Indigenous Townsville: The First Nations Community at the Heart of the TropicsUpdated

Townsville has one of the largest urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations of any Australian city, the combination of the Wulgurukaba and the Bindal people whose country the Townsville coastal plain and the hinterland encompasses and the broad population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across north Queensland and the islands who have moved to Townsville for the education, the employment, and the health services that the regional city provides, creating the Indigenous community that the city's social services, the cultural organisations, and the community institutions serve and that contributes the cultural richness and the social complexity that the Indigenous presence in a major regional city creates. The community's size and the diversity of the language groups and the traditional territories that are represented in the Townsville Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population reflect the city's position as the service hub for the vast north Queensland region whose Indigenous communities access the city for the services and the opportunities that the remote communities cannot provide locally.

The Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service, the community-controlled health organisation that provides the culturally appropriate primary health care and the chronic disease management programs for the Indigenous community, addresses the health disparity between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations that the historical disadvantage, the social determinants, and the specific health risks of the tropical north create for the community's health outcomes. The community-controlled model's effectiveness in providing the culturally safe health care that the Indigenous community trusts and accesses at higher rates than the mainstream health services delivers the health system equity that the service model's community governance creates.

The Torres Strait Islander community in Townsville, the largest Torres Strait Islander community on the Australian mainland, maintains the cultural connections to the island communities of the Torres Strait through the cultural organisations, the language preservation programs, and the family networks that sustain the Torres Strait identity in the mainland city context. The cultural events that the Torres Strait Islander community organises in Townsville, including the annual Torres Strait Cultural Festival, provide the public expression of the island cultures that the mainland Townsville location creates the audience for among the broader Queensland community that has limited direct experience of the Torres Strait Islander culture.

The employment and the economic participation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in Townsville, supported by the mainstream employment programs and the Indigenous business development initiatives that the government and the community sector deliver, reflect the progress toward the economic equity that the Closing the Gap framework measures and that the Townsville Indigenous community's educational attainment and the employment growth in the professional, technical, and the skilled trades that the north Queensland economy creates are beginning to show in the improving metrics. The Indigenous business sector in Townsville, including the construction, the transport, and the professional services businesses that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurs have established, provides the economic participation model that demonstrates the entrepreneurial capacity of the community when the access to capital and the business support that mainstream entrepreneurs access is extended to Indigenous business owners.

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