BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
This week, Brisbane is hosting its first mental health and arts festival — The Big Reach. Through conversations, technology, and workshops, attendees will learn how the arts can play an integral role in psychosocial health.
Marianne Wobcke is a Girrimay woman from North Queensland. A midwife and award-winning artist, Marianne will share her knowledge through workshops and conversational events about trauma and intervention. In this interview, Marianne introduces us to her process of connecting people, culture, and art through midwifery ahead of The Big Reach.
Marianne, thank you so much for taking part in the conversation. You are working in two fields that may initially appear different — midwifery and the arts. Yet, they are both deeply in touch with the human experience. How would you describe the way these fields are so closely intertwined?
As an Indigenous midwife, I struggle to see arts and midwifery as separate. Both are steeped in innate creativity and inextricably connected. To create another human being I would attest is the greatest act of creativity.
My role as an Indigenous midwife is to ensure the environment I create to support mums and bubs promotes connection with their essence, beyond the challenges of inherited patterns of trauma currently manifesting in their lives.
We are born ‘Creators’. So creative expression is imperative to our health and wellbeing.
Tell us a little bit about your day-to-day life in midwifery.
One of the joys working within the Indigenous community, I was supported to create opportunities for our mums, bubs, and families to flourish, even in the most challenging of situations. This involved weekly community days, where mums and bubs were transported to our medical hub, where we wrapped services and support around them in a culturally safe environment.
We provided a variety of basic arts resources for mums, partners, family members to create memories. We invited industry experts to share their skills — for example, weaving, painting, dancing, yarning, and singing. We did belly casting, and hand and feet casts of newborns. We partnered with organisations to provide programs such as Sing and Grow.
As an Indigenous midwife, you work with families through a process called Perinatal Dreaming. What do you find most fulfilling about this process of connecting with people, their bodies, and their creativity?
It requires shifting the lens in how we view our place, identity, and role or contribution to the world.
Perinatal Dreaming emerged from my personal journey of self-discovery, unpacking a Stolen Generation legacy. I credit my great-great-grandmother, whose influence radically shifted my perception from a western approach to a profound Indigenous understanding of ways of being and knowing. Becoming aware of the primal, corrupted unconscious patterns/imprints from our Perinatal experiences is critical to understanding how we unconsciously sabotage our health and wellbeing.
I adore supporting mums, in particular, to find the freedom to become the best possible version of themselves. When they are no longer constrained by past trauma, which locks them into ‘survival mode’, they are able create a future for themselves and their families of unlimited potential.
As part of The Big Reach, you will be giving some workshops centred on trauma recovery. How do you believe art can assist in the healing of a person who has experienced trauma?
The pre-/peri- and post-natal realms of the psyche are pre-verbal and currently ignored or underestimated in relation to their life-long impact.
The Perinatal is the domain of imagination, which links us to our ancestors, the archetypal realms, and our creative source – which I relate to as an infinite source of creative potential and love. Art in its diversity not only connects us to this source, it also provides the opportunity to reveal where we are trapped in our past.
Creative practices provide expression for trauma that is embedded in our DNA, and potentially release us from these toxic recurring patterns. This process becomes profoundly therapeutic when supported in culturally safe, holistic environment, where a diversity of trauma-informed professionals are available to listen deeply, witness without judgement, and partner in reframing trauma creatively.
How would you like to see the Australian health system better adopt creative or artistic outlets for patients? How can creativity be used as part of a holistic approach to health care?
Simply, there is no ‘holistic’ approach without creativity. We are creators by nature. However, this process is corrupted when our inner ecology is dominated by very addictive ‘survival’ hormones, our flight-and-fight system, which we consider as normal states of being.
When we are influenced by hormones feminine in orientation, we are programmed to seek connection, bonding, to open our hearts. We feel an organic impulse to express our innate state of wellbeing creatively: we dance, sing, yarn, tell stories, weave, make art, eat nutritiously, cook, and share food and nourishment with love; share, educate, connect respectfully with ourselves, with others, and our environment — not to compete to be an expert or the best, but to nurture, evolve and flourish.
For 80,000-plus years, our First Nations People flourished through integrating these practices into daily life. This should be informing the emerging wellbeing paradigm.
In a video, you described the view of western art as a profession rather than birthright, and shared the way you feel a responsibility to “awaken the artist, the creator, in every individual”. What advice would you give to those who may be struggling with mental ill health, and may feel intimidated by the idea of expressing themselves?
Our disconnection from our authentic creative spirit, and subsequent inevitable symptoms of ‘dis-ease’, can be elegantly transformed through a holistic approach to wellbeing.
Client-focused approaches are enhanced by partnerships — social prescribing model embedded in United Kingdom health system — with a diversity of cross-disciplinary creators, including artists and health professionals.
Igniting and promoting our innate connection to our unique creative abilities throughout our life journey should be enhance through every developmental milestone, and enhanced throughout early childhood and our education system. Dancing, singing, painting, weaving, cooking, gardening, and on and on is mandatory to health and wellbeing. Creative, playful practices reliably elevate mood and promote relaxation.
This can be enhanced when a creative partnership is established, and the client in collaboration with the appropriate artist/creator are able bring their unique contribution though to the world.
Sharing of this expertise installs a sense of value, self-respect, and inspires unlimited potential innate in the creative process.
Is there anything else you would like to share ahead of your talks and workshop with The Big Reach?
Many Indigenous mothers, babies, and families, deal with a raft of challenges from poverty to violence, addiction, homelessness, discrimination, and much more. My work hinges on being able to guide my clients out of survival mode, where their brains are constantly downloading worse-case scenarios because that provides us with the optimum potential to survive the perceived threat. I shift the focus from surviving to playful creative practices that create an immediate shift, where they are able to engage their baby in the moment, accessing the joy to be found in that loving connection.
Dance and singing programs have been evidenced not only in our First Nations communities as integral to wellbeing, but also across the world. Singing in pregnancy has been researched as an indicator of wellbeing and connection for mum and bubs with many positive outcomes antenatally, through the birth process and post-natally.
Traditionally, our midwives and mothers sang to their babies at the time of birth. The midwife sang songs that connected to our ancestry, awakening the infants’ inherited wisdom — we are eternal beings — and the mother sang songs from familial songlines. These language songs evolved into lullabies as the infant meets early developmental milestones.
Singing becomes an integrated part of a wellness model that is the foundation of wellbeing for individuals and the community life. No-one is excluded.
Learn more about Marianne’s events and The Big Reach on The Big Anxiety website. Events take place from 26-27 May at QUT Gardens Theatre, Brisbane.
The Big Reach images supplied.
Brisbane captured by Richard via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
