BWA Podcast Show: Truth Telling and Listening: Healing and Holding Pathways
Tune into this important episode as Karina Seng chats with Moorditj Yorga Yok Waangk’s Dr Robyn Smith-Walley and Elspeth Gonzalez-Skuja, exploring the importance of truth-telling, truth-listening, and truth-action.
Tune in as we connect the everyday experience of women “holding everything together” with the deeper cultural, historical, and spiritual meaning of holding in Noongar women’s lives. This is an opportunity to understand how non-indigenous allies can be true supporters by listening, learning, sponsoring, and promoting First Nations-led initiatives.
Healing and holding
What does it mean to hold, not only as women carrying responsibility for families, businesses, workplaces, and communities, but as a cultural practice, a form of strength, and an essential part of healing?
Hear how the interconnected themes of healing and holding are important to the journey of First Nations women, their communities, and the wider Australian story. Many women will recognise the sense of holding everything together. This discussion opens a deeper understanding of holding as the carrying of culture, stories, relationships, responsibility, Country, identity, and knowledge across generations.
Healing and holding are not separate ideas. Holding truth with care, creating space for stories to be heard, maintaining cultural connection, and supporting women to carry responsibility collectively can all be part of a deeper healing journey.
While many cultures have brought experiences of trauma, displacement, migration, and survival to this country, our shared healing in Australia begins with listening to and supporting the healing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the First Peoples of these lands.
Hear about the importance of:
- truth-telling that allows First Nations stories and lived experiences to be voiced;
- truth-listening that asks others to listen with humility, openness, and without defensiveness;
- truth-action that moves beyond awareness and good intentions into practical commitment;
- culturally safe spaces in which First Nations women can speak for themselves and their communities;
- recognising the strength, leadership, knowledge, and cultural authority held by Noongar women;
- understanding how holding can be both a source of strength and a heavy responsibility;
- creating opportunities for responsibility to be shared rather than carried alone; and
- supporting the Noongar Women’s Summit through respectful allyship, participation, sponsorship, and sustained action.
National Reconciliation Week 2026, All In, asked more of us than participating in a single event or moment of recognition. It calls for ongoing curiosity, courageous listening, respectful relationships, and a willingness to act on what we learn.
This episode offers an invitation to consider how we can ALL be IN – show up, without taking over, without speaking for others, nor placing further responsibility on First Nations peoples.
It asks for deeper listening, honouring cultural knowledge, supporting First Nations-led initiatives, and taking responsibility for turning understanding into meaningful action.
Listen and hear:
- The vision of the Burrunginge Noongar Women’s Summit is to be held on Noongar Boodja (Southwest Western Australia) from September 14 to 17.
- The power of “Holding, Sharing, Healing” for up to 1,000 Yorga (women).
- What Noongar women are asking for and needing at this time.
- Why a dedicated space for Noongar women’s voices, experiences, and aspirations matters.
- Why healing across Australia must begin with acknowledging the experiences of First Nations peoples.
- The relationship between culture, Country, identity, belonging, and healing.
- What holding means within a Noongar cultural and community context.
- How Noongar women hold culture, family, knowledge, relationships, and community across generations.
- What truth-telling, truth-listening, and truth-action mean in practice.
- How leaders can listen without becoming defensive, trying to fix or centring themselves.
- What genuine allyship looks and feels like, moving from symbolic support to practical action.
- Ways to respectfully support and what being “All In” can mean beyond Reconciliation Week.
Meet Dr Robyn Smith-Walley
Dr Robyn Smith‑Walley OAM is a respected Wilmen, Kaneang, Minang Noongar woman with more than 35 years’ experience in cultural education, arts and culture, community development, and Aboriginal leadership within Noongar country. She holds a Community Development degree from Murdoch University and an Honorary Doctorate from Edith Cowan University, recognising her lifelong commitment to strengthening Noongar culture, identity, and community wellbeing.
A Churchill Fellow, Robyn has undertaken international research in 2023, researching truth‑telling, trauma recovery, and community‑led healing, drawing on global models to inform Western Australia’s emerging truth‑telling and reconciliation frameworks.
Robyn is a co-founder and Chairperson of the Western Australian Aboriginal Leadership Institute (WAALI), contributing to the development of culturally grounded leadership pathways for Aboriginal people. She is also a Director of Aboriginal Productions & Promotions, her family’s cultural enterprise dedicated to promoting and preserving Noongar culture through many different forms.
Meet Elspeth Gonzalez-Skuja
Elspeth Gonzalez-Skuja is an experienced community-focused professional, facilitator, and founder of Frondeg, a coaching and development organisation supporting personal, team, and organisational transformation.
Across her work, Elspeth helps individuals and teams foster growth, leadership, and healthy organisational cultures through respectful relationships, deeper understanding, and meaningful connection. She brings significant experience across corporate, community, and client service environments and is known for her approachable, energetic, and highly organised style.
Elspeth’s work is grounded in the belief that healthy cultures are cultivated through strong relationships and a genuine understanding of the people, communities, and ecosystems surrounding an organisation.
Elspeth holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours focused on Community and Youth from the University of Reading. She is committed to bringing people together, creating the conditions for constructive conversations, and helping individuals and organisations translate their intentions into positive outcomes.
About Karina Seng
Karina Seng is a transformation leader with over 20 years in financial and professional services, known for building capability that holds and embedding change that actually sticks. She’s led enterprise transformations, partnered with executive teams, and built organisational capability from the ground up – in how people work, lead, and show up every day.
Recognised as a Women in Finance Innovator of the Year finalist, she’s passionate about creating spaces where people thrive, and collaboration fuels results. As the founder of Work Besties, Karina helps professionals grow through genuine connection, career insights, and leadership conversations.
Karina believes leadership is about action, impact, and empowering others to rise.
Acknowledgement of Country
Business Women Australia acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters across the continent now known as Australia.
We recognise their continuing connection to Country, culture, community, knowledge, and kinship, and the enduring leadership and strength of First Nations women.
We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to emerging leaders and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Business Women Australia is committed to listening, learning, and walking respectfully alongside First Nations peoples. We recognise that genuine reconciliation requires truth-telling, truth-listening, respectful relationships, and sustained action.
About Business Women Australia
Business Women Australia is a national ecosystem for the development, connection and expression of conscious women leaders.
We connect women from diverse industries, professions, businesses, cultures, communities, generations, identities, and lived experiences. We are founders, executives, professionals, business owners, emerging leaders, innovators, and change-makers committed to leadership and contributing positively to business, community, and society.
We believe that stronger leadership is developed through both inner growth and outward action.
Our approach encourages women to deepen self-awareness, expand their thinking, build respectful relationships, collaborate across differences, and act with courage, care, and responsibility.
Through leadership conversations, facilitated peer groups, roundtables, retreats, podcasts, events, and development programs, Business Women Australia creates spaces where women can:
- develop the inner capabilities required to lead in complexity;
- engage in meaningful and courageous conversations;
- learn from different cultures, experiences, and perspectives;
- practise conscious communication and respectful listening;
- build relationships across industries, communities, and generations;
- strengthen their leadership presence and influence;
- collaborate on ideas and opportunities; and
- translate insight into positive action and impact.
We recognise that diversity and inclusion involve more than inviting people into existing spaces. They require us to consider whose voices are being heard, whose knowledge is valued, how decisions are made, and whether people experience genuine respect, belonging, and cultural safety.
Our community welcomes women from all cultural backgrounds and honours the distinct place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia.
We are committed to creating an ecosystem in which women can bring their whole selves, learn across difference, and contribute their leadership in ways that strengthen our businesses, professions, communities, and wider society.
Business Women Australia’s purpose is to unite and develop conscious women leaders who uplift business, community, and society.
Continue the conversation
Listen to the full episode and consider:
What truth are we being invited to hear?
How can we listen without becoming defensive, taking over, or trying to fix?
What are we being asked to hold with greater care?
What practical action can we take through our leadership, businesses, and communities?
What would it mean for each of us to be genuinely “All In”?
To sponsor, support, or learn more about the Noongar Women’s Summit, contact Elspeth Gonzalez-Skuja elspeth@frondeg.com.au