Dr Maggie Brady

Position

Fellow, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research

Address

Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR)
Hanna Neumann Building #21
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

Contact

Telephone: 02 6125 4796
Facsimile: 02 6125 2789
Email: maggie.brady@anu.edu.au

General areas of interest

Health policy; primary health care; community development; research

Specific aspects

Substance abuse; early intervention; health service/doctor's role; alcohol treatment

Biographic details

Maggie Brady has been working on Aboriginal issues since 1978. She became involved in an action research project on Aboriginal juvenile offending and petrol sniffing while she was based at the Department of Psychiatry at Flinders University in Adelaide, between 1978 and 1981. Following this she worked on land tenure issues as an anthropologist with the Northern Land Council in Darwin, and researched Aboriginal diet, hunting patterns and lifestyle in the Maralinga region of South Australia, contaminated as a result of the British nuclear tests of the 1960s.

Maggie did fieldwork in central and northern Australia for several studies in the 1980s, including one on alcohol use in Tennant Creek, and a major project on petrol sniffing which resulted in the book Heavy Metal (Aboriginal Studies Press 1992). Since then she has published studies of natural recovery from alcohol abuse among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Giving Away the Grog, Drug Offensive, 1995) and became interested in the potential role for doctors and other primary care practitioners in much earlier interventions for alcohol misuse.

She has been a technical advisor to WHO on Indigenous substance abuse issues, and has also written on HIV/AIDS education, young peoples' health, the impact of gaming machines, and produced a community development manual for Indigenous people dealing with alcohol problems (The Grog Book. Strengthening Indigenous community action on alcohol, Dept. Health and Family Services, 1998).

Recent publications include:

• Brady, M. (2002). Historical and cultural roots of tobacco use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 26(2), 120-124.
• Sibthorpe, B.M., Bailie, R.S., Brady, M.A., Ball, S.A., Sumner-Dodd, P., & Hall, W.D. (2002). The demise of a planned randomised controlled trial in an urban Aboriginal medical service. Medical Journal of Australia, 176, 273-276.

Maggie is a Fellow at the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in Canberra and has completed a Doctor of Philosophy at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University.