Growing up on Elcho Island in north-east Arnhem Land, Stuart Yiwarr McGrath was used to seeing people die young. It was something he thought was normal, until it happened in his own family.
52 is when you die on the island, three people a month die, all of modifiable diseases.Stuart Yirwarr McGrath
Stuart's mother was diagnosed with lupus when he was around ten years old, but factors including low health literacy and language barriers delayed her diagnosis and treatment.
It was too late by the time it was diagnosed so she went into palliative care... I thought it was important that I bridge this gap and get into health, and kind of be that middle person in both worlds. It's not really your average Australian kid story... the inspiration came from dark places.Stuart Yirwarr McGrath
In this episode of Seen, Yumi Stynes talks to Aboriginal health practitioner Stuart Yiwarr McGrath about soon becoming the first Yolngu nurse, discrimination his community has faced in the health system, the work he’s doing to change this and whether it matters to be seen.
Clips featured in this episode are from the Ask the Specialist podcast, Menzies School of Health Research.
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, Seen is a podcast series about cultural creatives rising to excellence despite arriving in a role-model vacuum. Hear from trailblazers like artist Atong Atem, musican Ray Ahn, Olympian Ellia Green and more about the transformative moments they felt seen.
Host: Yumi Stynes
Created by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Executive Producer: Kate Montague
Producers: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth
Junior Producer: Alison Zhuang
Sound design and mix: Ravi Gupta
Theme music: Yeo
Art: Evi-O Studios
SBS team: Caroline Gates, Max Gosford, Joel Supple
Special thanks to Sajarn Stow and Tracy Westerman
Transcript
Yumi Stynes: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this episode references people who have died. It also features some explicit language, and references to suicide.
If anything comes up for you, you can call Life Line on 13 11 14, or the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line on 13YARN.
(Music)
Stuart Yiwarr McGrath: People just die young from where I'm from… 52 is when you die on the island, three people a month die, all on modifiable diseases you know.
Stynes: Dialling in for this episode of Seen is Stuart Yiwarr McGrath from Larrakia Country, also known as Darwin.
A lot of people consider Australia’s health care system to be gold standard. You don’t have to go into debt for surgery, and if you get a chronic disease… there’s an expectation you’ll be looked after…
But there exists a whole ecosystem of discrimination that city people like me, often can’t see.
McGrath: The health literacy was quite low where I come from. And English isn't the first language.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: Stuart’s a Galiwin’ku man and a single father of two daughters, he’s lived in one of the remotest parts of Australia… And he knows first hand the struggles of health literacy and language barriers, having an Aboriginal mum with a chronic illness.
McGrath: I think I was about ten or 11. My mother was diagnosed with lupus. We didn't really know back then, so we went back and forth and the clinic and the hospitals and stuff. It was just heaps of blood tests, blood tests, and she never really got diagnosed. But in the end, it was too late by the time it was diagnosed so she went into palliative care.
I thought it was important that I bridge this gap and get into health and kind of be that middle person in both worlds.
Stynes: The Yolŋu are a people from North East Arnhem land. And Stuart’s about to become the first registered Yolŋu nurse…
(Theme music building)
McGrath: It's not really your average Australian kid story. Like I always wanted to be a nurse when I was a kid sort of thing. So the inspiration came from dark places. You know Yumi.
Stynes: I’m Yumi Stynes, and this is Seen. This podcast is about trailblazers who, unseen or unrepresented in the mainstream, rise to excellence anyway.
We start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record, whose culture includes a rich tradition of healing and medicine, the Cammeraygal and Gadigal people, and their Elders past and present.
(Music fade out, sound design: phone ring)
McGrath: (Greeting in Yolŋu Matha language) Hi everyone. My name is Stuart Yiwarr McGrath, and I'm from Elcho Island.
Stynes: Stuart’s the only Aboriginal Health practitioner in his community who’s studying nursing. Who can speak Yolŋu Matha the language of his people.
He spends his time travelling the world talking about cultural safety in the practice of medicine. And was also named Young Australian of the year for the Northern Territory in 2021. And you may have seen him doing parkour in Santorini in Greece, eating pickled lemon in Marrakech and dancing the salsa in Columbia on the Amazing Race.
Stuart was raised on North East Arnhem land in a very remote place called Mata Mata, right at the top of Australia.
McGrath: I'm not sure if that's on Google Earth or anything. It's probably a house, you know, around six houses. Got a school there. My mother was the teacher and my grandmother and we would have a white teacher that flew in once a week to teach us, you know, a few words in English here and there.
Stynes: Wow, so your mum and grandma were both teachers there.
McGrath: Yeah.
Stynes: That sounds so tiny. I don't even know if I can picture it. Were you near the ocean or inland?
McGrath: Yeah, yeah, pretty much up near the ocean. And then later down my childhood, we moved to a place called Galiwin'ku, which is the main community. It’s on Elcho Island. That's about 3000 people now.
Stynes: You would have known every single person.
McGrath: Yeah. Yeah, I know everybody in the community. (Yeah) With which families they come from. Which dialect? Which clans?
Stynes: Galiwin’ku is the largest and most remote Aboriginal community in northeast Arnhem Land. Here the traditional ways of hunting, living, art, lore and language aren’t historic - they’re part of everyday life. Stuart grew up steeped in his culture, speaking Yolŋu Matha, learning from elders the stories of his ancestors and how to take care of the land.
Stuart’s father was white and his mother was a Galiwin’ku woman.
McGrath: My father died when I was five, and all that I knew in Mata Mata was being black. And I was treated as such by my family. I think it was later down the track when we went to Galiwin'ku, Elcho Island where the population was a little bit mixed, they had white people working there and stuff. And that's when I started to kind of see it when I went to school there.
Stynes: And how was it viewed? What was the perspective like?
McGrath: I started to notice how evidently mixed I was, a mixed race coming from a full blood Galiwin’ku woman and a white dad when the Galiwin’ku school, Yolŋu students making fun of me for being mixed. And that's when I kind of realised, alright, I'm not like everybody.
Stynes: When you were a kid, you attended a lot of doctor's appointments with your mum. Can you tell me about those experiences?
McGrath: It was normally white nurses and white doctors kind of giving the opinion. But never really considered, maybe she needs an interpreter, so perhaps she could articulate her symptoms, in her first language, because it's more you more likely to be expressive in your first language because obviously you dream in that language, you know, so it'd be only right. And so that was the only gap in that was that the health service lacked in cultural safety. That's why she died.
So I didn't understand. I pretty much thought it was a way of life. I think she was like in early forties when she passed away. Where I'm from 52 is when you die on the island, three people a month die, all on modifiable diseases you know.
It's all about crying and dying, burying people, you know. At a younger age I started to kind of see the dysfunction. I didn't really know what that was, like what suicide was so. In fact, I actually seen one of my family members, after that, it was just never ending.
(Music)
Stynes: At the age of 12 Stuart became an orphan… The experience of losing his mother shaped everything that followed.
McGrath: I got a phone call by the time I was 13 from Canberra, from my aunty. This is my father's sister who's obviously white and said, “would you like to come down and do your education down here for two years or something?” You know, and I agreed.
Stynes: So. So you're about 13 or 14 and you leave your tiny, remote community. You leave Elcho Island, population less than 3000, and you fly all the way to Canberra, which is besides being really white, it's also really cold and southern (laughing).
(Music fade out)
McGrath: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I came from a, you know, school that was, you know, probably 95% who are, Yolŋu, so blak. To a school that was 95% white and I was the minority. So it was, it was quite mind blowing. Scary times. Scary times.
Stynes: Do you remember much about it?
McGrath: Yeah. Yeah. I went there and luckily my cousin went to that same school as well. So it was kind of comforting, you know?
Stynes: Yeah, I bet.
McGrath: Yeah, yeah. But it was funny times. This was around 2004. Everyone eventually found out that my cousin and I were related and nobody believed us. Cause they thought we were adopted. Because my cousin was white. Yeah, it was a, it was a very foreign concept for them to see. You know, this doesn't happen. It can't happen. A mixed race product.
Stynes: The culture shock that Stuart experienced was immense. But he’s smart and adaptable and above all, a survivor. But here’s the huge irony: by being exposed to the so-called “Australian way of life,” this Indigenous teenage boy was, for the first time, taught that - he didn’t belong.
McGrath: Racism was a very new word to my vocabulary. And, and I can tell you that I found that word not on a dictionary.
(Music)
McGrath: I had a friend and he introduced me to his friend, another white boy. And I went to shake his hand. And then he was still standing there. And I was like, “You okay? Are you going to shake my hand?” And then he goes, “I don't shake hands with no black man.” And yeah, it was terrifying. Shattered me and I was like, ‘Oh, I don't know what this is.’ That's how I found out. They were like, “Oh, that kid's being racist to you”. And I was like, “What's that?” And then they were telling me like, “Oh, it means, like, he sees you as an inferior race because of how you look and where you're from.” So that's how I found out what that word meant.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: Was that across the board because you would have been interesting to others? Were lots of people treating you like an other?
McGrath: Yeah, yes. I was quite evidently black. But really, where I come from, I was the light-skinned black. So it was quite funny. They were like, “Really? You black and this and that.” And I'm like, “I'm not, I'm just I'm half white from where I come from. I'm light skinned.” (Yeah, yeah) So like even I was quite dark for the school in Canberra I went to.
Stynes: This was one of many culture shocks Stuart experienced during his life in Canberra.
McGrath: It’s a different world. I understood it was ‘me, I, and mine’ mentality, so materialistic and capitalism is a core value of the western life. So that was quite up in my face, you know. Where I come from, it's a collective culture. We share everything. So yes, it was that was the culture shock that I- the way that I translated it was like ‘me, I and mine,’ everything's mine. I learnt pretty quick though. By then, I started to understand the world that I lived it down there and then I went back to Galiwin'ku then I started to kind of adapt in both worlds.
Stynes: Learning how to adapt between different cultures is known as code switching.
‘Code switching’ is a way of explaining the way some people change the way they speak, their mannerisms and body language to both blend in better and put those around them at ease. It’s not bad or good, it’s a survival mechanism, and people do it all the time. For Stuart, switching between his cultures came with side-effects.
McGrath: So I started going back down south to Canberra. I would start to think in English and dream in English. Then when I went back to Galiwin'ku, I started thinking in Yolŋu Matha and started dreaming Yolŋu Matha. So I started to become a shapeshifter in two worlds, you know? Took me a while though.
A lot of people should embrace it. I embrace it. It took me a long time. But you have to adapt to this Western world. You know, if I live a fully Yolŋu life, it's it's not compatible in the modern world. So you have to, you know, embrace both worlds because that's that's the world we live in now. And you get left behind pretty much. So I'm not saying that because I'm colonised. I'm saying that as a survival mechanism.
(Music)
Stynes: Yeah. You gotta survive.
McGrath: Because when I started to dream in English and think in English, that kind of scared me. I was afraid that I was going to lose my culture.
Stynes: And after two years living in Canberra, Stuart decides to return home… but his perspective had changed forever.
McGrath: Yeah, it was never the same in the end. What my problem was, that I seen the outside world. So I started to compare my life on the island as a Yolŋu boy, you know, I couldn't be the same person anymore. I was never content after that.
Stynes: At 16 years old, Stuart could now see the shocking disadvantage of his people.
McGrath: I was living in poverty and this is not the Australian life. Like Australian people outside don't live like this. So I started not to accept my environment. (Mmm) The system's killing someone. Even someone that's still breathing today.
(Music fade out)
McGrath: A lot of my family members that I grew up with are stranded on welfare and in and out of prison. So, they've kind of, you know, been washed off by the Western world.
Stynes: Seeing the contrast between the way white people in Canberra lived, and how his friends and family lived back home - was appalling to Stuart. Then he became a father. It shifted his perspective even more. He wanted to give his daughters a better life. So at 25, he began his career in health care.
McGrath: I realised that in order to have these both worlds, you needed to be educated in both worlds. So I learnt my own, own, own, you know, education system and then the Yolŋu system first because my grandmother told me, “this is the fire. This is the coal. This is the origins. If you can't get this fire, then you cannot survive in the Western world.” Fire is my totem, this is how my grandmother talks. She's very in the spirit realm. (Laughs) And I didn't know what she meant. But yeah, you have to get your first identity first. Your Yolŋu identity. If you can't figure that out, then you can't exist in the Western world.
But then later down the track I realised that, that is the only way that you can survive is to be educated in both worlds. And I'm not talking like societal culture. I'm talking, like, academically as well in both worlds.
I started my Cert four and I thought that was it. I'm handling the health care system. My competence was questioned all the time by nurses, you know, and, and, you know, midwives and doctors and stuff. Hence why I decided to do a degree in nursing. Because you're always going to be, you know, on top of them to be equivalent. That's how they respect you and understand your knowledge.
Stynes: It's true. It's true. It's almost like you've got to be better, better than.
McGrath: Oh, yeah, yeah. I've got some colleagues that are, you know, the one who told me she's a professor now, but she started out as a nurse and stuff. But even that was never good enough. People still questioned her clinical opinions and judgements and professionalism, so she went to do a PHD. So she's a professor. So you're always going to go on top extra than the white person’s education background.
(Music)
Stynes: That, listeners, is the Model Minority pressure we’ve been talking about nearly every episode of this podcast. Because when you come from a minority with the cultural baggage of low expectations, everyone expects you to fail and no one believes you when you say you’re qualified.
I asked Stuart to explain why the hospital setting can be a fearful place particularly for Indigenous patients?
(Music fade out)
McGrath: It's power dynamics, cultural safety plays a lot of power dynamics in how they communicate. I guess it's a self-reflective message of how you use your biomedical knowledge and your white privilege and really analyse yourself before you talk to someone because it could have some serious consequences. So like people die because of this. They run off from the hospital and the medications are not dealt with and people die. That's where that's where it leads to.
I tried to say, I asked them what they would like to be called. And if it's a Indigenous name or a, you know, European name. So that was kind of incorporated. Even the admission documentation. (Mmm) It used to be just like ‘what does the person speak in language?’ And they would just tick the box by saying ‘Indigenous language.’ And there's about 100 plus languages that are considered alive in the Northern Territory. So I and my cohort, a lot of my colleagues, we try and we try to explain that no, there's no such thing as Indigenous language, there is names of nations and they speak that language. So now all that's changed.
Stynes: Wow. So now they’ll actually name the actual language.
McGrath: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stynes: Yeah. Right. They're calling it Indigenous languages. It's like saying you speak Asian.
McGrath: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much or like, oh, that person speaks European. Like what? Whereabouts, though? (Laughing)
You know, there was one incident on Gurrumul Yunupingu. Right. He's from the same island as me. So, for example, that went national. Yeah. With the news where he was deemed as an alcoholic, but he was just born with hepatitis B, with a liver disease as a child. But it was labelled on the medical system that he was an alcoholic. Stuff like that, that's.
Stynes: He didn't even really drink did he?
McGrath: No, he barely drank. (Mmm) But he had the disease when he was born. (Mmm) But people just jumped to the gun and wrote it on his file. That. Yeah. Hep B liver disease due to alcoholism. And as a result, he died. So that's what it does.
Stynes: And despite all of Stuart’s qualifications and hard work, people still underestimate him.
McGrath: I presented my research with my colleague Vicki, we went to convention centre in Darwin in the city and it was about renal, a lot of kidney disease conference with specialists and stuff.
Anyway I've been, like, practising my PowerPoint in the morning early, so I could know, all right, I'm going to be perfect in my presentations. So I was practising my presentation and rocked up there like one hour early. So, you know, I could be professional. And I was looking for, for the room where, where me and my colleague was going to present the research.
This white lady turns around and says, “are you doing one of the testimonies?” And I said, “What?” “Like, are you one of the renal patients with kidney disease. Are you doing a testimony as a patient?” Because the way I looked and according to the statistics, there’s high rates of kidney disease with Indigenous people here. So in her head, she's calculated that and she assumed that I was a patient. I was a researcher there. I was there in a professional capacity.
It's quite degrading. I kind of learn to pick my battles nowadays because you can't keep pulling people up without them realising they're doing it because you become the villain. So it's just white fragility. You know? They get really defensive.
Stynes: Yeah. And you get punished.
McGrath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get deemed as the radical black fellow, so that's kind of. Yeah, pick my battles nowadays.
(Music)
Stynes: In 2020, a 7-part podcast was released - aimed at educating doctors and other medical professionals who work with Aboriginal people in Darwin Hospital.
It was trailblazing in the way it acknowledged the real cultural differences that might be disempowering or intimidating blak patients in mostly white hospitals - and instead of asking for white solutions, it actually consulted with Aboriginal people, who were also specialists.
(Music fade out)
(Archival audio: Ask the Specialist podcast
Speaker: He seems to have great rapport, because he actually wears a NAIDOC shirt, or a football guernsey with an Aboriginal print on it
Stuart: The Aboriginal patient will be like “oh he’s quite relaxed he’s. He's not all medicalled out with a green gown on and stuff.
Speaker: Now if you're a racist, or a bigot you will NOT wear an aboriginal print shirt.)
(Music)
Stynes: One of those specialists is Stuart Yiwarr McGrath. The podcast is called Ask the Specialist and I highly recommend it… but I may not need to because it’s already really popular.
(Music fade out)
McGrath: I think because it's I think the communications within the health care is, is a global issue and that's, that's what the realisation is because it's been downloaded all around the world. So the miscommunication in healthcare system is a global problem and that was something that we did that was intended, intended for pretty much Aboriginal people in Darwin Hospital.
Stynes: Yeah. But it's gone global.
McGrath: Yeah. Yep. So certainly it's a big gap.
Stynes: From his childhood in Galiwin’ku, to his teenage years in Canberra, Stuart has been quick to acquire the necessary tools to fit in. He has described himself as a shapeshifter. But it seems there are few who see all of Stuart.
McGrath: I probably started to get accepted. I started to tend to barbecues and stuff with my white colleagues. When I was I was crowned as the 2021 Northern Territory of the Young Australian of the Year. And then I started my nursing degree. That's when my opinion started to count, because I sound like them and I eat like them and I talk like them. My level of education is like theirs. And so it became easy and I started to be seen as one of them. So being seen is measured upon Western society’s metric system.
Stynes: Did it mean much to be young Australian of the Year in NT?
McGrath: Not to my family, no. It's not their world. Well, this degree stuff. Going to Scotland for the conference for the for the research. Amazing Race Australia didn't. It doesn't really mean anything.
My family live Yolŋu world. They don't live in Western world, so it doesn't mean anything. But in this world I became very accepted. I'm seen as part of the mainstream Australian society.
Stynes: I'm curious how that felt. Did it feel good to be in mainstream Australian society?
McGrath: Yes and no. A bit of both, I reckon. Yeah, I, I kind of know in the back of my head that if this was none, if I didn't have all this, then I wouldn't be sitting with, with academics, you know, sipping on French rosé and eating lobsters and stuff. This is only happening because I'm doing the equivalent to them. I'm aware of that. That's never drifted off because I know where I come from and I know where I'm coming from. You know?
Stynes: Yeah. And speaking of where you're from and your family, so they were kind of unmoved by you becoming young Australian of the Year, going to Glasgow, doing TV shows. What does impress them about you? Like what is the achievement you can make where they like, yeah, ‘go Stuart Yiwarr, you know, that's awesome!’
McGrath: If I'm affiliated with my family culturally doing ceremonies and stuff, that's status in, in my culture.
Stynes: Yeah. And that's where you're valued and respected back home.
McGrath: That's right. For my Yolŋu knowledge. Not, not for we say, balanda for white people. So it's not for balanda knowledge because it's irrelevant. (Mmm) Why would they. It's not their world. It's, it's probably relevant for me because I, I shift in and out, I live both worlds.
Stynes: To live in both worlds is common to the migrant experience… but the thing is, Stuart’s not a migrant. As an Indigenous man, he’s as local as can be!
(Music)
McGrath: Last time I was on Amazing Race. I was in Columbia and I said to these two contestants, they were these white girls from Melbourne. And I said, You know what? I don't know how this is going to sound, but I don't feel like a minority in Columbia. So I felt like I was part of it.
Race is a selective thing, Yumi. It shifts in between countries depending on which country you are, it shifts as being the minority, you know? But in this shift of space in Colombia, I was the majority. So it was a weird feeling yeah.
I felt more Australian than I was in Australia. How crazy was that because people ask me, you know, like, “hey, you know, where are you from?” “And I'm like, I'm from Australia.” And they were like, “wow, you really from Australia?” And they, that was it. They took it for what it was.
There's no such thing as us. “But you're Indigenous, aren't you?” I was just taken as Australian. Because that's what it says on my passport.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: It’s amazing that to be seen as Australian, Stuart needed to leave Australia. Weighing up the value of culture, language and education, Stuart made some tough calls on how to best raise his daughters.
McGrath: I've kind of paused the Yolŋu world on them and I, I'm passing on to them Western culture and language first. I speak to my kids in English every day, they don't, they barely speak Yolŋu Matha. And I get criticised for it a lot, but that's a survival language, it's the dominant Western world. Of course I'm going to teach my kids that first. It's a survival mode. But then again, of course I'm going to teach them the Yolŋu culture, and language and Yolŋu world later down the track is not getting to extinction. There's about 15,000 Yolŋu people that exist in Arnhem Land and the language is really alive and still alive.
(Theme music building)
Yumi Stynes: What's next for you?
Stuart Yiwarr McGrath: Oh, well, start practising my nursing in East Arnhem Land in Northern Territory and I will solely pledge to be a full time father to my children and teach them what it's like to live both worlds. I'm going to invest my time in that.
Stynes: This has been Seen. Hosted by me, Yumi Stynes, created by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn with Audiocraft, in collaboration with SBS.
From Audiocraft this show was produced by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth, our Junior Producer is Alison Zhuang. Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta, and executive producer Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Caroline Gates, Joel Supple, and Max Gosford.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi O Studios. Music is by Yeo.
(Theme music fade out, music sting)
Stynes: What has becoming a healthcare professional meant for your understanding of all those negative experience that you had with the system and that your mum had?
McGrath: I decided to stop whingeing Yumi. So I became the change. There's no point protesting about things and saying things that’s beyond your control. You can't change. I decided to do something about it.
Stynes: Becoming the change - is the inspiration and motivation from a lot of the people we will meet on this podcast. Another First Nations person making change is this woman:
Tracy Westerman: My experience is that Aboriginal people, generally just do not get access to the services that we need.
Stynes: This is Dr Tracy Westerman she’s a clinical psychologist and the founding director of the charity, The Westermen Jilya Institute for Indigenous Mental Health.
And much like Stuart, Tracy’s fighting the good fight for her people. Her work is fundamental in creating more culturally appropriate health care for First Nations.
Westerman: We actually had four successive government enquiries into the suicide rates in remote areas and all of those enquiries concluded essentially that our young people were dying by suicide because of what they referred to as system failure. What we know is that there are 218 Indigenous psychologists in this country. And so what that translates to is that for every 4000 Aboriginal people in mental health crisis, there's only one Indigenous psychologist available to them.
As an undergrad I was quite shocked actually coming down from the remote Pilbara, expecting to learn all this amazing stuff that I could then use to go back to help my people. And the word Aboriginal wasn't mentioned in the first three years of my undergraduate degree.
The psychology training is predicated on the basis of cultural exclusion. Most of the best practise. And the treatments have been developed predominantly by non-Indigenous people for non-Indigenous people.
So what we're doing at my Jilya Institute is not only developing more capacity in terms of having more indigenous psychologists into on the treatment side, what we're also doing is we're ensuring that best practise research and treatment interventions and all those sorts of things that psychology has fundamentally failed to provide is actually being provided by Indigenous psychologists.
We now have 41 Indigenous psychology students. Just in two years since the Jilya Institute started and while that what that fundamentally means is that, you know, Indigenous people ourselves are driving this, but also non-Indigenous people are able to capitalise on that expertise and developing those really great models that we know are going to be most effective in our communities.
Leadership is really about taking a stand for others more than it is yourself. And where we fail is that often people don't realise that you lift up the most marginalised and all of the country becomes better as a result.
(Music sting)
