Swell approach to birth weights

HEALTH and art met when the Aboriginal women of Moree in NSW made plaster casts of their pregnant stomachs.

Mubali program

WHEN birth weights hit critically low levels in the northwest NSW town of Moree in 2004, Kim McConville saw an opportunity to bring together the worlds of art and health.

"I said to the people at the NSW Health Department, 'Why don't we take plaster casts of the women's bellies?"' says McConville, executive director of community arts organisation Beyond Empathy. "They looked at me like I was on drugs."

But the program -- called Mubali, which means swollen belly in the Kamilaroi language -- has had startling results. It involves taking casts of pregnant women's stomachs, the moulds of which are painted by Aboriginal artists and put on exhibition in regional galleries.

"While the indigenous women and artists were painting, they received advice from health workers," McConville says.

"A year later, 80 per cent of the women were still breastfeeding, and the weights of their babies were considerably higher than those of mothers who hadn't taken part."

The success of the program, which is now running in indigenous communities across NSW and the Kimberley, has as much to do with its healthcare vision as it does its corporate backing, McConville says.

Mubali received $20,000 from the NSW Department of Health in its first year but has been funded entirely through private enterprise since. Investment bank Goldman Sachs pours in $80,000 annually, including access to that organisation's wealth of resources.

"What needs to happen is not just (government) giving more money but enabling community development," McConville adds.

It's a point made strongly in a submission by the Key Producers Network -- an alliance of 11 community arts and cultural development organisations, of which Beyond Empathy is a member -- to the National Cultural Policy.

Theirs is just one of more than 450 submissions and 2000 completed surveys understood to have been received by the federal government.

Submissions and public input (a small number of which have been published online at culture.arts.gov.au) closed almost a month ago.

Arts Minister Simon Crean is expected to announce further details of the submissions, which his department will consider before putting together the nation's first integrated approach to the arts and cultural sector since Paul Keating's Creative Nation in 1994.

The Key Producers Network's submission states that for every dollar invested by government in community arts projects, $8 could be generated through corporate support.

"This is a great opportunity to be heard," McConville says.

The government will flesh out the policy's detail in the coming months before the NCP's implementation next year.