Odette Best is a Wakgun clan member of the Gorreng Gorreng Nation and holds a Boonthamurra bloodline with adoption ties to the Koomumberri, Yugambeh people. She commenced her training at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in the late 1980s and holds a Bachelor of Health Sciences (double major in Aboriginal Health and Community Development), a Master of Philosophy and a PhD. Odette has worked for 35 years in Indigenous health. Clinically, she worked for a decade as sexual health coordinator at the Brisbane Aboriginal and Islander Community Health Service and within the women’s and youth prison systems across Brisbane. She is co-founder of the human rights organisation, Sisters Inside. In 2000, she moved into discipline teaching within nursing in the tertiary sector. Odette’s leadership in Indigenous health and Indigenous nursing research is acknowledged globally, and she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (the only Indigenous Australian nurse to hold this honour) a Fellow of the Australian College of Nursing, a Churchill Fellow (the first awarded to an Indigenous nurse) and a Fellow of the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives. As an historian of Aboriginal nurses and midwives, Odette remains passionate about uncovering and documenting the experiences of Aboriginal nurses and midwives and saving them from historical oblivion. Odette is now semi-retired and is a native beekeeper.