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278 | Traditional medicine

Present day

Pharmaceutical companies have utilised Aboriginal knowledge in the devel-
opment of a number of commercially viable entities. Much of the world’s
supply of hyoscine now comes from species of Dubosia. The volatile oil, tea
tree oil, which is extracted from Melaleuca alternifolia, is widely promoted
as an antiseptic, antibacterial and antifungal agent, and is included in
numerous cleaning and cosmetic products, as are the oils of many Eucalyptus
species. The kangaroo apple bush, Solanum aviculare,is a source of alkaloids
related to the steroids produced in the Mexican yam, and which could also
become a viable source of the starting materials for oral contraceptive
synthesis.
These commercial successes, together with the increasing trend in
western society to utilise herbal medicines, has revived interest in Australia’s
flora and traditional herbal medicine history. A systematic search of infor-
mation in Australia’s Northern Territory about Aboriginal use of plants led
in 1988 to the compilation of the first Aboriginal pharmacopoeia of the
Northern Territories.^7 This provides botanical and chemical information
about 70 plants used by Aborigines for medicinal purposes and includes
both the conditions for which these plants were recommended and the
various types of preparations most commonly used. More recent research
has compared the efficacy of certain traditional remedies with western
preparations used for the same conditions, and has found them to be at least
as effective, especially when used to treat skin problems such as boils and
other general surface infections. As traditional remedies are often more
acceptable than western ones to some Aboriginal communities, such medi-
cines may be used to improve the often very poor general health of people
in these communities.
It is ironic that a people whose culture is so ancient and who live in a
country with a flora that is at least potentially so medicinally active should
have such poor health that their life expectancy is almost 20 years less than
that of ‘immigrant’ Australians. One of several strategies being employed to
help reduce this inequity has been the recent introduction of support for
traditional healers and other Aboriginal health workers in Aboriginal
communities. The hope is that their use of a combination of traditional and
western medicine will help promote a greater sense of ownership, pride and
thus self-worth in the people of these communities, and thus ultimately better
general health.

Fiji

It is difficult to determine which of Fiji’s flora are indigenous and which
introduced by its human inhabitants. The forest plants seem, however, to be
the oldest surviving species while later ones appear to include most of the