Muriel Wymarra, who was born and raised in Gimuy (Cairns), joins a remarkably diverse all-female board at AASW, becoming the fourth woman on the board with a First Nations background and the first of Torres Strait Islander culture.

Linda Ford, the National President of AASW, said the appointment of Wymarra is a major step in representing the diversity of First Nations cultures in Australia within the organisation.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are often identified jointly without acknowledging their unique cultural differences,” Ford said. “The AASW Board has recognised that we must value and promote both First Nations. 

“Muriel Wymarra’s appointment represents a significant milestone for the AASW board. Her wealth of experience and dedication to advocating for the Torres Strait Islander community aligns seamlessly with our inclusivity and cultural integrity mission.”

Wymarra has had an impressive career, amplifying the voices of Australia’s First Nations peoples in every role she has held.

Wymarra has worked in federal government administration, as well as not-for-profit organisations, and has served as the National Indigenous Social Work Group (NISWG) chairperson in Services Australia. She also provides counselling support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and is now pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy at Central Queensland University. Her research focuses on professional helping in Torres Strait culture.

Wymarra is looking forward to starting her new role as a Board Director at AASW.

“This is an exciting opportunity for a Torres Strait Islander social work practitioner to represent and amplify the rich diversity of Australia’s culture,” she said.

The Australian Association of Social Workers is the professional body for social workers around the country, supporting social workers and setting standards for education and practice within the industry.

Diversity of board directors in Australia is improving overtime. According to research from Watermark Search International and the Governance Institute of Australia, the percentage of women board directors on the ASX 300 list rose from 20 per cent in 2016 to 35 per cent in 2022.

However, most board directors in Australia still come from Anglo/European backgrounds, with just four per cent of board directors on the ASX 300 list Indigenous Australians.

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It’s an extraordinary feat that came up on my LinkedIn feed this week, with her photo shared among the various milestones and other achievements posted by users to mark the end of 2023.

Dr Herbert doesn’t appear to be on LinkedIn herself, but rather her story has been celebrated after the University of Queensland shared the news last week that the long-term social worker had earned her PhD in social work from the UQ’s School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work.

It’s not just a story of lifelong learning that’s worth celebrating here, with Dr Herbert first enrolling in university in 1962, but also one of a long legacy of care work and the determination to find answers to the problems we witness and experience in different ways across our lifetimes.

Having completed a Master of Social Work in 1982, Dr Herbert has personally seen the changing face of homelessness over the years, with her thesis focussing on the intergenerational impacts of homelessness.

Her career has been far from linear and didn’t accelerate her social work career until she was in her fifties after raising children and caring for others, enabling her to bring real empathy into her various positions across youth and alternative care and supporting families in crisis.

But Dr Herbert’s firsthand experiences have been particularly transformative. She was a single mother after her first husband died when she was just 23, while she was pregnant with their first child.

She says she witnessed over the years how young people who had been homeless as a child with their parents were then falling into homelessness as adults. She wanted to examine what could be done differently to prevent the problem.

“There was little written about how early homelessness affected their relationships, education, and employment, so I decided to follow that up and try and close some of those gaps with information,” she says.

Featured by the UoQ late last week, Dr Herbert says she retired from social work at the age of 81, only because she wanted to get stuck into her thesis and didn’t have the time to work on it.

Dr Herbert tells the UoQ also about some of the things she’s witnessed and experienced over her life, including giving birth as a widow and being put in the room with a mother who had just experienced a stillbirth.

“It made me realise that some young mothers are suffering grief, broken marriages, domestic violence and some had suffered abuse, and they needed more support.

Dr Herbert later remarried and had another three children. She first enrolled in university in 1961 but discontinued her studies to raise her children. When her eldest was finishing school, Dr Herbert started considering her career options, with an old university friend urging her to re-commence her studies.

On graduating in 1982, she started a long career supporting families in crisis.

“In my 50s, when many people were thinking about lessening their workload and perhaps retirement, I was all enthusiastic and just wanted to get going,” she says.

“And I kept going until I was 91.”

But the past few years have been tough, with Dr Herbert experiencing poor health, the tragic death of a son as well as the death of her second husband, whom she cared for in his later years until his death at the age of 95.

Now a grandmother, Dr Herbert isn’t done. She says she’d like to write about the interesting cases she’s had as a social worker and to record some of the amazing outcomes families have achieved despite both the financial and emotional trauma they have experienced.

While Dr Herbert does not appear to personally be on LinkedIn, her family members have been praising her work, including a niece who described her as “an inspiration to us all”.

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If there was ever any doubt about the importance of social workers in Australia, COVID-19 has set the record straight. In many instances, as communities were pushed to the brink in 2020, Australia’s 20,000 social workers were left to pick up the pieces.

At the same time, demand for social workers has grown exponentially, and it’s a trend that is unlikely to subside any time soon. By 2024 Save Social Work Australia estimates that the need for social workers will increase by 29 per cent. 

Dr Belinda Cash, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Charles Sturt University says dealing with difficult situations is the bread and butter of social workers.

“As social workers, we are often dealing with terrible things happening…so in a way we really hit our stride when things like this happen.”

The pandemic has given society a better understanding of the important role that social workers play, Belinda says. “There has been a whole lot of people who have not typically needed these services who have, for the first time, found themselves in need of extra support. Jobs are going, it has shaken up the security of families and how they pay for the necessities, like food and rent.”

Belinda, who specialises in ageing and mental health, says in many respects the pandemic could not have come at a worse time. Australians were “already strung out” and stressed by the devastating summer bushfires when the pandemic hit in March, she says.

2020 has been especially stressful for the aged, Belinda says. Especially around the messaging of the pandemic – that COVID-19 “only kills older people” and that somehow their lives were less valuable than younger people.

“Ageism was already happening…however it happened so much more during the pandemic. It was horrific to watch.

“Imagine if you constantly heard people talking about the value of your life like that –  that your life was not as valuable as the economy?”

There were many unforeseen benefits of the pandemic that Belinda hopes will continue to have an impact on society in the future. For example, the additional resources and attention given to peoples’ well-being and mental health.

“I think we had a lot more open and honest conversations about isolation and mental health, which has been a really positive thing,” Belinda says. “People talk about looking forward to ‘getting back to normal’, but I really can keep some of these changes can continue.”

From a personal perspective, Belinda, found the pandemic challenging. Maintaining full-time work at the university, she also had to supervise her 13-year-old twins with home learning.

“At one point, I had my twins at home, two rescue pups, and I was facilitating a week-long counselling skills intensive program online,” she says. “The program is usually held on-site, and if you had told me I would be doing that 12 months ago, I would have said that there is no way that would be possible!”

There have been many challenges for people and social workers, especially around physical distancing and not being able to interact with people in the same, face-to-face way. For example, children who might have been monitored at school can’t be cared for in the same way, a woman who is experiencing family violence can’t be supported at work or in the community are not as visible.

Challenges around physical distancing, however, forced social workers to “get creative” with how they interact with people. In addition to things like Telehealth, family sessions, for example, might have been held outdoors at a park, volunteer phone programs for older people increased and iPads were widely used by aged-care residents to contact their families.”

Amanda Lee, a social worker with 20 years’ experience in a homelessness support organisation, found the pandemic difficult to manage from a practicality perspective.

For disadvantaged people, many of whom are homeless or on the brink of homelessness, contact via Zoom or online is not possible.  “Some of these people do not even have access to a mobile phone, so contacting them was very difficult.”

Amanda says while, social workers were granted permission to enter the hotels that some homeless clients were living in, there were many limitations – such as rigid time limits and huge restrictions in personal interaction.

“I often felt a bit powerless not being able to get out there. I was home schooling two children and attempting to work. There are only so many conversations you can have – such as with a registered sex offender – with two kids doing home school in the room with you,” she says.

Amanda, who has recently started a new job working for ASCO in prisoner reform, says her experience of people living in poverty, or on the brink of poverty, was complex. In many ways they could be separated into two distinct groups:  those who had experienced financial hardship as a direct result of the pandemic and those already experiencing poverty.

“I had calls from people like airline pilots, who always had access to good wages, could not afford to pay off their debts because of the pandemic and they hadn’t told their partners because they were ashamed,” she said.

“They needed guidance about what to do next. They’d never been in this situation before.”

Many of Amanda’s homeless clients in Melbourne fared “very well” over lockdown, with the Victorian Government’s $150 million plan to but around 2,000 people “sleeping rough” into hotels during the pandemic. The security and safety problems of living rough were removed, food was provided and conditions were much better for them. There additional issues for drug addicted clients – such as a national shortage of illicit drugs, when overseas flights were cancelled. 

Amanda says there will only continue to be more need for social workers, particularly following COVID-19 and the economic and social impact of the pandemic. It’s a job of passion, rather than money, but something she wouldn’t change.

“You meet all kinds of people every day and I really do love it,” she says. “It is a job where you can make a real difference – even with things that might seem minor to you, but are huge for people in need. It’s a great job in many ways.”

 A picture of future social work

The need for social workers has never been greater. However, earlier this year Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan’s initial proposal to double the cost of studying social work at university, and reduce Government contributions by 91 per cent, put the industry’s future in doubt.

Industry lobbying eventually made a difference, with the Government re-classifying social work as Allied Health. The decision improves affordability of social work degree, and government contributions.

As peoples’ awareness of social work and its crucial function grows, more countries are publicly recognising the role that social workers are continuing to play during the pandemic. In Scotland its Government has just announced that every NHS and social care worker will receive a 500 pound “thank you” for their service during the pandemic.

If you’re rethinking your career and considering further study, you can check out Charles Sturt University’s post graduate options here.

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