Aunty Barbara Wingard was one of the first group of Aboriginal Health Workers trained in South Australia. She was involved with Dulwich Centre from 1994 when she played a key role in the “Reclaiming our stories, reclaiming our lives” gathering for Aboriginal families with a loved one who had died in custody. Aunty Barb was part of the teaching team at Dulwich Centre and played a key role in the centre’s engagement in community projects. She also served as Chairperson of Aboriginal Legal Rights and Commissioner for the Environmental Resources and Development Court. As an Honorary Fellow of The University of Melbourne and as a senior Kaurna Elder, Aunty Barb created the Aboriginal narrative practice online course and the Aunty Barb Walking History Journey. Well known for her influential book (with Jane Lester), Telling our Stories in Ways That Make Us Stronger, Aunty Barb was named Elder of the Year in South Australia in 2008.
Jean McMahon is a proud Yorta Yorta woman living on Djaara Country in so-called Victoria. She works at Weenthunga in the women’s social and emotional wellbeing space. Jean brings 25 years of experience as a First Nations educator across community, education and health sectors. She is completing her Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work and is ardent about collective narrative practice, decolonising justice, and healing through connection to Country. A queer woman and parent, Jean loves spending time with her loves out on Country.
With Indigenous communities facing so many losses due to past and present injustice, we have been seeking ways of speaking about our grief that are consistent with our cultural ways of doing things. We are remembering those who have died, we are honouring Indigenous spiritual ways, and we are finding ways of grieving that bring us together. We are telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. This is an audio recording of a paper that was originally delivered as the opening keynote address at the first International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference, which was held in Adelaide from 17 to 19 February 1999. A later version of this paper was published as “Grief: Remember, reflect, reveal” in the 2001 book Telling Our Stories in Ways that Make Us Stronger (edited by Barbara Wingard and Jane Lester).
Key words: Aboriginal; First Nation; grief; narrative therapy; narrative practice
Original paper: Wingard, B. (1999). Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. In Dulwich Centre Publications (Ed.), Narrative therapy and community work: A conference collection (pp. 7–12). Dulwich Centre Publications.
This recording: Wingard, B. (2025). Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger (J. McMahon, Narr.) [Audio recording]. International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, (2). https://doi.org/10.4320/ZKPA8661 (Original work published 1999)
