William Redfern Oration
The William Redfern Oration is AFPHM’s keynote address at the annual RACP Congress. The Oration is named after Dr William Redfern, a surgeon, who was born in c1774 in Trowbridge, England and died in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1833.
Redfern was sent to Australia as a convict in 1801/1802 after escaping the death penalty for his role in the Mutiny of Nore in 1797 and pleading to be transported after languishing for four years in jail in England. He was granted a pardon in 1803 and appointed Assistant Surgeon in the Colony in 1808.
William Redfern was both a pioneer in public health and represents the earliest beginnings of the first medical specialty to develop in Australia - that of preventive medicine. William Redfern greatly improved the health conditions in the settlement through basic public health interventions.
The William Redfern Oration was instituted in 1994 by the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine in acknowledgement of the debt owed by Dr William Redfern for his pioneering work in public health medicine in Australia.
AFPHM William Redfern Orations by year
| Year |
Speaker |
Title |
| 1994 |
Dr George Salmond |
Pioneer and Champion of the Public Health |
| 1995 |
Dr Khum Mechai Viravaidya
|
Public Health, Thai Style: An Unconventional Approach
|
1996
|
Dr Alessandro Liberati
|
Cochrane and Clinical Epidemiology or Evidence-Based Medicine
|
| 1997 |
Professor Anthony McMichael
|
Global Change in the Coming Century: How Sustainable are the Recent Gains in Human Health?
|
| 1998 |
Dr Michael Wooldridge
|
New Directions in Public Health in Australia
|
| 1999 |
Professor Bruce Armstrong
|
Diet and Cancer
|
| 2000 |
Sir Michael Marmot
|
Structural Determinants of Health
|
| 2001 |
Professor David Penington
|
Striving for a Rational Policy on Illicit Drugs
|
| 2002 |
Laureate Professor Alan Lopez
|
Priority Setting in Health: The Global Burden of Disease
|
| 2003 |
Dr Mark Chassin
|
Improving the Quality of Public Health: Fact or Fantasy?
|
| 2004 |
Professor Margaret Whitehead
|
Challenging Inequities in Health: From Ethics to Action |
| 2005 |
Dr Ichiro Kawachi
|
Globalisation and Health: Making Sense of the Evidence
|
| 2006 |
Professor Ernest Hunter
|
Back to Redfern: Atonement and the 'middle e' in relation to Aboriginal health
|
| 2007 |
Dr Pekka Puska
|
Global Chronic Disease Prevention – From Science to Effective Programmes and Policies
|
| 2008 |
Professor Annette Dobson
|
Congress Oration (Population Health Congress – in place of Redfern)
|
| 2009 |
Dr David Pencheon
|
The Health Sector’s Role in Promoting Sustainable Development and Mitigating Climate Change
|
| 2010 |
Dr Richard Smith
|
Rediscovering Public Health through Global Health
|
| 2011 |
Professor Kerry Arabena
|
Acceptable Loss: Accomplishing the Mission
|
| 2012 |
No Redfern Oration
|
Population Health Congress features combined oration – no Redfern Oration
|
| 2013 |
Professor Dawn Bessarab
|
What’s race got to do with ‘it’? Health care and Aboriginality in the 21st century
|
| 2014 |
Dr Rhys Jones
|
Decolonising Medical Education and Practice to Advance Indigenous Health
|
| 2015 |
No Redfern Oration
|
Population Health Congress features combined oration – no Redfern Oration
|
| 2016 |
Dr Sue Morey AM
|
2016 William Redfern Oration - What would Redfern think? (PDF)
|
| 2017 |
No Redfern Oration (World Congress on Public Health)
|
| 2018 |
Professor Alistair Woodward
|
Climate Change - Risk and Disruption |
| 2019 |
Professor Sandra Eades |
Health across the lifespan: Indigenous Australian children, youth, young and older adults |
| 2020 |
Professor Tony Capon |
Planetary Health: Protecting and Promoting Health in the Anthropocene Epoch (PDF) |
| 2022 |
Professor Nicola Spurrier |
Lessons from the Pandemic |