The Australian’s Australian of the Year: Diabetes expert Ray Kelly transforming Indigenous healthcare

Exercise physiologist Ray Kelly has achieved world-leading results on diabetes in Australia’s backyard, raising the question: ‘If you can do it in Bourke, why can’t you do it in Bondi?’

Physiologist Ray Kelly. Picture: X

Exercise physiologist and Gomeroi man Ray Kelly has routinely achieved seemingly impossible results for those at the frontline of Australia’s type 2 diabetes epidemic, yet he is the first to discount the “Ray Kelly factor”.

In 2000, Dr Kelly began treating diabetes in the community. Putting aside a career in sports physiology to pursue it, he had no inkling it would develop into a world-leading methodology. His novel approach often garnered ­little applause.

“It wasn’t a matter of the success, people would pass that off as the Ray Kelly factor. That would be the term,” he said.

“They would give all these terms, like I was just a motivational interviewer. And it wasn’t that, it was that I listened to people and I would help them come up with strategies (to lose weight) that would work in their life. It was as simple as that.”

Though hesitant to be the face of his success, Dr Kelly has advanced one of the most innovative models for obesity and diabetes treatment, garnering himself a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

His view on diabetes changed fundamentally in 2006 when he discovered the work of nutritionist Kerin O’Dea, whose study of diets in Indigenous communities through the 1980s indicated results markedly more effective than treatments of the time.

Realising that patients could not only manage diabetes through diet and exercise, but actively push it into remission and come off insulin, was a revelation.

Dr Kelly’s exposure to Professor O’Dea’s work would cause a fork in his career that prompted him to leave his bulk-billing clinic behind and travel between Indigenous communities to put theory into practice.

“I knew that it would have to work in challenging environments, which is one of the reasons I decided to work in regional and remote communities,” Dr Kelly said. “These communities get things last, that was a strong motivator, and in the back of my mind I knew that if I showed it there then there’d be no excuses.

“If you can do it in Bourke, why can’t you do it in Bondi?

“I’m just really proud of the communities that have been able to do this, because it’s these Aboriginal communities that have helped change the way non-Aboriginal people are seeing type 2 diabetes.”

Among Dr Kelly’s patients, 85 per cent of those who could drop 15 per cent of their weight entered full remission.

In Central Australia, four in 10 Indigenous Australians have diabetes. A dearth of non-processed food, poor social support, and high turnover among medical staff complicate outcomes.

Before Dr Kelly was trying to dispel the mythical “Ray Kelly factor”, he had to bring sceptics ­onside. “I started looking into rapid weight loss, and for my whole career, I’d been told that losing weight fast was bad, that you were better off to lose it slowly. But the research never said that.

“I was seeing these kinds of improvements, but I was pretty quiet about it, because I thought it was unusual, and I thought people would think that it was dangerous and reckless.

“Since 2006 I felt like quitting probably about two times a year, especially in the early years.”

Dr Kelly’s research has become the benchmark for diabetes treatment in Australia. In 2024, he presented his work twice at the parliamentary inquiry into diabetes, and drafted the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation’s preventive health guidelines on healthy eating, physical activity and obesity.

Ophthalmologist James Muecke, a contemporary in diabetes treatment for his work on curbing macular oedema through diet, praised the “unparalleled benefit” of Dr Kelly’s work.

“Ray is a pioneering exercise physiologist supporting people living with type 2 diabetes,” Professor Muecke said.

“This extraordinary but little-known and rarely practised opportunity in Aboriginal health­care provides a disadvantaged sector of Australian society with real hope.”