This presentation is titled Benangying Dangalang, Picking Everlastings – a story to listen and learn, which is a metaphor for my story of my earliest memories as a child going out and picking everlastings with my girl cousins, and the cultural knowledge I learned from them.  This memory stayed with me during my journey through foster care in a non-Indigenous foster home and through the years growing up trying to find ‘who I am and where I belong’ and to reconnect to family and country.

My story is the basis of my PhD research, applying storytelling and Indigenous Life Story as my methodology, and positions Noongar Katitjin as cultural knowledge in the forefront of my research, and draws upon Dangalang as a cultural framework, and Kaadaninny, to listen and learn as the basis of cultural practice to work with First Nations children, young people and families.  It also considers my learnings while completing the research appropriate to my lived experiences, becoming a Social Worker and an Indigenous Social Workers, an Indigenous Researcher and Academic, and the main themes of my learning and practice which are: