health studies on aborigines in Australia.

Miss Florence Marva Jean O'Brien was speaking at Hamilton Rotarian's weekly luncheon at The Princess.

The service club sponsored the graduate of Warwick Academy, Bermuda College and Dalhousie University.

And Miss O'Brien, who recently completed her Masters degree in public health at University of James Cook in Australia, returned to say thank you.

She said she would never forget the fulfilling experience.

After showing slides of some of the 14 Pacific islands she visited, Miss O'Brien told Rotarians she decided to find out how she could help as many people as possible with limited resources.

Her efforts took her to the Philippines where she looked at several primary health projects.

She also visited Nepal, one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, where she wrote an implementation plan for a child development project and set up a clinic and a health education project.

Miss O'Brien later worked in islands in the Torres Straits off Australia -- a set of islands with some 8,000 people.

There, she explained, she spent much of her time focusing on finding health statistics and designing a survey on the health needs of the community.

"Because there were no statistics, the work was tough,'' Miss O'Brien said.

"So we did a 33-question survey on what people would like to see.

"We expected to get about 250 respondents. But we ended up getting 1,000 people, making it one of the biggest surveys done of indigenous people in Australia.'' The survey found that aborigines' hospital admission rate was 10 percent higher than those living on the mainland and their infant mortality rate was three times the rate of those of Queensland.

And Miss O'Brien noted that the life expectancy rate of aborigines was even shorter than that of the Native American.

In Torres Straits, she said, aborigine males die 18 years earlier than Australian males and aborigine females' life expectancy is 30 years less than Australian females.

"It is a third-world country in a westernised society,'' she added.

As a result of this, the Australian Government has been forced to upgrade health care in the area, Miss O'Brien said.

"But they need statistics to guide themselves.'' She said she therefore pushed for more education within the health field.

"If you want to change a system, you have to learn the system,'' said Miss O'Brien who was asked by the Australian health body to stay on as an advisor, but decided she had to come home.

While admitting that the experience was stressful at times, she said she always had the support and "family backing'' from Rotarians in Townsville, Australia and surrounding areas.

"They always pushed me to look beyond myself,'' Miss O'Brien concluded. "Not only did I teach them about their health, but they helped me to be stronger.''