to have hosted you.

For the audience, if questions occur to you later, you can reach out through the NHMRC Media team and we'll endeavour to have your questions answered if that suits you, Veronica.

Just a reminder that the recording will be available online and so please share it with any colleagues who've been unable to join us today. Thank you again.

54:51 Associate Professor Matthews

Thank you so much, Prue, and thanks for everyone for listening in. Enjoy your week.

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