Speaking of Science: Cultural safety and fostering connections to social and emotional wellbeing with Associate Professor Yvonne Clark

During National Reconciliation Week, we embraced the theme of ‘Bridging Now to Next’ with our guest speaker for Speaking of Science, Associate Professor Yvonne Clark from SAHMRI.

Since the age of 19, Associate Professor Clark has worked within the Aboriginal community – ultimately becoming the first Aboriginal person who was clinically endorsed as a psychologist in Australia. With a strong ancestral connection to social and emotional wellbeing, A/Professor Clark has translated that into a health and medical research career.

With a focus on cultural safety, watch and listen as she discusses her inspiring career to date, as well as the impact of her research and how it has been translated into tools, processes and resources based on community priorities.

Recorded on Friday 30 May 2025 from 14:00 – 15:00 AEST.

Video transcript

0:14 Mr Alan Singh
Good afternoon, everyone.
We'll just give it another couple of minutes while everybody's jumping on.

I always enjoy seeing the participant number tick upwards, 93 right now. Alright, we've given people a minute and oh, we're at 97, are we going to break triple digits before we begin?

Just going to give it another few seconds. I wish I knew who the lucky 100th person was. We could actually welcome them specifically. But oh, there you go, 100th. That's going to be a good, I mean, let's begin.

Good afternoon everybody and welcome to another instalment of NHMRC Speaking of Science series where we've been hosting some of Australia's most respected health and medical research professionals.

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we're meeting today. Here in Canberra, the Ngunnawal people, for those in our Melbourne office, the Wiradjuri people of the Kulin Nation, and of course the traditional custodians of the lands on wherever you may be joining us from.

I pay my respects to those elders past and present, and especially warmly welcome all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are joining us today.

I'm Alan Singh, I'm the Executive Director of the Research Quality and Advice branch here at NHMRC and we have the privilege of leading on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health for NHMRC. I'm also the Indigenous Champion for NHMRC Reconciliation Action Plan.

Just a few housekeeping things before we begin.

We will be getting the chance to ask questions of Yvonne at the end, please just pop your questions in the chat and we will round them up and use them at the end of the session.

If you ever find yourself unable to attend a webinar or you want to go back and rewatch some of the really interesting things people have been saying, all our recordings are made available on NHMRC’s website.

And lastly, please do keep your microphone off during the presentation otherwise we will all giggle at you if we see your name flash up.

This is of course an important week, starting with National Sorry Day where we remember the mistreatment and also acknowledge the strength of Stolen Generation survivors.

I was glad to be one of the NHMRC staff who participated in the National Sorry Day bridge walk event in Canberra last week.

Then of course, that leads straight into National Reconciliation Week, a time for us all to learn about our shared histories, cultures and achievements and explore how all of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia.
The theme for this year is Bridging Now to Next and calls on all Australians to step forward together, look ahead and continue pushing forward and let past lessons guide us.

At NHMRC of course one of our formal priorities has been for many, many years now Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. That is something which most obviously we have a couple of targets that we have been meeting for a number of years including spending at least 5% of our funding on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and more recently we introduced a target for 3.4% of all our grants to be led by an Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander researcher. I'm very glad to say last year we met both of those targets.

But another very important thing is that we always make sure we have an Aboriginal and, or Torres Strait Islander Advisory Committee and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices on all our other advisory committees. That of course, brings me to our Speaker this afternoon.

But before I do, I just want to mention that if you are interested in how NHMRC has been going in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, we do publish these report cards on our website and they go back a number of years now, do check those out.

But getting to Yvonne at long last, our speaker for this seminar is of course Associate Professor Yvonne Clarke, a Kokatha/Wirangu woman from SA. She's a clinical endorsed psychologist and researcher with a PhD in psychology and extensive experience in clinical, community and academic psychology within government, private and the university sector.

She's currently co-leading the Aboriginal Communities and Families Research Alliance platform within SAHMRI’s Women and Kids theme and is the chief investigator on multiple NHMRC grants. In particular last year, Yvonne was awarded an HMRC Investigator Grant to continue her work with families and improve their social and emotional wellbeing and service access to help alleviate stresses and for this she was the recipient of the 2024 NHMRC Sandra Eades Investigator Grant Award, which is given to the top ranked Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander Researcher recipient in the Emerging Leadership category of Investigator Grants.

We're very pleased to make that award to Yvonne and we're very interested to hear what she has to say today as she discusses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural safety and fostering connections to a social and emotional wellbeing.

Over to you Yvonne.

7:27 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
Thank you Alan, it's always nice to hear nice that said about you, thank you. I'll just go to my next slide.

You've already introduced me, but just a couple of other things. Kokatha/Wirangu as you said, I'm a mother of two. I have seven siblings, five are remaining and I've worked in the Aboriginal community ever since I started work I've always been in the Aboriginal community. But since I got my first job as a 19 year old, I started working in the Aboriginal community. Damn it, now I've said how old I am.

I'm a clinical psychologist. I did my clinical psychology in the 90s when there were only a few Aboriginal people doing psychology and I'm amongst one of the first, I'm the first Aboriginal person that was clinically endorsed in Australia as an Aboriginal person.

I've done lots of lecturing. I worked in Adelaide Uni and Uni SA as a researcher, now with SAHMRI. I did my PhD in 2017, sort of later after my clinical experience and I'm a founding member of the Australian Indigenous Psychologists Association, APO, which started in 2008 and I'm a current director on that.

I always put these photos up because I'm really strongly connected to social emotional wellbeing. I'm strongly connected to my ancestry and I'm and I know that I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors. I know as an Aboriginal woman, I've got thousands and thousands of years of ancestry here. But I know the pretty good stories of at least six generations.

My Nana, who's my aboriginal side, is my maternal side. My father was non aboriginal. My Nana, my maternal side was the most she was a wonderful storyteller, would tell me all about her grandmother and the generations back. I had the richness of all that information imparted to me as a young person. I always carry my ancestors with me wherever I go, especially when I present.

My research journey I guess started when I did my PhD. I was at the University of Adelaide for about 10 years and I did little bits and pieces of research there, but nothing major and I did more teaching. It was only till I went to SAHMRI that I really got mentored and really got into research. I had no idea how the research world really worked and I didn't know how to apply for a grant, I went over, came over to SAHMRI as a research fellow on a project and then applied for my first Investigator Grant and got lots of advice and mentoring and actually was successful.

That started the whole ball rolling into research and it's an area now that I want to stay in and retire in. It did start basically from my PhD, which was on lateral violence in the aboriginal community and that's a topic that I was always interested in, or not always. I became interested in lateral violence when I went to a conference in Canada in about 2006. Is that right? Oh goodness, 2006 where a lot of Canadians talked about lateral violence and made a video about lateral violence.

Ever since then I've been interested, and I brought a lot of the concepts back to Australia and started to do workshops and information sessions and then decided to do my PhD on it because I was so interested in the topic.

But having said that, a lot of as a psychologist and having worked in the field as a psychologist, a lot of my research is in area of psychology, of course, but it's also with children and families because I worked clinically in, child and mental health and child protection and other different areas. It crosses with things like wellbeing, trauma, mental health, attachment and bonding is something an area that I'm really interested in. Let me see, where am I at?

Alan said in the Aboriginal Communities and Families Health Research Alliance, and we've shortened it to ACRA, doesn't quite fit ACRA, but that's an easier way for us to talk about this platform. ACRA is a both a platform within SAHMRI Women and Kids and it's a steering committee with 40 organisations. I'll talk a little bit about that in the next slide.

As Alan said, I'm a co-lead in this in this platform and I do this with my colleague Miss Karen Glover.

Projects do have their own goals, but this is just our general goal for ACRA, one of our general goals anyway. We work a lot with families, babies, pregnancy, young people, and our goal is to see them flourish or to do research that can move them towards that trajectory of flourishing and not just always surviving.

Our guiding methodology and research question is that we use the social emotional wellbeing framework in a lot of our research that helps guide us. Because I'm a psychologist, I do it as part of the APA group that originally sort of put this together.

It's something that I always incorporate into anything that I do, whether it's clinical work or research, it does guide a lot of our research projects. Also, cultural safety guides a lot of our stuff and holistic processes guide a lot of our research.

Our platform and such, we employ our staff, we do the day to day management of all our projects and we hold forums with community and with organisations and partners on a regular basis to inform, to provide feedback, to set priorities, a number of reasons. We hold consultations probably about three times a year and then we hold community accountability forums every two years and I'll explain that a little bit more in a moment.

We research in a very ethical way. We follow, we've got our own South Australian Accord principles that was developed within SAHMRI by our Aboriginal unit, by a lot of people, but the Aboriginal unit, Wardliparingga led that and also the NHMRC guidelines.

The platform, we apply for grants, and we've been successful of course, we manage the research projects, we provide feedback to communities, we develop partnerships, we enable those partnerships and we set up Aboriginal governance groups. There's a lot more of course than we do, but those are the main things that we do.

Our steering committee is made up of about 40 organisations. There's probably more than that, but about 40 organisations, community and service providers who we partner with as well. We deal a lot with policy and planners and other researchers from other institutions, we work across NCRI. We've got links with Adelaide Uni, University of South Australia, the Telethon Kids Institute. We have policy and plans in various places, South Australian government, our service providers. We've got lots of community-controlled organisations and governments, Aboriginal services and governments. Our reach is far reach.

This is just sort of a diagram in a diagrammatic form of how we work with community in our accountability forums. We're always encouraging Aboriginal people to be part of our research. We do yarn with a lot of Aboriginal people in South Australia, through either we just call people together in a forum or we have various governance groups. They tell us what their priorities are, for research, what needs researching, give us as much information about what they want to do.

We have a system that, we write it all down and we have sort of a traffic light system. A lot of the priorities have already been, we've applied for grants and have been able to start those priorities. Some of them are still waiting. Once we do hear what the priorities are with the community, then we write the applications and that, as many of you still know, that is quite a difficult process.

It's almost like writing a thesis sometimes it's quite a big process, but we do it. And as Alan said, and from what I'm saying is that we have been successful in some grants and then once we start the projects, we then feed that information back to the community every two years.

But that's not to say we don't yarn with the community in between those two years. That's just the formal process that we take on to let the community know that we've been successful, that we've started projects. This is where we're at. What else needs doing? What would you like us to do next? what are the new priorities? Does this need building on, or have we done enough? And the community often let us know.

Safety is at the core of all of our stuff as well and I can talk a little or a lot about this slide. I probably won't say too much about it, but we do provide cultural safety to all the people that we work with. That's our staff. We do staff well-being days, mentor, capacity building with staff so that they feel comfortable in what they're doing.

We work with community, as I've said, we do the community accountability forums and different stuff with them so that their voices are heard and they feel comfortable that they that their voices are heard and that we're listening and that we're feeding it back.

We do collaboration a lot and that's with the ACRA governance process. We take the time out to make sure we nurture our collaborations and partnerships. We provide feedback back to the community and the partnerships throughout various forums. Then, of course, there's all the projects that we have that we do provide cultural safety in various ways.

I've been part of some processes where we've written the cultural safety protocols in a more formal way. But we do that anyway because we have to provide that sort of information when we do ethics, how culturally safe we are. That's always at the forefront of everything we do.

Our journey for ACRA. From 2011 till now. This ACRA process has been around for over 10 years. The foundational project was the Aboriginal family study which there was one or two staff for that started in 2011. That was Wave 1 and from there we then managed to get lots of other projects going. Myself and Karen Glover co-led ACRA from about 2020 when there were lots of projects coming. Before that, Karen did a lot of the stuff in ACRA

The team's been growing. We've got about, let me see, about a 14 staff at the moment in ACRA and we're probably expecting another, perhaps another five more by the end of the year because we've got a number of other projects that we've received this year that we have to start employing for.

We've led about I guess about since the start was in the last 10 years anyway about 15 grants ACRA, two of those were commissioned government projects and we're part of some CRE networks as well. The projects last from one to five years to clinical what it is. Our methods of research are obviously qualitative. We do evaluations, longitudinal cohort studies, tool development and a lot of those are based on community priorities.

As you can see from 2025, we've been successful with, we've got the Aboriginal Family Study wave 3. We've got a small project, Stronger Dads at the moment. I received an investigator grant this year. We've got a Care and Connect Pathways project and these have all got longer names of course, that I can't remember. We shorten them down, of course. The ones in blue are from 2025.

Some examples, some of our projects. We've identified our key Aboriginal priority issues and that's also identified by the Aboriginal communities and their partners. We've developed some new measurement tools that was developed in the Aboriginal Family Studies and part of that is been a childhood resilience measure, Aboriginal Women's Experience of Partner Violence Scale.

One of our staff members who was also a student, has developed the initial stages of a social emotional wellbeing tool. I've been an investigator in developing other tools as well on other projects. That's an active part of our research.

We've worked on models of care, accurate, influenced, quite influential and the Aboriginal Family Study in particular on the Aboriginal Family Birthing Programme model here in Adelaide.

I've got about 5 PhD students and also a lot of our staff that we have Aboriginal staff, we've got majority of Aboriginal staff, a lot of them don't have their PhDs and we've recruited as community researchers. We really try to capacity building and get them into research. Research is not an area that we're finding, it's not an area that a lot of Aboriginal people are initially drawn to. But many of the staff that do come and work with us do end up staying and some of our staff have really flourished. It's good, that's great. Plus we also encourage our staff to study as well.

The types of research that we do, we've done the longitudinal cohort study. That's the Aboriginal family studies, which is in its third wave at the moment and that's been going since 2011 and the newest version wave 3 started this year. We've been part of the Centre of Research Excellence, Stronger Futures, where the topics intergenerational trauma recovery and resilience have featured in that CRE.

Investigator grants. I've so far in ACRA, I'm the only one that's received two of them and we're encouraging other staff to apply. We have done lots of exploratory studies or we've done at least one or two exploratory studies which have led to other grants. Of course, we have applied for targeted calls and MRFF as well. We've just been successful in that one.

Each project has their own outcomes. This is just a very general of the outcomes and when I originally did this, I had about four or five pages of it, I cut it down to 1. I'm really only skimming over the surface of some of our outcomes.

As I said, the Aboriginal Family Studies was one of our foundational projects and we had some major findings with that. It showed us that the high rates of stress during pregnancy was really quite significant and cannabis use was quite high, was impacting small for gestational age for babies and there was a reasonable number of Aboriginal women using cannabis. Also, as I said before, the Aboriginal Family Studies influenced the Aboriginal Family Birthing Model of Care as well.

A lot of the learnings from the Aboriginal family study as well as other projects as well led to the success of our recent spate of projects. We've got Corka Bubs and also these are all the short names of course, they've got long, long names.

The Corka Bubs study was a two year study that looked at cannabis and that was Aboriginal pregnant mothers and we connected them to support people, key support people and services for their stress and alcohol. This was an Incubator Grant and we finished that project at the end of last year, but we're doing lots of write up for that. But that particular study also influenced the ICARE study.

Again, that's a long title and that's a five year study with five streams in which we're introducing a decolonisation training with this project, who developed a tool Baby Coming You Ready, it's not exactly an assessment tool, but it's a tool that helps to understand mum's wellbeing and where they're at.

We're sort of going to incorporate that into the Aboriginal birthing units here, or at least two or three of them here in Adelaide. We've got a Coolamon wrap around service, which will be the support service which we've taken from our learnings from the Corporate Bubs project. We'll have a data governance and, and a, and a sovereignty stream as well. That's quite a big project and we're in our third year of that project.

We've also worked with government some commissioned reports around young people cultures, Strong Culture Strong Young People and that report has influenced lots of our current projects as well.

The most recent one, Care and Connect to Care and Connect Pathways is more of an intergenerational project that'll we'll look at from pregnancy to young people and the pathways that they take to increase their wellbeing. We’re still in the early days of that project and still recruiting for that.

One project has led to, projects have led to other projects and we work in a holistic way so they're all influencing each other in some way.

OK, that was about ACRA and our general projects. I look at the time, I have probably a few more minutes and I'll try not to. I'm not right with timing. It's not one of my best features, Alan, you might have to pull me up at some stage.

But I just thought I'd quickly run through my lateral violence project that I received my first Investigator Grant for and also taking it into my second Investigator Grant. As I said, I did my PhD on lateral violence and that was with adults. One of the main things that they said was that you really need to work with young people and help them to understand it and be able to work through it.

That was what my first Investigator Grant was about. It is about improving social emotional wellbeing and that is looking in through the lens of lateral violence. Definition of lateral violence, and some of you, or all of you may know, but I often get asked, what is it?

It's a standard definition that's used from the native counselling services of Alberta. But you'll see this definition in lots of the literature that other dominant groups might use. It’s about people in positions of powerlessness can covertly and overtly direct their dissatisfaction towards each other, themselves and those in powerless positions. The diagram that I've put next to it is one that I use when I'm talking to community and community seem OK with it. I've tested it out a few times.

If we're sort of striving for our cultural identity and I've put different layers so we can harm ourselves as part of this process of infighting, we can, the lateral violence can happen in the home and in domestic setting, it can happen in the family, it can happen in the community. I define lateral violence as all of those. But lateral violence can be when you put your dissatisfaction to any other Aboriginal person.

That may not be in my home or my family, I may be sort of putting down or infighting with somebody from another state, another aboriginal person. It’s a broader sense, but it also can encompass all these other aspects to it, but it's on the outside. They're kind of the triggers to lateral violence.

Racism, lateral violence, a consequence of lateral violence or a link to lateral violence is colonisation and dispossession, and the systemic process that Australia has, can trigger off lateral violence.

There are many other kinds of violence as well, gang violence. Just when you look at the WHO documents, it explains that there are many different types of violence and also all kinds of oppression can trigger off lateral violence or how we feel about ourselves and our identities and then use that to harm others or those closest to us.
I don't know if I've explained it well enough. We often do workshops on lateral violence and it can take up to a day of unpacking lateral violence because it is quite a complex term. When we do our projects, there's always this other side of lateral violence. All of our projects are strength based, which I haven't mentioned of course. This is part of it too.

There's no formal definition for lateral empowerment, but these are the kinds of things that always come up when we search for terms and stuff like that and lateral empowerment, we like to look at lateral empowerment to decrease incidents of lateral violence. A lot of our questions when we talk to young people are reflective of lateral empowerment.

Two things that we've managed to do, and I won't go into this because these are quite big, is that we've managed to do to peer scoping reviews. When I first got my Investigator Grant, it was during COVID, so we couldn't have contact with young people so we did scoping reviews at the time and they just took quite a while to do at the end of the day.

This first one was about 170 papers. He reviewed articles. It had a broad criteria reflecting kind of all those layers that I've talked about for lateral violence and it's difficult when you're doing scoping reviews because not everybody names lateral violence as lateral violence per se. They might talk about it in a particular way of infighting or using different languages or describe it in a way that they're talking about lateral violence. It was hard to really do this because the language isn't all there yet.

We also did it sort of in an international setting, so the CANZUK Nations, which is Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia across those areas. Just briefly the findings did talk more about family and community violence, a lot of the interpersonal and victimisation and it did talk a little bit about self-harm behaviours.

But also in the lateral empowerment, a lot of the papers that we did see, it does talk about young people's resilience, their capacity for healing and learning and that they want to, it talked a lot about community informed treatment approaches and how well these worked, the importance of identity, all those things that go with lateral empowerment. For this one, we're in our final stages of the review and before we send it back to the journal article, so hopefully there'll be something soon.

Here we go. We've also done a Grey literature scoping review as well, which was mostly Aboriginal people in the Grey literature. It was some around lateral violence. Lateral violence is often expressed as internal racism caused by political agendas and colonisation. There was a lot of lateral empowerment in relation to lateral violence in the Grey literature review and we've done an article on that one as well. There's the DOI for that one. I won't talk too much about that because I know I'm kind of run out of time already.

We've done lots of consultations around young people, that's with adults and young people with, as I said earlier, we do our ACRA forums, but I've done 1 specifically on lateral violence. We do the accountability forums where the community have said yes, lateral violence is a very important area to look at. We've talked to specific reference groups around many things, but lateral violence is one of the topics we talk about. 
We did a young people's forum in last November. We had about 45 young people coming to talk to us and they said that that there's an intergenerational obligation of lateral violence. What they mean by that is, for example, if their parents or grandparents didn't like particular families or people, then that's passed down to them and it's almost like they're obligated to also not like that family and stuff. They want to address things like that. They want to celebrate Aboriginality and identity, and they want to work on that and their cultural knowledge.

They want to better speak up and build up their empowerment. They want early intervention. They want more of the connection to country and all the aspects of the wellbeing model. Social media is a good and a positive and a negative thing. It's one of those areas where people do use lateral violence on social media, but it's also a way of connecting and being in touch with other Aboriginal people and caring and sharing.

They want to collaborate more with family and Elders and other young people, and they also want to make sure that a lot of this information is also young Aboriginal people from rural and remote areas.

The next step. This is where my Investigator Grant that started this year comes into it. It's a much broader grant. It's not only looking at young people, but it's also looking at mums and dads and that as well as lateral violence. But the next steps in terms of lateral violence stuff is that we're going to continue hearing from young people's voices.

We want to do the yarning circles again with young people from the forum that we had in November. They've all, many of them said they'd love to come back and talk to us more about it and we're starting the Young People's Governance Group.

We do have a young person here at ACRA, a staff member that's working on that and she's got quite a few people. We're just setting that up, but we're setting it up with another project that also needs a young person's reference group, that's in the pipeline.

We want to help facilitate connections to country identity and wellbeing and of those aspects of the social emotional wellbeing model that young people said they would like some help in connecting with. We want to be able to provide education and awareness wherever we can.

We codesign and work with young people and we also need our partnerships and translation services. We held a policy forum this year and we did talk lateral violence was one of the projects that we did feature, and we had quite a few government departments and them wanting to have more yarns with us about lateral violence and lateral empowerment and how they can sort of incorporate that into some of their programmes.

It's only happened a month or so ago, those yarns are still fresh, and we need to work on that and evaluations and feasibility studies. We always need to know how well we're doing.

I reckon that I've sort of finished and I've gone over time. Sorry, Alan. I asked you to pull me up, but you didn't. But it's not your job to pull me up. I should have properly timed myself better. But yeah, I’ve finished.

These are just a couple if you need them. My emails there and the ACRA email if you want information about ACRA. We've got newsletters and different ways that we can connect with people. Yes, I'm done.

42:54 Mr Alan Singh
That's fabulous. Thank you. I'm just, there we go just jumping on with my video hopefully is working now. Thank you very much.

Didn't feel the need to stop you since it was so many interesting projects you were talking about. But we do have a few minutes for questions and there's a couple in the chat.

Actually, we might start with Jenny's if that's all right and she mentions that you mentioned a social emotional wellbeing scale in one of the projects and she was asking for a little bit more detail, is it developed now? I guess is it available?

43:37 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
Yeah, that one. I wasn't going to mention that one and it's just been published, and I don't have the date if you just let me quietly email. But I'm not going to do that while I'm presenting. I can certainly send that to you.

It's one of our Aboriginal workers has just recently completed her PhD and it's part of that. She did a scale and that was also from information from the Aboriginal Family Studies, which as one of our foundational projects, she has the first stages.

I shouldn't really say that. It's a tool that's been developed and I can send you the link to the article. It's just been published; I think last week or the week before. It certainly is a tool to use. I have to double check. It's still being fuel tested to a certain extent, but it probably could be used for research.

But I'll send you the article and then Jenny can sort of work out where to from there and you could contact if she needed further questions on that.

44:50 Mr Alan Singh
Fabulous. And we've got a few sleuths online, I'm sure so if anybody manages to track it down a web link in the middle.

44:58 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
OK, so it's Arwen Nikolov would be the first. If you're there on Google at the moment and can put it into the chat, then go for it.

45:06 Mr Alan Singh
Yeah, there you go. Somebody's already beaten to us too. Yes, yeah, fantastic.

Sam has commented on the amazing range of research projects that you have been involved with and asked what research project are you most proud of and why?

45:26 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
Oh, but that's the hard one. The simple answer is I'm proud of them all. I've been working on lateral violence for a long time, so I'm always proud of that.

But I guess to answer that, I'm proud of the, the Korka Bubs because that was a short project, and we've actually finished that. We've got some outcomes and I'd like to see something from start to finish. We've just for that project; it was a two year feasibility study. We had wonderful staff, we had women participating and it's a project that you can actually see is working and that women at the hospital are actually flourishing especially.
One of the major support things that the women in the Korka Bubs project, the pregnant women, accessed and took best advantage of was the counselling that had the highest, you might think counselling, counselling is everywhere, but it's not accessible often for Aboriginal people and especially if you're going into a hospital setting and where you feel that you can't navigate very well. The counsellor with a bit of navigation or help can really set somebody on the right in the right way.

Seeing that from start to finish. We've still got articles to write on that, but I'm proud of that because I have been able to see it grow and develop. That to me is my foundational project because I am involved with the Aboriginal Family Studies as a foundation project, but I wasn't there at the start with that project where I was with the Korka Bubs one, and it was one of the first ones that I was the CIA on after my Investigator Grant. I think it's also, and I and I rave on as well. Sorry, once you get me started.

47:46 Mr Alan Singh
I think it's also the most fun project name I've heard as well. Congratulations on that.

We've got a question in relation to do you have any suggestions for applying for MRFF early career funds, not necessarily related to the subject of today's presentation, but we might broaden that out too. I mean, obviously as the best Investigator Grant application from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person in the last round and with the number of grants that you mentioned along the way, obviously you've had good success there and you've got the skill of being able to put in those great applications.

Any tips you can provide people I think would be very welcome.

48:27 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
Well, come and work for us and I can help you. Yes, I shouldn't say no.

Oh, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how I've gotten to this point. Having said that, like I've also had lots of guidance and help around the place as well and it is about the mentoring you get and you just keep asking like I even our research office here, I kind of got stuck quite often and I'd ask, can you help me with this? Can you help me with this? Am I saying this the right way? Have I put enough impact? Just different voices helping you.

Before I started in research and when I worked at the university, I used to send stuff for reviews and I used to feel really downhearted when somebody would sort of write over my stuff and put a red mark and say that's not right or I just felt like sort of destroying my words.

But I've learned to love that a bit more and accept that and appreciate that I don't have to take everybody's words, of course that they're saying, but everybody is trying to help and to make a stronger piece. It took me a while to actually get there because in a sense, I was a bit offended that people would do that. Why aren't I smart enough to do that?

I've also had to go on a bit of a transformation journey as well with these grants and accept help a bit more and ask for help. Yeah, I'm a bit stubborn, but I've had to do this.

50:04 Mr Alan Singh
Yeah, great. Thanks.

A question from Nicola who says I hadn't heard of the concept of lateral violence before.
Is lateral violence being considered in other areas of research in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and are other impacts being identified?

50:25 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
Like when I first heard the term back in 2006 and started to talk a bit about it here in South Australia. There was a video that was made from the Canadian Indigenous mob, and it really wasn't out, not many people knew what lateral violence is. But now it is quite a word that is used quite a lot in the Aboriginal community. It is terminology that's well known. It's still not written a lot about it.

That's probably why we had a lot of issues with our scoping review, not issues, but it just became so broad that we weren't sure whether it was lateral violence sometimes and people talk about something, but we just weren't sure. We were more in try to be inclusive, so it's taken a while to do the scoping review in part because of that.

I've forgotten the exact question, but I guess there's not a lot of research in it, but I'm seeing a lot more research. I know there's a couple of other people that have done PhDs and I was recently asked if I would be a co-supervisor for another project that's going to happen soon. There's a lot more interest.

If you Google lateral violence, you will find a number of papers and a bit of research with Aboriginal people and other Indigenous people from around the world, but you might also see it from other oppressed groups as well. It depends on what words you put in, what search words you put in, what you're looking for.

52:05 Mr Alan Singh
Great. One from Lindsay.

What's the biggest barrier you found in the violence focused research?

52:20 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
I think I'll just sort of draw on some of this stuff I've said is probably the way it's described in the terminology.

When you sort of say Aboriginal, if you Google Aboriginal violence, it'll come up with so many different articles or different, what do you call them on Google information?

But anyway, so the terminology is quite broad and it is hard to research specific stuff, even if you put in something like gang violence, that could be lateral violence, but it may not be clear.

53:20 Mr Alan Singh
One from me, you mentioned in a couple of places, the community accountability forums and things like that, that you've been doing and I guess I'm just wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about how you go about setting those up and how you kind of manage the discussion and the outcomes.

Because accountability is always really tricky, and it can be an uncomfortable place to be. But obviously we as an organisation also really need to think about being accountable, more accountable always in particularly in this area. Love to hear your insight.

53:53 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
There are a lot of established community groups that we, I draw on here in South Australia and we're a small state and we don't all know each other of course we know someone who knows someone who knows someone.
But that happens in a lot of Aboriginal circles anyway. But being a small estate does help that a bit. We hold the forum, we invite the Elders, people that we've already got established relationships.

We have the ACRA governance group, so we draw on lots of people from there, Aboriginal people.

We do, as I said, we do go to a lot of established groups that we have an Elders group, we have a granny's group, we have groups in different areas, the West and the South and etcetera. We know somebody that might be on those groups or helps facilitate those groups, send out the invitations.

We've also got our direct community links that we have and we're all from most of us here from ACRA, from different areas of the state, Aboriginal groups. For our links there, we've always got our families as well that we can always invite or tell them to pass on for us, so we do that.

We have held some successful forums. I think the last one though, it was kind of the end of COVID, it was out. Actually it was out. There was 1 during after COVID, which is a long story. But the last one that we held two years ago or no 12 months ago, we actually went out to different rural areas because the community said you need to go to more rural areas. We went out to different established groups and talked a little bit about ACRA research projects, what they were and asked those questions about, are we on the right track? Do you, what are the priorities do you want? Are the projects what you asked for or do they fit with the priorities that you had? What else do you need? All those sorts of questions so we've tried different things.

Sometimes we have, but as I said, we, it's not every, I said that's every two years we do that but we're constantly talking to community in some way or rather they're just the more formal type of processes and accountability forums. I don't think anybody really, really growls us or anything.

But yeah, somebody can say to us, you're not on the right track or and sometimes we do get told that we do need to sort of work more in maybe even the child protection space because we work with children young and we and we kind of get growled about that sometimes. But our space is we work in more prevention, like for example, the Korka Bubs 1 is supporting the mums and the babies and to sort of not go into child protection. That's more a space at the moment and there are other researchers around that do work in that area.

We don't need to do that area. But and that's what we'll tell community as well, that there are other researchers in that space and we can't all be in the same space. We need to work on the prevention and provide the supports and help families flourish. I'm not sure if I answered the question because as I said, I just go off on all sorts of tangents when I start answering a question.

57:40 Mr Alan Singh
I thought there was some really important things there, particularly about the continue keep the conversation going and don't just make it once every couple of years sort of thing and of course, just being able to listen to people and generally open yourself.

Well, thank you very much. I guess we are going to have to wrap. I'm sure there'd be plenty more questions if we had more time. But thank you very much, Yvonne. Thank you very much everybody online for participating.

We hope that this was a useful thing in your Reconciliation Week and we encourage you to get involved with the reconciliation activities wherever you might be located.
Lastly, just hot off the press to let people know that the next Speaking of Science webinar will be on Tuesday the 17th of June and it'll be Ainsley Cahill and Professor James St John about consumer participation in health and medical research.

But thank you very much, Associate Professor Yvonne Clark for speaking to us today. Thanks everyone.

58:47 Associate Professor Yvonne Clark
My pleasure too. Thank you. Bye.

End of transcript.