The Fitzroy Valley is home to roughly 3,500 people spread across 32 communities, about 400 kilometres from the nearest regional centre of Broome. Around 80 per cent of residents identify as Aboriginal and belong to five predominant language groups: Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Walmajarri, Wangkatjungka and Nyikina. The region has earned international recognition for its community-led response to foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, spearheaded by senior women whose authority flows from kinship and Country. Yet families there have consistently reported limited access to health and disability services, and children with developmental delays or social-emotional difficulties face elevated risks of mental illness and other comorbidities later in life without early support.

That gap prompted the Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre, an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation based in Fitzroy Crossing, to form the Marurra-U partnership with Royal Far West, a New South Wales-based specialist developmental health service. The partnership operates a two-way governance model in which Aboriginal knowledge and clinical expertise meet on equal ground, delivering a wraparound model of care that includes telehealth therapy, capacity building for local teachers, and the family camp that formed the focus of the new study. The camp itself is held at the Broome Camp School, the closest facility to the Fitzroy Valley offering accommodation, meals and activities in a single location, and was run twice, in April 2024 and April 2025.

Each camp brought together occupational therapists, speech pathologists and a social worker alongside Aboriginal family support workers from the Fitzroy Valley. Children aged between one and eighteen years attended with their parents and siblings, participating in music sessions, sports, arts and crafts, low-ropes courses, swimming and raft building. Behind the playful surface lay deliberate therapeutic aims: building vocabulary, speech fluency, oral motor skills, listening and memory, social and expressive language, and emotion regulation through play-based activity. The camp also deliberately incorporated risky play, activities that require children to assess their own capabilities, test limits and manage risk, which developmental research links to confidence and personal growth.

Crucially, parents were not bystanders. While children played, parents attended workshops grounded in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing model, working on personal artwork while learning about child brain development, grief and loss, intergenerational trauma and practical strategies for supporting children with complex needs. Workshop topics were chosen by the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Marurra-U team based on priorities identified through the centre’s research, advocacy and community work. Local language and knowledge were woven throughout: parents and children taught the group songs in Gooniyandi and Walmajarri, traditional instruments featured in music sessions, and parents showed the team how to make damper. One Aboriginal family support worker observed that the clinicians’ approach made families feel good because there was no judgement and no guilt.

To capture what worked, the research team used an Aboriginal Participatory Action Research approach with a strengths-based lens, treating lived experience as expert knowledge rather than deficit. Researchers lived at the camp for five days, participating in every activity and recording daily debriefs, an approach they describe as ethnographic observation paired with relational engagement, in which knowledge emerges through collaboration rather than detached observation. Their observations were validated by Aboriginal co-researchers during debriefs and on subsequent visits to Fitzroy Crossing. On the last day of each camp, an Aboriginal researcher and MWRC staff member invited parents to yarning sessions, conducted in English with Kimberley Kriol translation where needed. All seven parents at the 2024 camp and at least one parent from six of nine families in 2025 took part, with findings fed back to the community in person for validation.

The results paint a striking picture of change. Parents described their children as more confident, more independent and calmer, with one reporting that her son slept better and his behaviour was much improved, and another saying camp helped her find ways to make him calmer. Shy children made friends, sometimes for the first time, and siblings shared experiences that brought families closer together. One mother recounted that her son made her toast the morning after camp, a small domestic gesture she read as a genuine shift in their relationship. In one family of a child with epilepsy, parents perceived a reduction in night-time seizures during the activity-filled week, though the researchers caution this was not verified by a health professional and the cause remains unclear.

Parents themselves emerged as powerful agents of the camp’s success. They arrived seeking help with behaviour, speech, emotion regulation and social skills, and left with concrete strategies framed within kinship values and collective care rather than deficit models. Many said the knowledge about brain development helped them understand their children and parent more effectively, and some wanted to carry that knowledge back to schools so teachers could better support their children. Respite proved to be a strategic outcome in its own right: held away from the Fitzroy Valley, the camp freed parents from kinship obligations and daily pressures, allowing them to sit, yarn and connect in ways they said were impossible at home. One parent described arriving and feeling her body simply go loose and relaxed. Fathers, whose engagement in parenting programs is uncommon in the region, actively joined workshops and sports, an outcome both staff and parents celebrated, though the team noted the absence of male staff in 2025 and plans to involve more fathers and young men in future.

The study’s fourth theme may be its most consequential finding: two-way teams work. Parents repeatedly emphasised that the combination of an Aboriginal staff member who speaks the local language and understands the community with a non-Indigenous clinician who is professional at what she does made a big difference, because the message came from an Aboriginal woman too. Aboriginal team members connected clinical knowledge about brain development, trauma and communication to families’ histories and experiences, and explained how colonisation and intergenerational trauma continue to shape parenting and family structures in the valley. Trust built through prior contact with Marurra-U services proved decisive; one mother said she does not leave her children with anybody, but the camp team’s kindness made her feel her kids were safe. The 2025 camp even employed Aboriginal parents who had attended the previous year, which the team credited with deepening trust and boosting engagement.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. Yarning sessions included only parents and carers, so children’s voices are absent, participant numbers were small, and no quantitative measures or formal assessments of language or motor skills were used, consistent with the Indigenous research methodology. Longitudinal data and culturally appropriate evaluation tools co-designed with families are needed to capture specific therapeutic outcomes and effects on education. Still, the study concludes that family-centred therapeutic camps, delivered through two-way teams with trauma-informed practice and local Aboriginal women’s leadership, show genuine promise for improving emotion regulation, social skills, confidence and behaviour in children while empowering parents. Set within a broader wraparound model that includes telehealth and service-provider training, the Marurra-U camp suggests a replicable blueprint: when clinical expertise is woven together with cultural authority, community leadership and relationship, healing follows, and the researchers ask what health systems might look like if every program were built this way.

Subject of Research: Family-centred therapeutic camps for Aboriginal children with complex neurodevelopmental needs and early life trauma in remote Australia

Article Title: Family-centred, therapeutic camps for Aboriginal children with complex neurodevelopmental needs and early life trauma in remote Australia: a qualitative study of the Marurra-U family camp

Article References: Pickard, A., Stubbs, T., Davies, J., Napier-Raman, S., Carter, E., Thomas, S., Berringal, V., Johnson, Z., Pindan, J., Hickey, C., Evans, R., Casburn, K., Esgin, T., Elliott, E. J., & Martiniuk, A. (2026). Family-centred, therapeutic camps for Aboriginal children with complex neurodevelopmental needs and early life trauma in remote Australia: a qualitative study of the Marurra-U family camp. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 74, Article 101974. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101974

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101974

Keywords: Aboriginal health, family camp, neurodevelopmental disorders, early life trauma, Fitzroy Valley, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, two-way partnership, trauma-informed care, social and emotional wellbeing, Indigenous research, parenting support, remote Australia