She grew up in the only Aboriginal family in a remote Pilbara mining town. Now Tracy Westerman is fighting for the lives of at-risk youth in communities like hers.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Inside a boxing studio, a slender woman leans on the ropes while her coach wraps bandages on her hands before the gloves go on. Tracy Westerman has just flown back to Perth after a gruelling week addressing judges, police officers and child protection workers in different states, and it’s time to de-stress.
Westerman rails against the “one-size-fits-all, monocultural evidence base” of much of Australia’s psychology practice. “A fundamental truth was drilled into me during my training: if you get assessment wrong, you get treatment wrong and you make things worse.”The nation, she says, lacks Indigenous-specific, data-driven content in its psychology training. “Instead, we have a side order of cultural awareness – or ‘we had an Aboriginal person do a lecture’ paternalism.
Back in 2016, only eight years after a coronial inquest into 22 Indigenous suicides in the Kimberley, she gave evidence to a West Australian parliamentary inquiry into another spate of suicides by Aboriginal youngsters. “When an Aboriginal child dies in Australia, 27 per cent of them will do so by suicide. That is more than four times the rate of non-Aboriginal children.”
“You have intimate relationship breakdown and then you lack the capacity to self-soothe, which is very common in attachment disorder or people who have suffered trauma from separation. Then there’s alcohol and drug use as an enabler because they have no other way of soothing, and thenThe inquiry requested copies of Westerman’s suicide risk assessment tools but ultimately did not endorse them.
Funding for $2 million in scholarships, plus administrative costs, has come from sources as varied as Paul Ramsay Foundation, which recently pledged $4.3 million over three years, to annual fundraising concerts by Fremantle-based singer-songwriter John Butler. “This isn’t just about students getting cash,” says Westerman. “They get personally mentored, have a student conference once a year and join a student hub.
He applied for a Jilya scholarship, “but I never thought I’d be accepted – I didn’t do well in high school, so the scholarship was a massive confidence boost”. Ahmat is now set on completing a master’s degree in psychology: his dream is to work in communities around Rockhampton “like Woorabinda, which is struggling but strong and resilient. If we can get more Indigenous people to help our mob, you can show people things can be different.
Mavis met and married Mick Westerman, the son of a hard-drinking Scottish migrant who ended up dying as a vagrant in someone’s backyard. Mick had headed north in his 30s with a swag and belongings in the back of his ute. He and Mavis worked on pastoral stations as shearer’s cook and general hand. “I had to educate myself through high school with distance education and, with no one on either side of my family having seen the inside of a university, it’s fair to say the odds were firmly stacked against me.”, she had picked up a book that described what a psychologist did. She’d never met one, “but I was always naturally curious and decided it would be my life’s calling”.
“That’s the first stage that every black person goes through. I see a lot of black kids, even adults, with identity problems. They reject their own culture – ‘I don’t want to be one of them’ – because the world reacts differently to blackness.” “I get the group to rate their reaction to what Howard says from one to 10, one being no reaction,” says Westerman. “Then I show an excerpt from the film.” Based on a true story, Phillip Noyce’s 2002 film shows Aboriginal girls Molly, Gracie and Daisy being forcibly grabbed by a police officer and crying for their mother and grandmother, who collapse in the dust as the children are driven away.
Empathy works both ways, she tells the audience. She describes living as a young woman with her brother Michael in the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie, “the most overtly racist place I have ever lived in”. Michael was studying at the School of Mines while she was starting her first job as a child welfare officer.
I tell Westerman that I scanned the attendance list for her workshop and it included individuals from the state premier’s office, child protection, state health department, a big mining company and not-for-profit charities. Does that match with her repeated assertions, outlined in her book, that she is snubbed by organisations, especially in her own state?
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