In July 2025, fifty First Nations and non-First Nations women and girls gathered on Bunuba Country for four days of deep listening, transformation and co-creation.

This wasn't a standard event with predetermined outcomes. Our Measurement, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework guided our approach to witness and sense what emerged in real time—through yarning, creative documentation, daily sensing and the signals women and girls named as change was happening. Big hART's Punkaliyarra process captured this through video, photography and visual scribing, documenting transformation as it unfolded.

This report tells the story of those four days on Country—why we gathered, the journey together, the voices of women and girls, what emerged, and the path forward.

It grows from the Institute's commitment to (re)connecting with and embodying the ancestral knowledge systems and cultural practices that First Nations communities have held since time immemorial. The report captures the organic nature of the yarns, stories and transformational thinking that emerged, using yarning as an authentic research practice.

We offer this as a journal of our collective transformation, a love letter to Country-based learning, and evidence of what becomes possible when we trust Indigenous methodologies to guide systems change.