Brady, M. (1995) Culture in treatment, culture as treatment. A critical appraisal of developments in addictions programs for indigenous North Americans and Australians. Social Science and Medicine 41(11):1487-1498.
This paper was stimulated by several visits to Canada, including a WHO fellowship, and I gave an earlier version at a Kettil Bruun meeting in Toronto in 1993. It examines innovations in addictions treatment in Canada and Australia that utilise aspects of Indigenous cultural practices. It explores some of the contradictions and challenges presented by attempts to integrate traditional healing and cultural affiliation into treatment programmes.
Brady, M. (1995) Broadening the base of interventions for Aboriginal people with alcohol problems. Technical Report No 29, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
This Technical Report was the outcome of a short visiting fellowship at NDARC in Sydney which at the time was a hot-spot for brief interventions research. It was based on the premiss that approaches to Indigenous drug and alcohol problems were focused on early prevention and very late – usually residential – treatment, with little in between. The paper argues for the validity and cultural appropriateness of brief interventions as a form of ‘secondary prevention’ to fill this gap, and provides the field-based evidence to support this.
Brady M. (Ed). (1995) Giving Away the Grog: Aboriginal accounts of drinking and not drinking. Department of Human Services and Health, Canberra [reprinted 1998, 2004, 2011] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/giving-away-the-grog-aboriginal-accounts-of-drinking-and-not-drinking
These are the edited stories of success over drinking that I collected from many willing participants, mostly living in remote and rural Australia. The book has been used in treatment facilities and sobering up centres, with individual stories read and discussed among participants.
Brady M. (2005) The Grog Book. Strengthening Indigenous Community Action on Alcohol. Second Edition. [First published 1998] Department of Health and Ageing, Canberra [reprinted 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/the-grog-book-strengthening-indigenous-community-action-on-alcohol
This guide book for action was designed to share practical solutions and ideas to Indigenous communities and organisations grappling with drinking problems. It distils the best in good policy and makes it accessible. I travelled the country seeking out examples of grassroots good practice; the designer and I field-tested the text, illustrations and layout with different user groups. Thousands of copies have been distributed free since its publication but because it was not peer reviewed in the classic sense, it does not ‘count’ in the academic world.
Brady M. (2000) Alcohol policy issues for indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Contemporary Drug Problems 27, Fall, 435–509
This was an invited paper to contribute to the Alcohol Policy and the Public Good meeting of collaborators in Copenhagen in 2000, under the guidance of Griffith Edwards. I covered a wide range of literature (with the help of contacts in each of those countries), and raised questions about the role that national alcohol policies can have in the face of local self determination policies (on reserves or indigenous-held lands), and the long standing effects of earlier government regulations such as prohibition for native peoples.
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.
I wrote this history of tobacco use for public health practitioners conducting smoking cessation and health promotion programmes for Indigenous Australians – smoking contributes to inordinately high morbidity and mortality. These programme designers needed to know about the precursors of today’s patterns: that in the past Europeans had intentionally manipulated Indigenous addiction to tobacco for their own ends, and also that Indigenous people were already enthusiastic users of nicotine sourced from the bush and from Southeast Asians.
Brady M, Byrne J and Henderson G. (2003) ‘Which bloke would stand up for Yalata?’: the struggle of an Aboriginal community to control the availability of alcohol. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2003/2:62-71
When it finally went ahead, after years of prevarication, my role in this court case was to prepare a report on alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. The paper tells how a shocking alcohol related accident mobilised an Indigenous community to demand that the state’s liquor licensing authority prohibit takeaway sales of full strength drinks in their vicinity.
Brady M, McGrath V. (2010) Making tuba in the Torres Strait Islands: The cultural diffusion and geographic mobility of an alcoholic drink. Journal of Pacific History, December, 45(3):315-330.
Based on interviews with Torres Strait Islanders and the literature, I wrote this paper with Thursday Island artist and community developer Vic McGrath. We trace how Islanders adopted techniques from outsiders (probably Filipinos) for the production of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic toddies known as ‘tuba.’ Extracting the sweet syrup from flowering coconut buds is quite an art, as are the methods of distillation. Although the drink has long been overtaken by commercial alcohol, older people have rich memories of its use, which was said to be largely unproblematic.
Brady M. (2017) Teaching “proper” drinking? Clubs and pubs in Indigenous Australia. Australian National University Press, Canberra. http://dx.doi.org/10.22459/CAEPR39.12.2017
This book (based on fieldwork and the available literature) is the only substantial examination of the rise (and occasionally the fall) of the canteens and clubs that were developed in remote Aboriginal, and some Torres Strait Islander communities, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. They are licensed to serve beer to residents and visitors in an effort to exert local controls over sales and diminish drunkenness. They are not always successful. In the book I also examine the purchase of licensed hotels (pubs) by Indigenous interests, using the Gothenburg system as my analytical lens. Aboriginal-owned pubs are – like the Gothenburg system – designed to ‘civilise’ the drinking act, and to keep the profits in the community.
Brady, M. (2021) The reinvention of Sweden’s ‘Gothenburg System’ in rural Australia: the community hotels movement. Journal of Australian Studies, v 125(1): 108–124 https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2021.1871934
This paper examines the birth of an Australian version of the ‘Gothenburg’ system of municipal/community ownership of licensed hotels at the end of the 19th century, and its diffusion in the 20th century among like-minded rural towns in the state of South Australia. Originally influenced by the temperance movement and the desire to direct profits towards local needs, most of the ‘community hotels’ still exist today.
