The Wattle CollectiveBuilding the cultures and systems behind truly continuous care.
Supporting Culture. Centring Survivors.
We work alongside maternity services to strengthen continuity of care, and to build the workforce cultures, leadership, and systems that allow human-centred, consent-based practice to thrive.
Named for what grows back after fire.
Wattle regenerates from root systems that survive fire, growing back not as though the damage never happened, but because of it.
Warm and hopeful. Distinctly Australian. And, as a collective, a way of working in partnership with systems, survivors, and the workforce. Our own work is grounded in the same premise: lasting change comes from what is rebuilt in practice and culture, not from what is patched on the surface.
Supporting Culture. Centring Survivors.
A multidisciplinary team, structured differently on purpose.
The Wattle Collective works with maternity systems, hospitals, health services, and the workforce within them, to reduce the conditions that produce preventable birth trauma, and to build response pathways led by survivors when harm has occurred.
We are structured horizontally, rather than hierarchically. Effecting systemic and cultural change that actually lasts has to happen relationally, not be imposed from outside, and that principle shapes both how we work together and how we engage with every service we work alongside.
Three practitioners, one collective.
Each of us brings a different professional path into this work. A little about what we each focus on.
[Space for Bec to write two or three sentences about her background, focus, and the work she brings to the Collective.]
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Anna is passionate about creating and supporting processes that respond to relational harm, guided by a commitment to redistributing and repositioning the impacts of harm, and the misuse of power within relationships. Central to this is her advocacy for alternative responses that move away from punitive, adversarial and investigative processes wherever possible, to centre and foster processes that focus on understanding and meeting the needs of the people impacted, and enable truth-telling, accountability-taking and repair.
Anna is a restorative justice practitioner, cultural change expert and previous solicitor, with nearly 30 years' experience examining how organisations and institutions respond to harm, and the compounding impacts of institutional betrayal on those they were meant to protect. This experience spans complex organisational, family and community context across government, legal, education, disability and not-for-profit sectors, including senior solicitor and policy advisor roles to three governmental inquiries into institutional abuse, and executive roles responding to those harmed within organisations.
Out of this work comes my passion for supporting leaders and institutional members to understand and explore how they can transition towards institutional courage to prioritise the people they care for in a way that is genuinely human-centred.
A continuum, not an incident.
We work from the understanding that violence and harm in maternity care sit on a continuum, from dismissive language, coercive framing, and small disregards for autonomy, through to severe obstetric violence. Lower-level harms normalise the conditions in which more serious harm becomes possible.
We also look inward, at the workforce delivering care. Internal power dynamics, unresolved conflict, chronic under-resourcing, and inadequate supervision all increase the likelihood of birth trauma occurring. Addressing the conditions clinicians and staff work within is part of prevention, not separate from it.
Restorative, survivor-centred response
Our response to disclosed harm is grounded in restorative, survivor-centred practice. This means seeking the voice, agency, and validation of the person or people harmed, and, alongside it, genuine acknowledgment and accountability from those who have contributed to that harm.
Supporting the courage to respond well, once harm has happened.
Institutional betrayal
Happens when an institution meant to protect someone instead compounds the harm, through denial, minimisation, or protecting its own reputation over the person affected. In maternity care, this looks like a disclosure being treated as something to manage, rather than a person to respond to. Our work acknowledges that failures in the maternity care system's response to birth trauma and obstetric violence have led to re-traumatisation and a compounding of harm.
Institutional courage
A service's willingness to face what happened honestly, prioritise the person harmed over its own reputation, and act even when that is costly. Institutional courage requires genuine acknowledgement of harm through a safe and supported relational structure of accountability and repair.
"We are here to support the maternity system to be courageous in how it responds when harm has happened."
Understanding our work.
We reduce the conditions that produce birth trauma, and reshape how systems respond once someone has disclosed it. Each focus area below is paired with the pathways we offer to put it into practice.
Prevention
Identifying and reducing the practices, environments, and power dynamics within maternity care that contribute to preventable birth trauma before it occurs.
Pathways: Systems review. Continuum-of-harm mapping.
Survivor-led response
Designing disclosure and response pathways so that when someone reports being harmed, the response is human-centred and led by what the survivor needs.
Pathways: Survivor-led response design. Restorative practice facilitation and dialogue.
Cultural and systems reform
Addressing the continuum of harm, from lower-level practices to acute trauma, and the internal power dynamics and under-resourcing that allow it to escalate.
Pathways: Workforce dynamics review. Cultural reform advisory.
Education and frameworks
Workforce training on trauma, power, and consent, alongside human-centred practice frameworks that services can embed structurally.
Pathways: Workforce education. Practice framework development.
Restorative justice
Processes of accountability, acknowledgment, and repair centred on the needs of those harmed.
Pathways: Community of practice. Restorative practice facilitation and dialogue.
Leadership reform
Fostering the leadership courage to move away from institutional protection centred on reputation and liability, toward accountability that reduces harm.
Pathways: Leadership and executive mentoring.
Growth that starts with a single stem.
Understanding the trauma someone carries in, before it becomes harm.
Histories that arrive with someone
Many women and birthing people enter maternity care carrying histories of trauma or past violence. Birth's inherent vulnerability, pain, and loss of control can re-activate these experiences regardless of clinical outcome, which is why recognising that history, not just responding to it after the fact, is part of prevention.
An intersectional history
People's lives, experiences, and identities shape how they encounter maternity care, and many carry direct prior experience of systems centred on the misuse of power, particularly for First Nations community members: the criminal justice system, immigration and child protection systems, or previous medical or government institutions. Where those systems have caused harm before, trust in any institution cannot be assumed, and that has to be actively accounted for in how care and consent are approached, not treated as a barrier the person is expected to overcome alone.
Consent as an ongoing practice
Informed consent requires clinicians to move beyond formal consent-taking to genuine, ongoing, freely given permission at every point of contact, actively checked, revisited, and able to be withdrawn. Continuity of care matters here directly: a known midwife or care team can recognise distress earlier, hold context across appointments, and avoid the re-traumatisation of repeating a person's story to those that they don't hold a relationship with.
The link with sexual and gender-based violence
Birth is a bodily, intimate, and exposed experience. For survivors of sexual violence, it can trigger prior trauma through touch, positioning, loss of control, or clinical language that echoes earlier violation. Our training draws directly on frameworks used in gender-based-violence-informed practice: understanding trauma responses, avoiding the re-enactment of power and control dynamics, using explicit ongoing consent rather than assumed consent, and creating environments where disclosure is safe rather than demanded.
Naming harm is necessary.
A restorative approach to harm
Treating harm, in relation to individual or collective responsibility, needs to be addressed with honesty and openness, to enable accountability and acknowledgement in the context of support and care. We are committed to ensuring that our approach does not foster shame, defensiveness, or self-protection, but instead opens a pathway for mutual understanding and change.
When accountability has somewhere to go
Naming what went wrong clearly, while holding open a genuine, relational path back that enables honest acknowledgment, and cultural and systemic change.
"Accountability has to be relational and voluntary to be real. Cultural, systemic, and practitioner-level change can only be sustained with curiosity, care and compassion, based on a model of support, integrity and respect."
Accountable to the people we're meant to protect.
Our work is guided by a multidisciplinary advisory group that includes people with lived experience of birth trauma alongside clinicians, researchers, and workforce representatives. The group informs how we continue to test, evolve, and refine what we offer, so our frameworks and training stay accountable to the people they are meant to protect, not fixed at a single point in time.
"Reform shaped by lived experience on an ongoing basis."
Reform, like regrowth, starts small and spreads.
Warm and hopeful without being fragile. Distinctly Australian. And, as a collective, a way of working in partnership with systems, survivors, and the workforce.
Let's talk about reform in your service.
Whether you're reviewing current practice, responding to a disclosure, or building a workforce education program, we'd like to hear from you.