The Women & Families Program is in full swing and the team are using the Abecedarian Approach to early childhood education! They also received a visit from rangers and older school kids and together looked for minyarra: a small sweet bush onion.

Some of the Martu Leadership team spent time in Melbourne attending a series of workshops, meetings and delivering presentations. They focussed on how companies run, who owns them and the role of members, directors, CEOs and staff.

The Martu Leadership group met for the first gathering of the year at a two-day meeting held in Roy Hill Mining Camp. This meeting enabled the group to reflect on the work that had been done in 2018 and to start planning what they would like to focus on this year.

In August, a number of executive leaders from the Australian & New Zealand Police Leadership Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Institute of Police Management (AIPM), spent five days with over 50 Martu leaders deep in the Western Desert region east of Newman.

Imagine being in a foreign country where you cannot speak the language, then being arrested and tried in court for something you cannot understand, and being thrown into prison hundreds of kilometres away from your family.

On 25 April Martu invited Newman police to attend a one day workshop to consider how they might continue to work together towards better relationships and effective strategies for change.

When Martu leaders from the West Australian desert town of Newman sat down with police to talk about the pervasive and complex problem of family violence, they agreed on one driving factor that was relatively easy to address.