Individual resilience in rural people: a Queensland study, Australia

Abstract

The findings of this study support existing theoretical concepts of resilience, with an added dimension not previously reported. The major finding of this study is that connection to the land, which is strongly embedded in the literature on Indigenous peoples (eg human ecology) and acknowledged as part of Indigenous culture and cosmology, may also be a factor that enhances the resilience of non-Indigenous people who have built up a relationship with the land over time. The extent of this connection and its impact on individual and community resilience was, however, not established in this study, but should also be a major focus of future research.