Caring about Care
Creators: name: Klein, Elise
name: Hunt, Janet
name: Staines, Zoe
name: Dinku, Yonatan
name: Brown, Chay
name: Glynn-Braun, Kayla
name: Yap, Mandy
name: Murray, Minda
name: Williamson, Bhiamie
Publisher: name: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University
Year: 2023

description: Care is an essential part of life; it grows people, nourishes people, and no one can live without it. Yet definitions and understandings of care that guide and shape research, policy, and practice are too often informed by western colonial logics, whereby care is typically viewed as peripheral to the economy, and as a burden that undermines women’s economic security. Seeing care through this lens provides only a partial and degraded view. It misses, for instance, the richness and complexity of alternative visions that elevate and centre caregiving as a crucial and respected activity that breathes life into people, communities, culture, land and whole societies. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s (2020) Wiyi Yani U Thangani report illuminates the importance of care to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Aside from this, however, little has been done in scholarship to deeply explore understandings and practices of care by Indigenous women in Australia. Thus, this research aimed to provide an understanding of the scope and nature of care work performed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, the complex realities shaping decisions around unpaid caregiving, and the associated impacts on women and those around them. Specifically, the project sought to explore: 1) how Indigenous women conceptualise care work, including its scope and nature, 2) how Indigenous women value and experience care work, 3) what volume and type/s of care work Indigenous women are regularly engaged in, and 4) how the care work of Indigenous women might be more formally recognised and valued, including through policy. We note that our study does not examine further the care work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men or others who identify as gender diverse. Instead, for our study, we invited participants who self-identified as women and thus, this study is not a gendered analysis of Indigenous care work. We took this decision because the Australian Human Rights Commission Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner specifically sought more detailed research on Indigenous women’s care work. Nevertheless, more research remains to be done from a wider gender perspective. Fieldwork for this study was undertaken between August 2022 and May 2023 in partnership with Aboriginal organisations in five locations spanning remote, regional, and urban parts of Australia. These partners and study locations were: Sisters in Spirit Aboriginal Corporation (Australian Capital Territory), Tangentyere Council and the Tangentyere Women's Family Safety Group (Central Australia), Cape York Partnership Indigenous Organisation (Cape York), Yawoorroong Miriuwung Gajerrong Yirrgeb Noong Dawang Aboriginal Corporation (East Kimberley), and Yanalangami Women’s Leadership Program at Tranby Aboriginal College (Greater Sydney). Qualitative interviews were conducted with 102 participants overall, while time-use surveys were also conducted with 96 of these 102 participants. Chapter 1 of this report introduces the study background and context, situating it within the historical context that has seen the longstanding devaluing of care work under capitalism and colonialism. We also position care within existing literatures on care work, before describing the study methods and approach. In Chapter 2, we summarise the (scarce) statistical information available about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s care work from the 2021 Census of Population and Housing. This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s participation in unpaid disability care, childcare, domestic work, and voluntary work, drawing on both national and regional data (the latter being relevant to the five sites/locations selected for this study). This analysis of the ABS Census data shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women do more unpaid work than non-Indigenous women and Indigenous men. This is especially the case for childcare and care of people with disabilities, largely because of the demographic structure and relatively poorer health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It is also notable that nationally, 8.6% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who themselves had a disability also simultaneously provided unpaid assistance to other people, and 12.1% did voluntary work Chapters 3 to 7 report the key qualitative findings from each of the five field study sites. The data has been thematically coded in each case and, as far as possible, we have described these findings using the words of interviewees themselves. These rich descriptions provide deep insights into the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are providing care, often unpaid, to their families and communities. The major themes from each site have a great deal of commonality, despite their very different contexts. Overall, the chapters draw out how women value the care work they do, the breadth, complexity and volume of the care they give and what that entails. They also talk about how their unpaid care work and their paid work, very often itself also in caring professions, intersect, and reflect on the many health, financial and other impacts that this work has on them, as well as how they try to look after themselves through all this. Many women shared their frustrations around how the various services needed to support their communities were non-existent or not culturally safe, and many were also frustrated by the challenges they face in accessing support. These women are often the backbone of their extended families and communities, not only providing support for survival, but laying the foundations for self-determined and decolonial economic relations. In Chapter 8, we report the findings from a short time-use survey, which was adapted for use in this study from the Individual Measure of Multidimensional Poverty (see here). Where participants agreed to take part in the survey, it was conducted directly after each qualitative interview. In total, we collected time-use survey data from 96 research participants and analysed the data using the 2016 ‘International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics’ (ICATUS) categories to report our findings in two ways. The first method aligned with our interpretation – drawing on the study’s qualitative interview data – of how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women conceptualised ‘care activities’ (care for others, care for Country and care for self) and ‘other activities’ (the latter included sleeping/resting and study/paid employment). This analysis found that care activities accounted for, on average, about 62% of our participant women’s time on a usual weekday (i.e., 14.8 hours per day on average), with 48% of their time (i.e., 11.5 hours) taken caring for others and/or caring for Country and culture specifically. The second method of analysis was in terms of the four Activity Classifications the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) uses to group time-use activities: ‘Necessary activities’ such as sleeping, eating, personal care, health, and hygiene; ‘Contracted activities’ like paid work and study; ‘Committed activities’ like domestic work, child-care, adult care, and voluntary work; and ‘Free-time activities’ such as social interactions, going out, and watching television. We found that women spent most of their time (9.6 hours per day, on average) undertaking what the ABS calls committed activities, such as domestic work and caregiving, and they had very little free time (3.3 hours per day, on average). Women with paid employment had less free time and spent less time on necessary activities than other women. We found that the participants in our study were spending more than double the amount of time on committed (care) activities compared to all Australian women. In addition, they were often multitasking. That is, they were caring whilst also undertaking other activities, and so were ‘on call’ practically all the time. Using Federal Award rates for relevant employment categories, we then calculated the approximate economic value of the unpaid care work women do (excluding care for self). We did so because (lost) remuneration for this work was raised directly by Indigenous women during our interviews. We estimate that the market value of this labour ranges between $223.01 to $457.39 per day (representing an annual estimated salary of between $81,175.64 to $118,921.40). Yet, this labour is not paid for, despite its incredible contribution to women’s communities and society, and despite it being expropriated by the settler economy. Moreover, despite the high workload carried by women, many of the women included in our study are categorised as ‘unemployed’ and passed off as unproductive by settler policies and measures. Our findings indicate that ‘mainstream’ definitions and measures of care do not include the vast and broad ways care is defined by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in Australia. For example, whilst care as a strength is an important insight from the women in this study, (white) liberal feminism has often characterised unpaid care as a burden that is unrecognised, undervalued, and which women need to seek liberation from. Liberal feminists have, thus, prioritised getting into paid work and public office and formalising care work. But what is evident from this study is that whilst jobs and external accolades are not unimportant, and care loads can be extremely heavy and demanding, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women place great value on family, community, culture, and Country. In this regard, the use of (white) liberal feminist thought to explain Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s care can result in harmful and inaccurate framings, which elevate paid and formal work over unpaid work across many policy settings including (but not limited to) social security policy, economic policy, employment policy, Indigenous policy, gender policy, and education policy. In doing so, these entrenched policy settings systematically marginalise all women, but particularly Indigenous women. Another common theme illustrated by women in this study was that colonisation has created and continues to create damage to the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This includes the impacts of colonisation on gender roles, on child removals, incarceration rates, poor health, racism, and more. Women in our study noted that state institutions set up to ‘care’, are often uncaring and may be violent. This damage, as well as the ongoing impacts of harmful state responses, requires Indigenous people’s care to heal, adding extra demands on existing care loads. As a result, many of the women interviewed in this study were tired and often, carers needed care too. Some were in, or had been through, periods of utter exhaustion and illness due to trying to carry the stressful care load they had. Most had little or no time to themselves, to have a break from the caring work they do or have a holiday without needing to care for others while they did. Rest was hard to come by. Another theme emerging from the research is how unpaid care and paid employment interact. For many of the participants, care was central to their paid work roles as well as the unpaid care work they did at home. Specifically, most of the women in paid employment in this study had roles in the community sector which put them at the frontline of caring for community. They saw this work as part of their broader commitment to supporting their families, communities and advancing Indigenous peoples. It is therefore hard to draw a line for these women between paid and unpaid work. Overall, our findings in this study underline the importance of a new approach to supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, where their voices, ideas and needs are central, and where care is placed at the heart. This is different to just ‘fitting’ Indigenous care into various models, policies and measures already in circulation. Rather, a whole new approach needs to be taken that elevates Indigenous women’s voices, and centres and celebrates their care as an essential and crucial expression of culture. This is a must if Australia is to take seriously its obligations under several human rights instruments, to which it is a signatory — including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Together, these instruments set out minimum standards for the protection and survival of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and children, including the free expression and practice of Indigenous cultures, the right to self-determination, the right of Indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their economic, social and cultural institutions, the right of children to be safeguarded, protected, and cared for while maintaining connection to culture, and the right to free prior and informed consent. Indeed, in this regard, unpaid care work in particular is — as described by the former Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona — a “major human rights issue” and one that poses a significant threat to women’s enjoyment of basic human rights the world over (United Nations 2013: 2). Taking this into account, we reflect on some possible ways forward in Chapter 9. Ultimately, the devaluing of care work is something that affects all Australian women, but also Australian and global society as a whole. The stories of caregiving that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women generously share in this report are more than just stories: they represent ways of being and doing that centre and prioritise care for humans, animals, plants, and Country that are absolutely necessary for human flourishing and survival. These are ways of being that must be urgently prioritised if humans across all societies — including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples — are to not only survive, but also thrive, into the future.