The Health Songbook Project is a collection of songs designed to support health care practitioners in working with patients throughout their treatment journeys. The project aims to provide Indigenous voices, songs, and language specifically for Indigenous people undergoing health treatment. While it is primarily intended for use by music therapists, it can also be a valuable resource for any practitioner seeking alternative ways to connect with people through music, language, and culture.
This project has been supported by a grant from the Global Arts and Health Alliance and has been developed by a team of researchers from Adelaide University in partnership with the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Foundation. The project fills a significant gap in the currently available resources for music therapists to use when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders patients in a therapeutic setting. In order to create the resource, the Adelaide University research team have interviewed a wide range of music therapists from around Australia on their experiences working with First Nations patients and what they would like to see in a resource such as this. First Nations artists from a variety of backgrounds were then invited to contribute material for the project for the specific purpose of being used by music therapists in a health setting.
We look forward to evolving this resource in the future to include more language groups and to broaden the possibilities for its use in a variety of settings.
Adelaide University Research Team
Grayson Rotumah, Luke Dollman, John Baranoff and Clemence Due.
Research assistants: Hannah Yates, Connor Fogarty, Nicola Baker
Special thanks to Jill Newman at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Foundation, to Will Fisher from the Adelaide University’s Mobile Language Team for his web development expertise, and music therapist Bec Watt for her advice and assistance at the early stages of developing this project.
Partners:
Global Arts and Health Alliance
Women’s & Children’s Hospital Foundation – Arts in Health