Transcript for
Weaving Indigenous wisdom into wellbeing

Professor Helen Milroy (00:00): Can we get real about what’s required for true cultural safety in our services? Some of our healers spoke to us when we were doing some research on cultural safety about walking together in friendship, that true partnership and working together is about walking together in friendship. So if we can’t care for each other as people, how do we care for the people that need our help?

 

Narrator (00:22): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.

 

Jasmine Bald (00:27): This podcast is one of the five-part series developed in partnership and led by the team from the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing research program (TIMHWB) and the Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention (CBPATSISP). You will have the opportunity to hear and learn from inspirational Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts and their allies in the field of social and emotional wellbeing and mental health. You will also explore key concepts and frameworks and learn how you might apply this knowledge in your own practice to better support the social and emotional wellbeing needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families.

 

(01:04): Hello, and welcome to this podcast episode, Weaving Indigenous Wisdom into Wellbeing. We are honoured today to be able to speak with Professor Helen Milroy, the first Indigenous Australian to graduate with a doctor in medicine in Australia. Throughout this podcast, we will hear Helen’s profound insights into the importance of social and emotional wellbeing, underscoring the need for generational healing and advocating for genuine partnerships in service development. Helen seamlessly weaves together western and Indigenous knowledge, promoting unity to enhance the wellbeing of Australia’s upcoming generations.

 

(01:38): Thank you and welcome Professor Milroy. I’m truly grateful to have this opportunity to speak with you today. Would you mind starting off with an introduction?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (01:46): Thank you for having me. So I’m Helen Milroy. I’m a Palkyu woman. My mob are from the Pilbara region in Western Australia. So that’s up around Port Hedland. And my mob are sort of Marble Bar down to Nulligine. I grew up in Perth on the beautiful lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people, and it is beautiful country I have to say. Very grateful that they took such good care of it because I very much enjoyed growing up here on country, on their country. And I’m very happy to be living here and working here and bringing up my children and grandchildren here.

 

(02:14): Professionally, I’m a professor of child psychiatry, so I studied medicine at the University of Western Australia. I was the first Indigenous doctor to go through medicine in Australia. Didn’t know at the time, but found out later on. And then I really did find a need to work in the area of trauma for children through various experiences during my training and early work. And so went back and specialised in child psychiatry with a focus on Indigenous children and recovery from trauma.

 

Jasmine Bald (02:42): Helen, your story is truly remarkable and inspiring. Being the first Indigenous doctor in Australia must have been an extraordinary journey. I can only imagine the challenges and trials you faced along the way. Could you share more about what that was like?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (02:55): Well, I didn’t know of course at the time, but look, I had healers in my family and looking after people and understanding their stories. This idea of wellbeing was something that was very much part of growing up in an Aboriginal family. My grandmother in particular talked a lot about that when I was a kid, and we had a lot of time at home together growing up. So I really sort of took, I suppose, her philosophy on which was about being good to people and looking after people. And that was very much how she was. She always looked after us.

 

(03:24): And then I think that I just went through school and went through university and there were no special programmes for Aboriginal students at that point. Afterwards, of course, some years later, the University of Newcastle got all of the Aboriginal graduates together across Australia, and that’s when we found out that no one had graduated before me. But thank goodness we put in programmes and pathways because it’s a lonely path to tread. And when you feel like you are a novelty or a bit out of place, you don’t really know what to do so you just do the best you can. And I was pretty young back then of course because it was an undergraduate course, so straight out of high school into university. But I think that my mum and Nana had always said, you can do whatever you put your mind to so I just kept going.

 

Jasmine Bald (04:07): That’s an amazing story. During your studies, did you encounter any tensions between the healing wisdom passed down from your grandma and the approaches in psychology and psychiatry?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (04:17): Well, there’s nothing taught. I mean, when I went through psychiatry, I saw a lot of things that I didn’t agree with. I saw things that were happening to Aboriginal people in the system that just weren’t right, that weren’t right from a cultural perspective. And I remember going to my director of training at the time and saying, “Look, we don’t learn anything about Aboriginal people, and yet some of their experiences are very different. There’s no cultural aspects of care.” And they said, “Well, go and write some curriculum.” So that’s what I did. And then I developed a Dance of Life model, which is a well-being model, some more holistic way to work. I started teaching all of that sort of stuff, ways of knowing, being and doing.

 

(04:5): Eventually, we got the CDAMS curriculum up in medical schools, which was a curriculum devoted to understanding Aboriginal culture and health in an Aboriginal context for medical schools. And then that went up through to the colleges as well. So eventually, there’s a sort of curriculum framework that gets used in all of the specialty colleges, including psychiatry. But it’s not enough. I mean, we still have a long way to go. I don’t think you ever stop learning. And I think that’s one of the issues, is how do people get that more advanced learning about culture and cultural ways of doing things if there’s no one to further that training for them. It can be difficult.

 

Jasmine Bald (05:31): Is it possible to educate individuals outside the Aboriginal community to engage in this field or does the real challenge line motivating practitioners to put the acquired knowledge into practise?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (05:41): We have some legislation, we have some policy frameworks, we have curriculum, but the translation of all of that into practise is different again. And I think that what we haven’t really done is support, I think, the workforce to be able to implement some of these strategies and some of these ways of working in a safe way. There’s resources go into training, but they’re not the implementation, which is always a problem. And then of course, there’s often not any evaluation either. So we don’t really know how well the training… The training may have been really well received, but then how is it then translated down the track? And I think what tends to happen with something like Aboriginal culture is we get the same cultural awareness programme over and over again, a little bit like an annual fire safety lecture, and it starts to become old hat or people start to tune out. What they need is the base foundational knowledge and then they need to build skills above that and become more sophisticated. And I think that’s where we haven’t quite met the training needs either.

 

Jasmine Bald (06:35): What would you think would be the things that would make a difference?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (06:38): I think we need to have more supervision, more cultural supervision, that sort of cultural mentoring as well. I think we could develop things like elders councils for certain services. And then developing those really true, authentic, genuine partnerships with the Aboriginal services. So we have that crossover. I think that when you embed Aboriginal staff within your services and they work in a cultural way, it does build up your cultural knowledge in the whole system. But if you never progress, it stays at a base level. So I think we need to really support all of those developments right throughout the whole system.

 

(07:12): And also give people perhaps the chance to work more closely with communities. I mean, sometimes a cultural immersion can be a really good learning experience where people might work in a community for a period of time or develop those longer term relationships with communities. That’s often the best way of really getting that on the job training, is that cultural mentorship and experience of working with our communities.

 

Jasmine Bald (07:32): Sounds like a lot of advocacy for social justice. What drives you to keep going?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (07:37): Got to be good to people. That’s my grandmother’s philosophy. And part of that philosophy comes from saying, “Well, you’ve got to be good to people because you might be related.” And at the end of the day, we all want our families to do well. We all want our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren to do well. I’m a grandma now, so I want my little grandson to have the best life he can. And I think we’ve got a lot to offer. I think we’ve got a ancient knowledge system that stood the test of time, kept us healthy in well for thousands of years. We’ve got some pretty cool things about our culture and the way of doing things and the way of being in the world that I think are good for everyone. It’d be nice to be able to share that knowledge in a really positive way, an empowering way.

 

Jasmine Bald (08:16): That would be quite a unique set of skills and knowledges. You must feel quite fortunate being within the sector that you work given its ancient roots.

 

Professor Helen Milroy (08:24): I think there’s a two-way sharing and learning thing that we have here in Australia. So we have this really the oldest knowledge system in the world, Aboriginal culture, it is very much that. And that’s thousands of years of observational learning and living within the environment. We had an extensive way of developing bush medicines and other sorts of knowledges around nature. And then we have this new knowledge system, which has some advantage as well. So we have new science and new ways of understanding life and wellbeing. And if we put the two together, then Australia’s going to be the best place in the world, best of both worlds.

 

Jasmine Bald (08:56): You’ve been quite prolific in your recent writing endeavours, and I understand it began with the Dance of Life you mentioned earlier. Is that where your journey in writing began?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (09:06): So I developed that model purely out of need because there was no cultural training in psychiatry at the time. And then I developed further concepts around trauma and grief and loss and recovery and healing and all of those sorts of things. And that’s more mental health type of concepts and understandings and experiences. And so there’s a painting, there’s a narrative or a story, plus a framework or an understanding of what that means and how you might think about that when you are dealing these particular issues.

 

(09:33): But more recently, I guess I have gone into writing stories more for children or for community that’s more universal stories, very much from an Indigenous storytelling perspective. So everything’s alive, everything has spirit, everything’s in relationship. And that’s how you problem solve within those relationships. I think also because many kids don’t grow up with stories, those sorts of Indigenous stories that used to be passed down for some children, they have those fragmented lives, they might be in out-of-home care or be in juvenile justice and they miss out. So part of writing stories for children was also to embed them back in that sort of cultural knowledge and that way of being in the world.

 

Jasmine Bald (09:40): It’s incredible how you initially developed your model out of necessity due to lack of cultural training in psychiatry, expanding into trauma and mental health concepts, and your recent focus on universal Indigenous storytelling, especially for children to reconnect them with cultural knowledge and a holistic world view. What are the things that you would learn through storytelling that supported children’s wellbeing?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (10:30): So there’s a lot of science to storytelling actually. And if you look at it from the value perspective, it’s the oldest form of learning that we have in the world. If you think about your own life, you probably remember it through stories and through life lessons which are part of stories.

 

(10:51): We also develop our own sense of self through knowing our own personal narrative. So being able to tell your own story is a really important skill so that you know who you are, where you come from, where you want to go, all that is part of storytelling. Storytelling also helps us to develop insight and our own judgement. So it’s a gentle way to learn about life and resilience rather than being instructional. It allows you to think about it and develop your own sense of problem solving or what the solutions might be for you. So it encourages autonomy, and we know that autonomy in children is a good thing.

 

(11:23): It also helps you to develop insight, which is also a good thing. It can develop empathy, cultural understanding, and it connects you back to culture and nature. It embeds you in an ecological framework so you can feel connected to things around you. So it has numerous benefits. If you look at it from a developmental perspective, it helps with language, with listening, taking turns, it helps with attachment with your parents when you do storytelling together. And so on a developmental level, it meets a whole pile of things that are good for development as well. So overall, it’s one of the best ways for children to learn.

 

Jasmine Bald (11:57): How might a practitioner who might be working with children support these stories through? If they’re using books, how might they support that with the child they’re working with?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (12:7): So I think that with stories in general, most stories, there’s a lot of stories for little kids, and we tend to think that stories is part of childhood, but stories are part of life. So stories can be used throughout your whole lifetime. Stories are good for older people as well. So to be able to tell, to listen and to make up stories is using your imagination.

 

(12:31): What we know from development is that when you can use your imagination and your creativity as a child, then you’re far more likely to be resilient and innovative as an adult. So maintaining that developmental process throughout life is a good thing. So I think for anyone working with younger children, to encourage that storytelling is a really important part not only of their resilience lifelong, but also those other developmental tasks that we spoke about. And I think the difference with perhaps Indigenous storytelling is that it does embed children within nature, that ecological framework that I spoke about.

 

(13:05): And so the importance of that is that then the child doesn’t just feel attached to people. They feel attached to land, to animals, to nature, which means that they have a greater sense of who they are in the world. There’s not so that same sense of isolation. And they also have a role. So if your totem is a kangaroo, then you’ve got brothers all over the place in Australia because that’s the kangaroo. Brothers and sisters are your kangaroo, and you look after them. So you’ve got an immediate role as well. And that can strengthen that sense of purpose and place. And for those children who don’t feel purpose in place, that can help restore that sense of who they are and the value that they have in society.

 

Jasmine Bald (13:46): Absolutely. Your perspective on the lifelong importance of storytelling, fostering imagination, resilience, and innovation from childhood to adulthood is profound. What was the process like for you?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (13:59): Well, people always ask me if the stories come first or the pictures come first, and it can be either/or. So sometimes I get the story and I’m thinking about something and the story just comes to me and it’s there. It’s like in peripheral vision. And then it suddenly comes full circle and I kind of get the story. When it comes full circle, I’ve just got to write it. I’ve just got to be there and do it then while it’s all coming out. It’s like a creative process. And it’s the same with the images. If I get the image first or I see something and I’m thinking about it and that image is held in my mind, suddenly then this story forms around it. And sometimes they just come together. So it’s a variable process.

 

(14:32): But I think the thing is, if you just spend a little bit of time and think about these things that you’re observing, then the story comes. You don’t have to create it. It creates itself and so do the images. And that’s the creative space that I think is the most important. It’s the mindset you create where you free yourself up from control and you allow it to come out and you allow it to be influenced by maybe things that you would normally not even think about because you’ve got this logical control going on all the time. And then things just come from the universe and create this unique or magic in the story, which is the best part of it when you get to the end and you go, “Wow,” and you kind of think, “Oh, that’s really good,” and you don’t even know that you’ve done it. It’s almost like it creates itself. And then that’s the best part of it. It’s a lovely experience to go through as a process.

 

Jasmine Bald (15:20): Your insight into the creative process, whether initiated by a story or an image, beautifully highlights the magic of narratives.

 

Professor Helen Milroy (15:28): The books have actually gone extremely well. All of the stories have been really well received. One of the series that I did was called Backyard Birds, Bugs and Beasties, and it was about I think allowing children during lockdown with Covid, instead of kind of focusing on all the anxiety and worry that was about, to say, “Hey, listen, there’s all these beautiful things that live in your backyard that come and visit you, particularly our beautiful birds.”

 

(15:50): I was sitting out the back one day, and I think I counted 19 species of birds that had come in one day to say hello. And I thought, “Isn’t it a wonderful thing? We’ve got all of these people. Or creatures I should say, not people, creatures around us that we can have a relationship with.” So then I started riding the birds, and I think everyone knows birds visit their backyard. I think every kid in Australia looks out for birds in the park or at the school or in their backyard. And so it was about saying, “Well, don’t just look at them. Think about them as a relationship. Think about how do you look after the birds and the joy that the birds bring you. So it’s a reciprocal relationship.”

 

(16:25): And then I started thinking about the bird sounds and learning bird languages. And so I think I’ve trained all of these kids in Australia to go out and warble to magpies. But that’s in about then saying, “Okay, so as the world got smaller because of Covid, suddenly the world in your backyard got bigger because there’s all of these relationships you can have with the birds, with the insects, with the beasties that come and inhabit your backyard.” And so suddenly that sense of connection, place, purpose again is reinforced.

 

Jasmine Bald (16:54): What an amazing ability to be able to pull all that together. How does stress and burnout influence our creative capacity and why is it crucial to tap into creative elements during challenging times?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (17:06): So what some of the science tells us is that when you are very stressed and perhaps not feeling so good or even feeling or experiencing some sort of burnout, that’s when we need to be our most creative. That’s when we need those creative skills and those imagination skills because what comes with creativity and imagination and then storytelling is hope. There’s always hope in stories, and you can always control the narrative and the future can be whatever you want it to be.

 

(17:33): And so I think that what we tend to do is we shut down those creative mechanisms when we are feeling stressed, but that’s actually the time when we should be looking for those creative elements. It’s not necessarily drawing or storytelling or music, which people tend to think that’s the creative arts, but it’s the mindset that you create. So even gardening or cooking. Lots of things can be creative if you allow yourself to be free and let your mind soar really, and allow things around you just to be present and to allow things to come into focus that you wouldn’t normally focus on.

 

(18:08): Sometimes my most lovely times are sitting out in the garden and just listening to the birds, feeling the breeze on my face, looking at the trees. And then I get some kind of clarity comes into my mind or I get a story or I get an image and then that spurs me on to do something else. And I think we need those moments. We need those contemplative moments, that deep listening to the universe.

 

Jasmine Bald (18:33): How could an non-Aboriginal practitioner, say a youth worker or somebody who is working with children maybe in early education, what can they do to support these processes?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (18:44): Well, I think they’re universal. I think they’re good for children of any culture to be able to have creativity and imagination, to feel like they connect, to feel a place and a purpose, to know themselves, to feel confident in the way they make their judgments and decisions. And that all comes from storytelling, and that’s good for everyone.

 

(19:04): Indigenous storytelling embeds them more into an ecological framework, so it’s another element. But I also think that’s good for all children to know that they can have a relationship with nature. Nature can be healing in itself. And it’s actually a common way for people to get healing, is to be out on country or in nature. A lot of cultural groups will tell you that. It’s not just strictly Aboriginal. But from our perspective, it was very, very important because our role in life was really to celebrate creation and to look after the earth and to look after everything around us. That makes you connected forever. And it also gives you this sense that you can’t really be lost or alone in your own country because you’ve got all of these things around you in relationship and that you have a unique place. So you’re irreplaceable from that perspective, which also helps you to feel stronger about your sense of life and your sense of purpose as you go forward. And I think reinforcing any of those sorts of thoughts or values is a good thing.

 

Jasmine Bald (19:58): How do you perceive the difference between the mainstream mental health services deficit-based model and the Aboriginal model, which prioritises a strength-based approach centred on social emotional wellbeing?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (20:08): So I think the trouble with a lot of mental health services and particularly some of the mainstream mental health services, we are very much focused on an illness model. So we’re focused on what’s wrong with you and what’s wrong with your family, and it is that sort of deficit-based model. There might be a little bit of a talk about your strengths at the end of that, but it’s focused on what’s wrong. Whereas the Aboriginal model comes from a strength-based process. So it’s a social and emotional wellbeing model, and it’s about what keeps you strong and where have things gone sort of wrong really in a way that has allowed you to become distressed or unwell. So it comes from that strength perspective first.

 

(20:42): And I think that feels more empowering for people so that they kind of have a sense of, “This has all happened to me and I’ve got through it. So at least I’ve had shown some resilience.” And I think to have that process of understanding what’s happened and what their story is, is a much gentler, nicer way to deal with people. Otherwise, it’s very disempowering, isn’t it, to sort of just be, “Well, this went wrong.” You’ve got all of these problems, but in actual fact, wow, wasn’t it fantastic that you actually got here after all of that as opposed to, “This is your problem and this is what you need to do.” It’s too instructional and it’s too disempowering.

 

(21:16): So I think some of the really important messages to understand is that children are our future. They always are. The way we treat our children, the way we nurture them, how we empower them, how we, I think, support them, they’re no future because they’re going to be our leaders tomorrow. And not only that, but they’re going to be looking after us so I’ve got a vested interest in making sure they’re really well looked after.

 

(21:41): So the future doesn’t rest with us. It rests in how we bring up our children. So the most important role that we have as adults in life is to bring about the wellbeing of our children to safeguard future generations. That’s the most important thing. Some of the ways that we do that is that we have to understand the magnitude of what happened in Australia. We are still recovering from genocide, and that is no easy thing to do. It is going to take generations of healing for that to actually occur in a good way. And we’re not there yet. We’re a long way off from that. So if we don’t understand magnitude, then we’re missing the mark in what’s really required to restore families, to restore our population structure.

 

(22:20): At the moment, our population is very young. We have a lot of children, which is fantastic, but we have less adults and we have very few grandparents and elders, so we don’t have a normal population. We’ve got to be able to have a generational programme where we grow really healthy babies and they go up strong and healthy and happy to become grandparents at the right age, not when they’re 20. Well, probably couldn’t do that, but you know what I mean. Not prematurely, but in their 70s and 80s and 90s. That’s where we want people to live long lives for. And that way then we have that buffering. So at the moment, we’re not buffering our families. There’s not enough adults to go around to look after all the kids. And so the kids are bringing up kids, and that’s not fair. That doesn’t allow them then those happy safe childhoods to go up. They’ve got too much burden on their shoulders.

 

(23:09): So we need to understand magnitude. We need to understand the population, the strange structure that we have at the moment, what’s required over generational recovery to do that. That’s not to say we shouldn’t also be taking care of the present. There’s a lot of distress out there at the moment. There’s high rates of suicide and self-harm in some of our young people. We have to address that crisis in. But if we only put money into the crisis in, we’re missing out on developing good families, strong families, nurturing families, safe families, and we’ve got to put that effort in there so that we build that population back up to a healthy level.

 

(23:09): I think the second thing that we need to also think about is the way we design our services as well. So at the moment, the services are very much built on Western models, certainly our mainstream services. And yet some of our knowledge and our systems from a cultural perspective have kept us in good stead for thousands of years. Can’t we marry these two? Can’t we get real about what’s required for true cultural safety in our services?

 

(24:06): Some of our healers spoke to us when we were doing some research on cultural safety about walking together in friendship, that true partnership and working together is about walking together in friendship, the most important factor being friendship. So if we can’t care for each other as people, how do we care for the people that need our help? And I don’t think we ever see friendship written in any partnership agreements. But that’s authentic. Partnership is friendship. So I think that’s a whole different way of thinking about how we sort of develop our services.

 

Jasmine Bald (24:34): You spoke earlier about the importance of seeing strengths. Could you expand on that a little?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (24:43): At the moment, some of the press around Aboriginal issues is kids running amok in communities, high rates of juvenile crime, high rates of drinking, that’s not us, that’s trauma. That’s the impact of generations of trauma. The real us is people who want to celebrate life, who want to have a holistic view around healing, who want to have strong, safe, stable, nurturing relationships. We have a lot of strengths. We have a lot of healing ways, which are really, really good. For example, some of the sort of therapeutic massage that some of our communities do, it’s amazing. You pay a lot of money for one of those services. But we tend to relegate a lot of the stuff in the Aboriginal group as kind of myth or legend, and yet it’s actually based on thousands of years of observational learning. So it’s actually got a good science to it, but we don’t see it like that. And so I think it’s time we really thought about the strength side of things and bring that into our everyday practise to enrich what we do.

 

Jasmine Bald (25:39): How do you balance Western concepts of evidence-based? And what community is saying it works for them?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (25:45): When you look at a lot of the clinical trials or the science, it’s based on small samples. It’s based on only certain parts of the population. There’s a lot of clinical trials that never include very complicated people or the sorts of people that we might have in some of our communities with lots of co-morbidities. So the evidence base is actually limited for a lot of things, but we don’t think of it like that. We think, “Oh, but it’s evidence-based.” It depends what you think evidence is. There’s no reason why thousands of years of observational learning would be considered any different than some scientific clinical trial. It’s evidence. It’s evidence of what works and knowledge that’s been built up over a long time.

 

(26:22): The other thing is, is how knowledge and evidence is represented. So for example, if you did a workshop, probably at the end of the workshop, you’d have some kind of survey that says, “Did you learn anything? 1 to 5, some sort of Likert scale that says, “Yes, I learned this and blah, blah, blah.” In our way of doing it, what a lot of people would do is they would draw pictures during the workshop. And then at the end of that, they would tell you a story about what they’d learn. It’s conceptual, it’s deep thinking. It’s much more comprehensive than a Likert scale and yet we don’t call that evidence. That’s just nonsense, absolute nonsense.

 

(26:57): There was a famous painting done for a native title tribunal, I think it was up in the northwest of Western Australia. And instead of writing a 200-page submission that had genealogy and blah, blah, blah, what they did to prove continuity of culture was they painted their canvas that showed their country. It was a map of their country. They danced on the canvases and they did ceremony, they did songs, they did stories. So their whole body of knowledge about culture and land was there. It was all demonstrated in front of you. Now, that looks very, very different that that was evidence because you couldn’t know that if you weren’t from there. And that to me was far more powerful than a 200-page written submission. So I think we’ve got to get past this notion that western science knows best. It doesn’t.

 

Jasmine Bald (27:48): So you’re parting words of wisdom to whoever might be listening to this, what would you really encourage them to connect with?

 

Professor Helen Milroy (27:55): I guess what I would like to say to our listeners is that we have this beautiful country. Australia is a magnificent country. And part of the reason why it’s a magnificent country is that our ancestors took care of it for you. We loved it, we looked after it, we loved everything about it and everything in it. We looked after the animals, the waterways, the sky, the sea, and we still do today. There’s nothing wrong with you taking part of that, with us. Now we live together. And learning to live together well is going to be something we need to think about a little bit more, but it’s the way of the future. We can learn from you. You can learn from us.

 

(28:36): A culture that survived so many environmental changes over thousands of years must have some pretty good ways for understanding how to care for country, how to understand caring for country during climate challenges, for example. We can learn from that. It’s really interesting to me that as we develop more science, we go back to saying, “Wow, the Indigenous ways of doing things was actually right. Let’s stop doing that.” Let’s just say it’s a given. We actually are pretty good at this stuff. Why don’t we just use that knowledge base now to go forward together?

 

(29:07): Everyone is welcome to be here because you’ve been born of this country now and you are part of Mother Earth. So let’s take our places up together, stand together united and go forward, combining both cultural knowledge bases, Western and Indigenous, and move together for the benefit of all of our children. Every child born in Australia now, every child who comes to live here now should benefit from everything Australia has to offer, and that includes us.

 

Jasmine Bald (29:33): This has now concluded this podcast. As we draw to a close, I find myself enriched by the profound insights Helen generously shared. Her wisdom illuminated the healing power of creativity, crafting a narrative of hope amid challenging times. Thank you Helen for sharing your invaluable insights. It has been an honour.

 

Narrator (29:54): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under The National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.