Walykumunu Waarka! (Our Work Is Good!): Aboriginal Women’s Participation in a Self-Designed Community Program of Work

Deeply embedded cultural protocols and family commitments often prevent Australian Aboriginal people from engaging in worker roles in remote community services and agencies. This prevents agencies and programs from engaging local people in work which they consider meaningful and which meet the needs of their communities. This paper describes how innovative multi-modal participatory action research (p)AR methods, creatively adapted by remote Aboriginal women, enabled them to enact, reflect and describe their experience as “workers.” In essence, the article describes how methods of community-based action research enhanced the livelihoods of a group of remote Aboriginal-Australian women and their community by foregrounding local Indigenous experience. It outlines how the unique, emergent, participant-led research methods grounded in lived experience enabled the evolution of effective, enjoyable, and cultually safe ways to do work and be a worker. Their activities provide an example of how agencies and services can meaningfully engage remote Aboriginal people in employment and provide the basis for more appropriate policy and program development. The story which will unfold in this paper provides an example of how (p)AR methods enable the incorporation of community-led, pragmatic and democratic processes for change that may influence policy and popular perceptions.