Posted on Jan 15, 2025
 
The Rotary Club of Belconnen has donated $15,000 to Purple House. These funds will provide additional equipment for the expansion and support of dialysis services to remote and removed indigenous populations based out of Central Australia. This is part of a joint project with Rotary District 9830.
 
Purple House Kintore Story
Before the Purple House was established Pintupi people from Kintore and Kiwirrkurra in the Western Desert of Central Australia were forced to leave their country and families to seek treatment for end-stage renal failure in Alice Springs or Darwin. Far from home, they suffered great loneliness and hardship, and weren’t around to pass on cultural knowledge in their communities.
 
In 2000 they decided to do something about it and developed four extraordinary collaborative paintings which were auctioned at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and raised enough money to buy a dialysis machine which was installed in the Kintore Health Clinic and the first dialysis in Kintore took place on 25th September 2004.
 
Since then, Purple House has grown a lot and now offers remote dialysis, social support, aged-care and NDIS services, and runs a bush medicine social enterprise called Bush Balm and we now run 20 remote clinics across the NT, WA & SA. 
 
The Purple House Kintore clinic holds a special place for Purple House and has enabled many significant community members from Kintore to get home on Country over the past 21 years. 
 
Thanks to the support of Rotary, we look forward to being able to celebrate 25 years since the art auction that kicked it all off in Kintore. We will be looking to do a range of engagement and health promotion activities with the community to celebrate this important milestone.