On the face of it, it’s simply the story of a new Hino operating as a mobile health clinic serving First Nations communities around Hervey Bay and Maryborough on Queensland’s Fraser Coast. The fact is though, this highly equipped truck plays a pivotal role in delivering health outcomes that do far more than just pay lip service to ‘Closing the Gap’.
Down on the marina, the first tide of tourists are steadily boarding a small flotilla of craft for a day out on the shimmering waters of Hervey Bay. Far across the glistening expanse, K’gari stretches out as it has for time immemorial, solemn and hazy in the early morning glare.
Business is brisk for the Bay’s tourism operators. It’s the start of a long weekend, the weather is bright and balmy, school holidays are in full swing and top of the list, it’s the height of whale watching season when humpbacks come to calve and mate as they have for interminable centuries in the warm, gentle waters between the mainland and the world’s largest sand island. And right now, there are plenty of whales to be watched.
Notably though, and much like Ayers Rock’s transition to Uluru, the tourism industry has been at the forefront of Fraser Island’s relatively recent name change to K’gari (pronounced Gurri), a word meaning ‘paradise’ in the creation story of the island’s native Butchulla people. Nowadays, with society’s far greater awareness of the island’s natural treasures and the stories of First Nations people, it seems K’gari and native names generally are simply good for business.
Even so, the boats, the business and the tourists are all a far cry from the past. It was, in fact, more a case of ‘paradise lost’ for the Butchulla people when early white settlement first encroached not just on K’gari but on the traditional lands of native tribes along the entire Fraser Coast from Hervey Bay to Maryborough and deep inland. Accounts of gross mistreatment and massacre of aboriginal people abound, entrenched as a wicked national truth in which the wounds of ignorance and indifference to the plights and rights of native people still remain far from fully healed.
But as the region’s pastoral interests and specifically sugar cane farms increasingly took hold, there came another assault by rabid early settlement; the need for labour. Cheap labour, giving rise in the 1860s to more than half a century of ‘blackbirding’ when tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders – or Kanakas as they were more broadly labelled at the time – were ‘imported’ by force or trickery to cut cane and perform any amount of menial work.
Again, it’s an ugly and uncomfortable history but the desire to build a better future rather than smoulder in the antipathy of the past has led to some remarkable initiatives in the Fraser Coast region. There are, in fact, indigenous people with passion and purpose determined to right at least some of the more enduring wrongs, most critically in the practical application of better standards of health and wellbeing for First Nations people.
An hour or so north of Hervey Bay, for instance, in a small carpark aside open land on the edge of the neat little town of Howard, Harry Blucher carefully parks a new Hino mobile health clinic and along with other members of the Galangoor Duwalami Primary Healthcare team, starts preparing for the first of the day’s scheduled clients.
It doesn’t take long, 15 minutes at most, and Harry has the truck with its highly visible and impressive livery ready for business, sitting on hydraulic rams to provide a perfectly level and stable medical clinic. Even to an untrained eye it is a superbly equipped and purposefully designed medical facility with all the equipment and features of a modern general practitioner’s (GP) service.
What’s more, with a diesel generator attached to the chassis and a fully integrated solar power system, the complete unit is able to operate entirely off the electrical grid when and where necessary.
Commissioned in April 2024, the Hino FE 1426 model with its precisely organised body built by Cooler in Brisbane is the foundation of an expansive and entirely professional Outreach clinic.
Or in more specific terms, the latest extension of the Galangoor Duwalami (meaning ‘good meeting place’) Primary Health Care Service established in 2006 by two remarkable, tireless and obviously tenacious indigenous women intent on improving the lives of their people.
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