On October 25, women from all walks of life gathered at Brisbane’s Queens Gardens for the Inaugural One Spirit, One Heart. 

One Spirit, One Heart, coordinated by the RED HEART Campaign and Yhurwun Bullan invited women, girls, and gender diverse people to share their experiences of sexual and domestic violence.

Participants encouraged each other to speak up about their experiences and women comforted each other throughout the event.

Lyn, a survivor of family violence heard about the event through the RED HEART Campaign’s Facebook and came to amplify Indigenous experiences.

“I went through it for 17 years and walked away with nothing and the system allowed me to do that. I had to start from scratch again without having any support. I walked away from community. I walked away from songlines. I walked away from a support system, walked away from a job, a house, everything because I could not get protection,” she said.

Lyn explained after the event that, “A lot of us tend to think that it’s only happened to us or it’s not happening to other people as soon as we speak, it’s like opening a floodgate. You see that other women feel supported, advocated for and seen, and its important because we don’t see women enough. We don’t put them in the spotlight enough”.

The event architect, Tanya Keed, is a Dunghutti woman from Canberra and a frontline support worker for women impacted by family violence.

Tanya Keed drew inspiration for One Spirit, One Heart from the traditional Indigenous practice of gathering in circles to yarn (talk).

“We decided to have One Spirit One Heart for that very reason I think in the community there is an awareness of DV and family violence, but we need to let community know exactly what it is like for our women to heal and we hope that the community will get behind us, to advocate to change what needs to be changed in this space,” Tanya Keed said in an interview in August.

The Inaugural One Spirit, One Heart Yarning Circle coordinators, Freya and Affie, were happy with the event turn out.

“Today has been incredibly powerful and incredibly moving, I’m not sure what I expected, but I think it exceeded all expectations,” Freya told the Griffith Journal.

Mandy, a woman’s advocate and domestic and family violence support worker from the Gold Coast attended to show her support for One Spirit One Heart.

“I came out today because I think it is important to gather as a collective. We could scream as much as we want on an individual basis, but that as history has shown doesn’t get us very far,” Mandy said.

While in the yarning circle, Mandy shared this perspective of how it feels to be a survivor of family violence.

I cannot ignore the fact that I live in a crime scene that I can never leave. That’s what trauma does, it builds a landscape around you. You can move houses; you can change jobs. You can heal parts of yourself, but the echo of what happened remains. It’s how you scan a room. How your body tenses at a sound. How trust becomes something fragile you keep hidden, and when I say I am trapped in a crime scene, I don’t mean I am trapped in the past. I’m in the past that lives in the present. And that is why this healing process and how we gather today is so important as it isn’t just personal. It is political because survivors live in the aftermath of systems that have failed to protect us. fail to believe us, and too often fail to hold perpetrators to accountable.

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