What the chicken money bought : researching with our local aboriginal community

It isn't often public health research within a tertiary, academic setting can profess a direct link with the sale of frozen chickens but such is the "claim to fame" of the Gudaga project. It is a long story spanning ten years but one which has led to the establishment of an Aboriginal home visiting team in the Campbelltown area (a large satellite city on the urban fringe of south west Sydney) and the recruitment of a cohort of almost 160 Indigenous1 babies whose health and access to health services is being studied in the first longitudinal study of Indigenous infants undertaken on the east coast of Australia. The study is known as the Gudaga project. This chapter tells the Gudaga story: yarns on the verandah; early dreams and schemes; initial short term funding for home visiting and finally, a successful proposal which led to NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) funding. Pivotal to the story is the way we have worked in partnership with the local Indigenous community which includes a number of groups - all of which play a very important part in the success of our research project. These stakeholder groups, and our strategies for working with each of them to ensure robust results and a successful study, are identified and described in the following discussion.