Australian Prescriber's international readership is growing. To identify the journal as distinctively Australian, the cover features an Australian Aboriginal painting. Jennifer Summerfield, the Aboriginal artist, from the centre of Australia, created the painting in 1998 for National Medicines Week. The central icon is of a gathering of people sitting around a fire, talking. Jennifer's story follows:
I'm Jennifer Summerfield. I am a Pitjantjatjara woman. I live at Umuwa on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands in the north west of South Australia. I work as an Anangu Health Worker for Nganampa Health Council. I am the artist who did the painting for National Medicines Week.
This painting is about using medicine properly, especially for older people. Store your tablets in a cool place or in your bag away from kids and other old people. Take your medication at the right time with the pictures of the sun showing in the morning, at midday and in the evening. Don't throw your medicines on the ground. If you don't take your tablets you may be blind or never walk again. This is what the painting is about.
The older people in the middle of the painting are keeping their medicine safe in a bag. The people in each corner have not taken their medicines and have become blind or crippled. There is the sun to tell them to take their medicine, in the morning, at midday and in the evening. People at the middle top of the painting are taking their medicines.
People down the bottom of the painting sometimes take their medicine and sometimes throw it away. Then young kids can find that medicine and take it and become sick. The two black paintings show that when people don't take their medicine properly, they die. Around the outside of the painting are a few bush medicines.
