Making Sure the Voices of Our Children Are Heard

The Kungka Education Advocacy Project, funded by The National Indigenous Australians Agency, supports young Anangu women to build confidence, develop leadership skills, and amplify their voices. Currently active in Kaltjiti and Pukatja (APY lands, South Australia), the project delivers workshops and camps that create safe spaces for young women to grow their agency and speak out on issues that matter to them, including alternative pathways to education and employment.

A key initiative this year is the development of a storytelling piece featuring Azaria Foster, senior Anangu Youth Development Officer and NPY Women's Council director. The short film follows Azaria's journey as a young leader, highlighting her role in empowering other young women to "speak up strong" and take on leadership roles in their own communities. Filmed on Azaria's family country in Irrunytju, Western Australia, the project also highlights the importance of intergenerational knowledge sharing. Azaria's grandmother was one of the early works at NPY Women's Council, and the film honours this legacy. As Azaria shared, "I was using my voice, I wasn't shame because that's what my grandmother taught me".

Once completed, the film will be integrated into Kungka's Advocacy Workshops as a central resource to inspire and encourage young women. These resources also contribute to an organisation-wide focus on embedding evaluative storytelling to better capture our work, support data analysis, and promote sovereignty over the stories of Anangu. Azaria remind us for the year ahead: "talking to young people, you've got to have love in your heart".

The Yuu Group is a special project led by four Anangu women who have been working together for years, creating innovative ways to use the strength of Anangu culture to resist domestic and family violence. Below is a collaborative tjanpi artwork they created which tells the story of how Anangu lived in the past, when the women were children, with families sleeping in a windbreak – a yuu. The scene illustrates that, without a yuu, a fi re can grow out of control. The work that the Yuu Group does calls community to act like a windbreak, to keep the fire under control and protect families.

“We created a scene from traditional times, the times when people had strong protection in the form of windbreak. These two people are strong and looking after their children really well and they have the right size fire. These two in the past, they lived without violence. With that small fi re they lived well and they looked after their children well. Now-days we are all surrounded by violence. The fire has become huge. When the fi re burns too high, the protective windbreak is burnt. That is what violence is. This is what we made to express our thinking and feeling about this. If you have the right size small fi re, that’s the right way to live when you are looking after all the members of the family and it is a good life. That small, low burning fi re is the right help that young people need. So, if you have the right thinking, strong, good thinking, you understand things and you keep that fi re the right small size then there will be no violence and you’ll live together looking after those children and all the other extended family members.”
- Yuu Group member

Funding support was provided by the Department of Human Services, the Department of Social Services, and the Paul Ramsay Foundation.