Dr Gordon Briscoe, AO
Research Fellow

BA (Hist), MA, PhDDr Gordon Briscoe, from the Marduntjara/Pitjantjatjara peoples of Central Australia, is a long-standing Indigenous activist, organiser, researcher, writer, teacher and mentor. He played a key role in inspiring the ANU History Program to establish its Centre for Indigenous History and became the CentreÕs inaugural Research Fellow in 2003. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of Australia for services to Aboriginal health, legal services and education. Dr Briscoe helped form an Aboriginal Progress Association in the late 1950s. He worked for the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Legal Service (a body he had helped to establish) in the late 1960s. In 1972, he helped establish a health service for the growing urban Aboriginal population in Sydney. He was also a Field Officer for the Commonwealth Office of Aboriginal Affairs and a senior liaison officer in the Department of Health and Acting Director of Professor Fred Hollows National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, where he advised on cultural protocols for approaching Aboriginal communities. Dr Briscoe began his academic career in 1981, studying history and politics at the ANU. He gained his PhD on Indigenous health in the RSSS History Program in 1997. His current research projects include the Sydney Harbour Trust project, the 'Native Census, 1920-44', an Indigenous population study, and Aborigines Between The Wars: 1920-1944.

Areas of Research
Publications

Areas of Research

• Aboriginal and Indigenous issues
• History
• Indigenous health and demographic transition
• Aboriginal politics

Publications

• Counting, Health and Identity: A history of Aboriginal health and demography in Western Australia and Queensland 1900-1940, Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2003
• Gordon Briscoe and Len Smith (eds) The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70,000 years to the present, Aboriginal History Monograph 10, 2002
• PhD thesis: Aspects of indigenous health in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900-1940, Australian National University, 1996