“That Sense of Belonging … That Comes from Within”: Beyond Legal Permanence: Aboriginal Understandings of Cultural Connection, Belonging and Child Wellbeing, and Cultural Adaptation in Child Welfare Reform

Abstract

Permanency planning, an approach to the placement of children in out-of-home care, is central to child and family system practice, policy and law. Using the example of legislative reforms in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, this article explores how privileging legal permanence leads to ongoing failures to account for Aboriginal worldviews and child-rearing practices. Drawing on qualitative research, including Yarning Circles and semi-structured interviews that I conducted with Aboriginal community members in NSW, the findings contribute to limited evidence on permanence from Indigenous perspectives, revealing how familial and cultural connectedness shape belonging and social and emotional wellbeing and highlighting the importance of children’s ongoing connections with extended Aboriginal family, community and culture. Aboriginal understandings of permanence align more closely with cultural, relational and physical domains than with the construct of legal permanence that predominates in permanency planning approaches. Prioritizing legally permanent care arrangements above other domains poses long-term risks to Aboriginal children’s social and emotional wellbeing, demonstrating the need for “deep-level” cultural adaptation in child welfare law, policy and practice. The findings have implications for decolonizing child protection and repositioning Aboriginal conceptualizations of permanence as the foundation for legislation, policy and practice—reforms that must be Indigenous-led, culturally grounded from the outset, and anchored in full implementation of principles embedding self-determination and Indigenous children’s fundamental rights.

1. Introduction

Child and family systems globally confront the intersection of child wellbeing, belonging and cultural adaptation. In attempting to meet the needs of children and young people who enter care, a fundamental objective in Australian child and family systems is to pursue permanency, that is, to develop lasting stability and connection in a family environment. Achieving permanency in a family or kinship setting is generally presumed the best means of preventing children placed in care from experiencing placement “drift”, or multiple placements, thereby supporting the wellbeing of children who Children’s Courts consider need care and protection, provided safety remains the paramount consideration. The rationale is that the family is fundamental to healthy development and provides shelter, financial resources and psycho-social and emotional care, all of which are further understood as providing connection via enduring relational ties and solid grounding in life (Barth 2002; Bass et al. 2004; Harden 2004; Hochman et al. 2004, cited in Freundlich et al. 2006, p. 743).

In the child and family sphere, the notion of permanence is synonymous with legal permanence, a goal that pertains to the legal status, rights and advantages children are intended to achieve when placed permanently in a family environment via restoration to parents, adoption or guardianship, or “third party orders” (Tilbury and Osmond 2006; Osmond and Tilbury 2012). Considered in child welfare practice as the “gold standard” of permanency, child welfare systems have prioritized legal permanence over other domains, such as “relational” or “cultural” permanence (Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (USA), p. 125; Stott and Gustavsson 2010).

In New South Wales (NSW), Australia, for example, a permanency-planning-focused program of reform occurred across the 2010s (NSW Minister for Family and Community Services 2012; NSW Government 2017), entrenching the conception of permanency as primarily legal in nature. Major legislative changes occurred in 2014, establishing “permanent placement principles” in the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 (NSW) (the “Care Act”). These principles established a hierarchy of placement options for children placed in care that prioritized legally permanent care arrangements over other types, including relative/kinship care and foster care.

Further legislative changes occurred in 2018, imposing measures including strict timeframes for decision-making, limited judicial discretion and other processes intended to expedite adoption pathways from care. The 2018 amendments drew particularly strong, sustained criticism, including for their incompatibility with Aboriginal1 relational and cultural understandings of belonging, their failure to address underlying systemic issues and the lack of government consultation that occurred, especially with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities and organizations (Allam 2018a, 2018b; Brennan 2018; Carmody 2018; Davis 2019, pp. 123–24; Community Legal Centres NSW and Hamilton 2018, p. 2; Libesman et al. 2025; SNAICC 2025; Turnbull-Roberts et al. 2022). These failings remain of deep concern, given that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children in NSW are removed and placed in out-of-home care at disproportionately high rates (10.7 times that of non-Indigenous children) (AIHW 2025), a disparity that persists despite the reforms’ overarching aim to reduce the numbers of children entering care.

Reform frameworks that concern Aboriginal people but do not reflect Aboriginal worldviews, family and community structures, child-rearing practices, and cultural priorities risk reproducing the very harms they claim to address, including instability and the unnecessary and prolonged separation of Aboriginal children from extended family, community, and culture (Davis 2019; SNAICC 2025). Conversely, as other scholars contend (Bennett 2015; Cross 1995; de Finney and di Tomasso 2015; Haight et al. 2018; Paki Paki et al. 2024; Stangeland and Walsh 2013), embedding Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into how critical constructs such as permanence are understood and achieved may provide pathways to more effective, culturally grounded framings and better social and emotional wellbeing outcomes for Indigenous children.

This article draws on original doctoral research to examine how Aboriginal community members understand permanence and how these understandings align with or diverge from the constructs applied in NSW child welfare legislation and policy. The study’s guiding research question was the following: What are Aboriginal community member understandings of the core legal and social concepts of “the best interests of the child” and “permanency” in decisions about children’s care? In the next section, using the example of the NSW permanency-planning-driven reforms, I explore the consequences for Aboriginal children and families of the omission of Aboriginal voices and the hindering of self-determination in the conception, design and implementation of child and family systems.

1.1. Cultural Adaptation and Permanency Planning-Based Frameworks

In health and in social interventions, scholars have described cultural adaptation as “the systematic modification of an evidence-based treatment … or intervention protocol to consider language, culture, and context in such a way that it is compatible with the client’s cultural patterns, meanings, and values” (Bernal et al. 2009, p. 362, cited in Barrera et al. 2013, p. 197). Wesner et al. (2025) distinguish between cultural adaptation that works at superficial or “surface” levels, retaining the Western frameworks upon which treatments, interventions and models are based and more transformative approaches in which “culturally grounded or immersed measures are aligned with cultural context across all aspects of content, measurement approach, constructs, and worldview or theory” (Okamoto et al. 2014; Wesner et al. 2024, cited in Wesner et al. 2025, pp. 120, 123).

Barrera et al. (2013), citing Falicov (2009), suggest that effective cultural adaptation requires a balance between universal (“top down”) frameworks applicable to all groups and a “‘bottom-up’ approach that emphasizes culturally grounded content consisting of the unique values, beliefs, traditions, and practices of a particular subcultural group”. From this perspective, it is the knowledge and experience informing an intervention or model design that determines whether cultural adaptation can take place. Consequently, health or social programs imposed or modified by dominant or colonizing cultures and their institutions, without genuine participation or partnership with diverse groups, yield superficial adaptations based on assumptions that are misaligned with cultural worldviews (Barrera et al. 2013).

Legislative amendments enacted in NSW across the 2010s privileged “legal permanence,” embedding permanency-planning-focused approaches presumed applicable to all children. The then NSW Government implemented the reforms without any pretense of cultural adaptation to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander worldviews (NSW Minister for Family and Community Services 2012; NSW Government 2017). Aboriginal organizations, scholars and advocates criticized the reforms for their lack of an evidence base grounded in the experience and knowledge of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people and the absence, particularly in 2018, of any consultation process (Davis 2019; Community Legal Centres NSW and Hamilton 2018). The reforms demonstrate a fundamental failure to recognize Aboriginal extended family systems, child-rearing practices and strengths, cultural beliefs, values and understandings of crucial concepts in care decision-making (Beaufils 2023; Hermeston 2023; Krakouer 2023; Turnbull-Roberts et al. 2022; Wright et al. 2025).

Indigenous-led research highlights the consequences of these failures for families navigating care systems, encapsulating complex structural barriers, inequities and lack of cultural safety embedded within the kind of top-down interventions that are implemented without meaningful Aboriginal participation (Bessarab and Crawford 2010; Bessarab 2013). Independent reviews and Indigenous-led scholarship have linked such breaches to systemic and practice failures, including disproportionately high rates of removal of Aboriginal children and young people, culturally inappropriate placements, and fewer pathways for children in out-of-home care to return to family and culture (Davis 2019; Newton et al. 2024).

The disjuncture between legislative intent and practice is not incidental. Fejo-King’s (2013) doctoral research shows child protection systems routinely apply a restrictive, nuclear-family-based “Western family tree” model to placement, resulting in the systematic exclusion of potential carers within children’s extended Aboriginal family and kin networks and impeding the placement options the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child and Young Person Principles were designed to protect. Recently published research further demonstrates that child protection authorities consistently breach this legislative principle and others intended to embed the rights of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities (Libesman et al. 2025).

The well-documented implications of disconnection from family and culture are profound and concerning. Enduring connectedness in families and in school environments has been found to protect against a range of adverse mental health and social-determinant-related outcomes, including substance abuse and being a victim survivor or perpetrator of family and domestic violence (Steiner et al. 2019). There is increasing recognition of the significance of relational permanence and its association with positive outcomes for children, including in relation to physical and mental health (Ball et al. 2021; Salazar et al. 2018, p. 13).

Within Western psychological research, belonging is identified as a fundamentally important human need that substantially influences emotional experiences and cognitive functioning (Baumeister and Leary 1995). This framing offers useful context; however, it is Indigenous scholarship and community knowledge that most precisely articulate what belonging means for Indigenous children, as a culturally grounded, relational and spiritual state, understood holistically rather than in individualist psychological terms (Hunter et al. 2021; Krakouer et al. 2023a).

An absence of belonging is linked with adverse mental health outcomes and increased vulnerability across the life course, while connection and belonging is associated with protection against these same impacts (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Cacioppo et al. 2006; Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010). Children in out-of-home care are five times more likely to receive a mental-illness-related diagnosis than children in the broader population (Green et al. 2020, p. 25), and Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children are more likely to experience significantly worse mental health and wellbeing trajectories than other children in care (Lima et al. 2026).

Indigenous-led scholarship and community knowledge suggest culture plays a critical role in healthy development and is fundamental to wellbeing for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children in Australia (Gee et al. 2014; Hunter et al. 2021; Krakouer et al. 2018). The first comprehensive systematic review of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children’s wellbeing needs in out-of-home care explains cultural connection as a distinct, immutable wellbeing need that is critical to children’s safety and security (Garvey et al. 2024). Further Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander community-led advocacy and scholarship indicate that engagement in cultural activities, enduring connection to family, community, culture, and identity support a sense of belonging and relationality, which in turn build critical protections and strengths in children (Hunter et al. 2021; Krakouer 2023). A growing body of Indigenous-led scholarship and community advocacy further recognizes culturally grounded notions of belonging and connection as fundamental determinants of social and emotional wellbeing, understood through a holistic, relational framework centering connection to extended family, community, culture, Country and ancestors (Bamblett 2014, p. 134; Gee et al. 2014; Krakouer 2023; Dudgeon et al. 2025). Disconnection from these foundations compounds trauma and the cultural burden imposed on Aboriginal families, reinforcing the importance of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care remaining connected in this holistic sense (Davis 2019; Krakouer 2023).

1.2. The Prioritization—and Failures—of Permanency Planning

US scholars originally conceived permanency planning as the “systematic, goal-directed and timely approach to case planning for … children subject to child protection intervention aimed at promoting stability and continuity … [It was] not only about placement … [but] about relationships, identity and a sense of belonging” (Tilbury and Osmond 2006, p. 266–67). Notably, child and family systems globally came to equate the achievement of permanence with legal permanence—that is, reunification, adoption or guardianship transferring parental authority to carers following the termination of parental rights (Berrick 1998; Cushing and Kerman 2009, p. 110).

The NSW Government’s permanency-planning-focused child welfare reforms of the 2010s resulted in far-reaching transformation of the child and family system (NSW Minister for Family and Community Services 2012; Rose et al. 2023). The permanency-planning-driven amendments to the Care Act were strongly rooted in legal permanence, most notably through a hierarchy of placement options for children following removal (Care Act, s 10A): first, restoration to parents, but if not practicable or in the child’s best interests, guardianship with a relative, kin or other suitable person, or adoption for non-Aboriginal children. For Aboriginal children, the Care Act positions adoption as the last option, with guardianship the preferred alternative to restoration (Care Act, s 10A(3)(a)–(e)), reflecting recognition that adoption is an “alien” concept to Aboriginal people (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, p. 404) and conflicts with Aboriginal worldviews on maintaining children’s multiple meaningful ties with family, community and cultural identity (NSW Minister for Family and Community Services 2012, p. 4; SNAICC 2005, p. 8).2

The theoretical underpinnings and mechanisms permanency-planning-based approaches are based on have long been recognized as inappropriate for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and families. Writing from his perspective as a Family Court judge, Chisholm identified tensions between Aboriginal worldviews and permanency planning (Chisholm 1982; 1987, p. 216), describing it as

a rather European view; it assumes … that home is everything … But things are very different with the Aboriginal family … The children may go and stay with members of the extended family; others may come to live in the house for varying periods. Care of the children will be shared among people in the house, and others living nearby.

(Chisholm 1982, p. 81)

Numerous reviews and scholarship echo these concerns, identifying issues with the NSW permanency reforms such as a lack of proper consultation and any evidence base supporting the reforms’ appropriateness and effectiveness for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children, alongside broader systemic failures in the NSW child and family system (Davis 2019; Hermeston 2023; Libesman et al. 2025, p. 4). Breaches of Care Act principles recognizing Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander rights, including rights to self-determination and participation in child protection decision-making, and children’s rights to placement within culture and family,3 compound these issues (Davis 2019; Libesman et al. 2025). These failures cannot be addressed without understanding the historical systematic forced removals of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children known as the “Stolen Generations” and the harsh teachings those practices offer for any meaningful, effective reform.

1.3. The Lessons from Historical Child Welfare Failures and Implications for Future Reform

International scholarship lays bare the traumatic impact of the removal, both historical and contemporary, of Indigenous children from families and from culture (Blackstock 2019; Yellow Horse Brave Heart 2003). The effects are mirrored in Australia, in the historical and contemporary experience of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people of discriminatory and profoundly harmful child welfare practices that resulted in the systematic removal of multiple generations of children from their families, as detailed in Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (the “Bringing Them Home” report) (the “National Inquiry”) (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, pp. 11–14). Some 777 submissions were made to the National Inquiry. This included submissions from 535 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander community members and community organizations from across Australia, as well as government and religious body spokespersons. Multiple in-person hearings occurred in state and territory capital cities and in regional areas across Australia (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997).

It is well established that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and young people removed throughout (and since) this era, now known as the “Stolen Generations,” were forced to assimilate into non-Indigenous society and adapt to European ways of life, which led to alienation from families and culture. The National Inquiry found that this systematic removal of generations of children from their families, which has had disastrous and life-long effects (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, pp. 190, 235–39), violated human rights and constituted genocide. The policies and practices that enabled these systemic harms were justified on the basis that they were in “the best interests of the child” (a familiar doctrine in family law and child protection jurisdictions). The intergenerational effects, however, are well recognized as contributing factors in the disproportionately high rates of removal that continue to be experienced by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and families, amongst many other damaging outcomes (AIHW 2025; SNAICC 2025). The doctrine of best interests, as stated above, is the overriding principle in the application of the Care Act and continues to underpin decision-making in the Children’’s Court of NSW about care matters.

The removal and placement of Indigenous children into unsuitable non-Indigenous care arrangements often results in severance from culture and identity and Indigenous communities’ loss of “an irreplaceable piece of their social fabric—their young people, who cannot help shape their communities’ presents and futures when they are being raised in a climate of disconnection and shame” (de Finney and di Tomasso 2015, p. 63). The consequences to social and emotional wellbeing of this kind of forced cultural adaptation imposed onto Indigenous peoples, in which children must navigate environments unconnected to their cultural heritage, are lived out as heightened vulnerability to psychological distress (Lima et al. 2026), identity fragmentation or being “caught between two worlds” (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, pp. 176–78), a deep sense of loss, and compromised social and emotional wellbeing across generations (Krakouer et al. 2023a). At the local level, as one survivor of the Stolen Generations testified:

We were completely brainwashed to think only like a white person. When they went to mix in white society, they found they were not accepted [because] they were Aboriginal. When they went and mixed with Aborigines, some found they couldn’t identify with them either, because they had too much white ways in them. So that they were neither black nor white. They were simply a lost generation of children. I know. I was one of them.

(Confidential submission 617, NSW: woman removed at 8 years with her 3 sisters in the 1940s; placed in Cootamundra Girls’ Home (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, p. 131).)

The Bringing Them Home report revealed the risks to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children of removal and placement in unsuitable care arrangements via frameworks that demand children’s cultural adaptation. Thirty years on, despite the repeated urgings of advocates and experts (SNAICC 2016; SNAICC 2025), and notwithstanding certain child and family system initiatives, for example in Victoria (Department of Families, Fairness and Housing 2022), the report’s recommendations for self-determination and the protection of children’s cultural identity have gone largely unimplemented (Davis 2019; Healing Foundation 2015; Libesman 2015; Wright et al. 2025).

1.4. Addressing Prevailing Interpretations and Uses of “Permanence”

Understanding historical failures, their transgenerational impact and role in child welfare dynamics today requires examination of the conceptual frameworks that underpin them—in particular, the construct of permanence and how it has been defined, applied and contested in child and family systems. “Permanence” has various understandings depending on the perceptions of different people and groups in contact with child and family systems, and no consensus exists about its precise definition, especially from Indigenous perspectives. In the child and family discourse, however, permanence is broadly recognized as ‘an enduring family relationship that provides safety and wellbeing and offers the legal rights and social status of full family membership” (Frey et al. 2005, p. 221). This framing assumes that stability and connection to family are vitally important and that children’s developmental outcomes improve when they reside in environments that provide nurturing care and continuity (Maluccio and Fein 1983, p. 196). In child welfare literature, permanence is broadly accepted as comprising multiple dimensions that relate to children’s fundamental need for enduring family, community, and cultural ties. Landmark research by Sanchez (2004) conducted with youth aged 16–24 from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds who had experienced various forms of child welfare care (n = 25) examined how they understood permanence. The study identified three primary dimensions grounded in the youths’ lived experiences of out-of-home care: physical/ecological permanency, emotional/relational permanency and legal permanency.

Sanchez (2004) found that youths prioritized relational permanence above all other domains, with meaningful emotional connections with family and with caring figures as much more important to them than the legal status of their placement. The study highlighted a substantial disconnect between the legally focused permanency goals pursued by child welfare systems and the relational forms of permanence most meaningful to youths themselves (Sanchez 2004, p. 10). Notably, despite the varying backgrounds of the youths who participated in interviews, this highly-cited study neglected to include a cultural dimension of permanency.

Physical permanence, also known as ecological permanence, concerns children’s secure and consistent, or “safe and stable” (Frey et al. 2005, p. 3) living arrangements with specific carers. Additionally, it can extend beyond to encompass broader life contexts, including “school, neighborhood, community groups, and religious communities (and) include[s] stability in the norms, rules, expectations, customs, values, traditions, communication patterns, and culture which govern daily living” (Stott and Gustavsson 2010, p. 619).

Relational permanence concerns children’s bonds with family members and other individuals who are important in children’s lives and who “offer trust and reciprocity” (Frey et al. 2005, p. 3). These connections, which can extend beyond parents to include extended family members, carers, friends and other significant figures, constitute “long-term, loving, and accepting relationships” (Stott and Gustavsson 2010, p. 619) and reflect a form of permanence identified in research as the most prioritized among young people in care (Sanchez 2004, p. 10). Drawing on Western developmental research, Viner et al. (2012) suggest that relationships characterized by trust, reciprocity and consistency are crucial for identity formation and healthy child development generally. However, it is important to note that, as highlighted above in the Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander scholarship on connectedness, relational development for Aboriginal children forms through heterarchical extended Aboriginal family networks rather than the dyadic bonds that predominate in Western developmental frameworks.

Legal permanence relates to the legal place of a child within a family and “the rights and benefits of a secure legal and social family status” (Frey et al. 2005, p. 3). Legal permanency generally concerns legal care arrangements in place for children, which are “officially determined by the child welfare system” (Freundlich et al. 2006, p. 744), and whilst placement types vary according to jurisdiction and whether children live with, or are restored to, their parents following a period in care, generally refer to restoration, guardianship or adoption (Stott and Gustavsson 2010, p. 619). Legal permanence predominates in child welfare legislation, policy and practice, and the notion of cultural permanence is increasingly coming into focus, partly in response to this dominance. Importantly, researchers who conducted a longitudinal qualitative study of children in long-term foster and kinship care in Northern Ireland found that children and young people can experience relational and physical permanence in placements such as long-term foster or relative/kinship care, demonstrating that adoption and guardianship orders are not prerequisites for achieving a sense of physical permanence (McSherry and Fargas Malet 2018, p. 133).

Cultural permanence, a concept developed within North American Indigenous, First Nations and Indigenous-focused scholarship, concerns children’s rights to sustained connections with extended family and community members, with their racial and language groups, and those in their religious and broader cultural systems (Frey et al. 2005, p. 3; see also Bennett 2015, p. 101; Stangeland and Walsh 2013). Whilst accepted in some international jurisdictions via incorporation in child and family-related legislation, including in British Columbia, Canada (de Finney and di Tomasso 2015), it has been under-theorized and often overlooked in the literature on permanence and permanency planning (Frey et al. 2005, p. 3) and in child welfare discourse more broadly.

The cultural permanence domain supports learning about culture through engagement in cultural activities, which, drawing on Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander scholarship and knowledge, are understood as fundamentally important to children’s identity development and social and emotional wellbeing (Gee et al. 2014). Aboriginal families navigate layers of cultural and familial obligations through extended family, kin and community networks, and cultural protocols. These webs of multiple intricate links allow children to grow understandings of family, cultural and spiritual significance, reciprocal responsibility, respect, and relational foundations through everyday interactions and events (Stangeland and Walsh 2013, p. 31). Additionally, cultural factors have important protective functions that are essential to a sense of stability for Aboriginal children in care (Bamblett 2014).

Achieving cultural permanence and a subsequent “sense of purpose and belonging” (Carrière and Richardson 2009, cited in Bennett 2015, p. 105) relies on maintaining connectedness across children’s broader familial and social networks. Sustaining these ties enables Aboriginal children to actively “live and breathe through culture” (Krakouer et al. 2018). Where they are severed, as can occur when child welfare systems prioritize legal permanency over other domains, the effects on children’s identity, belonging and long-term wellbeing can be profound and enduring.

1.5. The Problem with Permanency: The Need to Embed Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Understandings

In a study on understandings of permanence, Freundlich et al. (2006, p. 743) highlight that “commonly accepted professional terminology can mean different things to the individuals most affected by child welfare policies [hence] … the absence of clear communication about permanency … can work against achieving the very goals sought to be achieved”. Colonial constructs embedded in crucial concepts applied in care decision-making—including permanency, attachment and best interests—have been shown to reflect non-Indigenous assumptions about child development, child-rearing practices and family life (Libesman et al. 2025; Wright et al. 2025). Scholarship and independent reviews that explore legal-permanence-based frameworks raise critical questions, including about their effectiveness more broadly (Rose et al. 2023), their predominance in child and family systems and about where the burden of cultural adaptation falls—that is, how child protection systems must adapt to recognize Aboriginal permanence concepts grounded in cultural continuity. The Family is Culture review report (Davis 2019) demonstrated in detail how the legal permanency-driven program of reform in NSW placed demands on Aboriginal children and families, including through conformity with practice and policy frameworks, via harmful measures such as the expedited severance of familial and cultural connections impacting negatively on Aboriginal children’s cultural identity, social connectedness and social and emotional wellbeing.

Legislative amendments based on recommendations from the Family is Culture review report (Davis 2019) attempt to address these shortcomings, including through legislating SNAICC’s five-element Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child and Young Person Placement Principle4 (Care Act 12A(2)), amongst other measures (Care Act, s 9A, s 63). Whilst largely welcomed, Aboriginal community-controlled organizations and others highlight significant implementation challenges that remain, particularly regarding adequate resourcing for legal and advocacy services. As Libesman et al. observe, “provisions that accord rights … that are not funded, known about or implemented result in little change to the status quo” (Libesman et al. 2025, p. 32). SNAICC’s review of the implementation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle in NSW documents further challenges, including that NSW holds the lowest reunification rate nationally, with just 2.3% of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care reunified with family in 2022–23 (SNAICC 2025, p. 32).

Reclaiming Indigenous conceptualizations of permanence, which are grounded in intergenerational familial and cultural continuity, challenges the predominance of legally permanent care arrangements and the mechanisms employed to pursue them, which can undermine and even sever Aboriginal children’s ties with family and community and jeopardize the cultural connectedness crucial to child wellbeing. Alongside intergenerational familial and cultural continuity, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander self-determination is foundational to reclamation, through participation in the design, implementation and oversight of child welfare law, policy and practice, encompassing the right of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples to exercise authority over decisions affecting the children, families and communities within their networks, (Davis 2019; SNAICC 2025). As Indigenous scholars and advocates note, reforms imposed without genuine Aboriginal participation not only fail to reflect Aboriginal worldviews but actively undermine self-determination, reproducing colonial dynamics in new legislative forms (Libesman et al. 2025; Wright et al. 2025). Self-determination is therefore presumed throughout this article as fundamental to reform. Empirical research examining what permanence means across diverse groups is scarce (Biehal 2014, p. 956), especially from Indigenous perspectives (SNAICC 2016). Research that centers Indigenous understandings and views is a crucial starting point for disrupting unhelpful and indeed harmful Western, nuclear-family-based constructs. Models that work must genuinely reflect the everyday lives and worldviews of those most affected.

This article draws on doctoral research I undertook at the Faculty of Law at The University of Technology, Sydney, conducting it from my positionality as an Aboriginal (Wiradjuri) woman with lived experience of separation from family through historical child welfare practices and professional experience as a former Link-Up (NSW) Aboriginal Corporation5 caseworker. The research centers Indigenous voices in the discourse on permanence, building on previous research on domains of permanence and their application in child and family systems. It reveals Aboriginal understandings of permanence as holistic, multilayered and relational, rather than centered on the legal status of a child’s placement, that are rooted in enduring relational, cultural and spiritual ties with Mob6 and are contingent on Aboriginal children developing a strong sense of cultural identity. This conceptualization challenges Western, legally focused constructs of permanence and their theoretical underpinnings—in particular attachment theory, which presumes universality but lacks an evidence base establishing its appropriateness for Indigenous children (Choate and Tortorelli 2022; Keller 2018; Waters et al. 2024)—and embodies what Richardson et al. (2025) identify as colonial frameworks in need of decolonization. Wright et al. (2025) characterize the application of such frameworks in Aboriginal child protection contexts as a form of epistemic violence that systematically delegitimizes Aboriginal knowledge systems. A further burden lies in the pressure on Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people to describe Indigenous ways of knowing using Western constructs. Not only does this pressure rely on dominant systems’ willingness to listen, it relies on the listener understanding that terms like those used in the current study, such as “identity,” “belonging,” or “connection”, substitute complex relational and cultural realities that extend beyond what Western psychology can adequately convey.

The overall aim of this article is to contribute to the discourse on permanence through an Indigenous lens, by exploring Aboriginal understandings of the construct as they compare with existing framings applied in child and family systems.

2. Methods

2.1. Study Context

This study is based on a socio-legal, qualitative doctoral research approach to reveal Aboriginal community member understandings of key concepts in care and protection decision-making, including the best interests of the child, permanency, attachment and related constructs. It is grounded in Indigenous research methodologies that take into account the historical research practices that caused harm to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people. Drawing on decolonizing and Indigenous research frameworks, the study centers Indigenous ways of knowing and recognizes the ethical responsibilities of researchers working in partnership with Aboriginal communities (Tuhiwai Smith 2012; Moreton-Robinson and Walter 2009, pp. 94–96). The research followed the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (AIATSIS 2020), embedding principles of accountability, community benefit and self-determination throughout all stages of the research.

Prior to data collection, I reviewed relevant NSW legislation, law reform materials, and national and international scholarship on the best interests principle and permanency planning to develop a thorough understanding of how these concepts are constructed within mainstream frameworks, situate the study within existing Indigenous-led child welfare scholarship, and establish the theoretical context for interpreting the empirical data. My candidature included regular discussions with Elders, cultural mentors and peers from relevant local Aboriginal community-controlled organizations about themes and the research directions of greatest value to community members and sector practitioners (AIATSIS 2020).

2.2. Setting, Recruitment and Participants

The study took place in a metropolitan region of NSW. The central aim was to build the empirical evidence base around how Aboriginal people understand key concepts in the NSW child and family system, namely the “best interests of the child,” “permanency” and associated notions such as “stability,” “bonding” and “attachment.” Generating understandings grounded in Aboriginal familial and cultural norms and child-rearing practices is, I argue, foundational to the more effective protection of the rights, safety and wellbeing of Indigenous children and young people in contact with child and family systems.

Recruitment took place from 2018 to early 2020 through outreach to local Aboriginal and mainstream community organizations. Building trust was crucial; contact with some organizations and groups was sustained over several months and in some cases, years. Information was distributed through community flyers, newsletters, social media and snowball sampling, a common qualitative research technique in which existing participants refer colleagues, community members or others within their networks, which is useful for connecting to specific groups who may not ordinarily be easily reachable (Lewis-Beck et al. 2003). Participants had to identify as Aboriginal, be aged 18 or over, and have lived or worked in the research setting, which was an NSW metropolitan setting with a larger than average population of Aboriginal community members, at some point. Eighteen people participated, all female with the exception of one. Most were parents, grandparents, aunties or siblings embedded in large extended Aboriginal family networks, many with professional experience in community, care or related sectors.

2.3. Data Collection

Data were collected across ten Yarning Circles and individual interviews. Yarning is a culturally grounded practice that in research contexts enables rapport and supports the reciprocal sharing of stories and perspectives between participants and researchers (Bessarab and Ng’andu 2010). Semi-structured questions were developed in consultation with supervisors and cultural mentors, trialed before data collection, and designed to allow participants to explore subjects freely. Methodological challenges around managing the length and direction of discussion (Bessarab and Ng’andu 2010) were addressed through loose time parameters and prepared prompts.

Yarning Circles brought together between two and five participants in a conversational group setting held in spaces participants identified as culturally safe, including community-controlled organization meeting rooms and public community spaces. Each session ran for approximately 60–90 min. The open Yarning format encouraged participants to build on one another’s stories, revealing shared knowledge and cultural norms (Bessarab and Ng’andu 2010).

Semi-structured interviews followed a similar approach, conducted with participants who preferred one-on-one interviews, or who could not join a Yarning Circle. Lasting approximately 45–75 min, interviews took place in settings chosen by participants. Across both formats, community members reflected on their child-rearing experiences, Aboriginal family and community life, what they believed supported children’s safety, wellbeing and sense of belonging and what these meant for Aboriginal children and families. Participants also spoke about child-rearing responsibilities, how these were shared in their communities, and their views on how child welfare frameworks and practices affect Aboriginal children and families.

2.4. Data Analysis

Sessions were digitally recorded, and transcribed notes were taken during and following interviews. Transcripts were reviewed systematically for emerging patterns and themes, and data were manually coded into categories forming the thematic framework underpinning the study’s findings and recommendations. The analysis focused on identifying what participants regarded as central to Aboriginal understandings of permanence and related concepts in care decision-making, including stability, belonging and connection and the best interests of the child. Data analysis followed a reflexive thematic analysis approach (Braun and Clarke 2022), undertaken in six phases, always from my positionality as an Aboriginal researcher with lived and professional experience of historical and contemporary child welfare practices and policies: (1) familiarization with the data through repeated reading of transcripts and field notes; (2) manually generating initial codes through color coding; (3) searching for themes across the coded data; (4) reviewing potential themes in relation to the dataset as a whole; (5) defining and naming themes; and (6) producing the written analysis. This approach was selected for its flexibility and its capacity to center participants’ perspectives and meanings, which aligned with the study’s Indigenous research methodology.

2.5. Ethical Considerations

The research required careful ethical management throughout. As a former Link-Up Aboriginal Corporation (NSW) caseworker, I was acutely aware that child welfare holds especially fraught associations for Aboriginal people, given the long history of forced child removal and the extensive reach of those policies and practices (Haebich 2000, p. 15; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). Ethics approval was granted by the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee (reference ETH171783). I sought ethics approval from the Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council (AH&MRC) Ethics Committee prior to commencing the study. The Secretariat advised following consultation with the Committee that the research was out of scope, as it was a socio-legal study and did not constitute health research. At the time the research was conducted, no alternative Aboriginal organization or governance structure in NSW maintained an ethics approval process applicable to this study. Participants received information sheets and consent forms detailing their rights, confidentiality protections and complaints processes and were assigned pseudonyms used consistently across all outputs. Interviews took place in public settings participants considered culturally safe. An information sheet with local support service contacts was provided post-interview, and participants could arrange a telephone debrief with a qualified Aboriginal counselor at any point. The breadth of participants’ experiences with historical forced child removals underscored the importance of these provisions.

2.6. Limitations

The research scope was shaped by the practicalities of doctoral research, and the diverse backgrounds of participants within the study’s geographical setting partially offset the geographical constraint. Most participants were women employed in community, care or health roles, and the planned final Yarning Circle with male Aboriginal community members was prevented by the COVID-19 pandemic. A further gap was the limited representation of young people with lived experience of the care system, whose perspectives would add important dimensions to the findings. Future research should center the perspectives of young Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in out-of-home care and care leavers. Transferability across all Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and Indigenous peoples more broadly is constrained by these limitations, and the NSW-specific legislative and policy context means findings should be applied cautiously to other Australian and international jurisdictions.

3. Results

The findings from my doctoral research (Hermeston 2022) detail Aboriginal community members’ conceptualizations of permanence and signal a clear departure from the legal-permanence-based frameworks driving NSW child and family system reforms across the 2010s. In Yarning Circles7 and individual interviews, community members shared experiences of everyday family and community life, child-rearing practices, and beliefs about what contributes to the safety and social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and young people. Those who took part expressed understandings relating to the notions of belonging, connection and stability that were grounded in a strong sense of cultural identity for children. Participants were under no illusions that these beliefs and measures were perfect or fail-safe; however, many viewed these meaningful connections as crucial for child wellbeing and the best foundation for children’s sense of belonging, connection, continuity and permanence.

Permanence, as understood by the Aboriginal community members who took part in this research, went beyond legal status, challenging institutional narratives that demand conformity to Western legislative and practice frameworks. This research contributes to evidence showing the harms caused from the pursuit of legal permanence at the expense of the relational and cultural ties that sustain Aboriginal children’s wellbeing.

The depictions of permanence shared in this study hint at the unspoken knowledge Aboriginal community members hold about strengths drawn from extended family and community systems and elucidate the security and sense of belonging children can gain through connection in these networks. Viewed in this way, permanence can be seen overall as an emotional and spiritual multilayered construct, formed from interdependent culturally grounded elements. Aboriginal children’s security and wellbeing hinge on a strong sense of cultural identity, grounded in knowing “where … [they’re] from and … who … [they] are and who … [their] Mob is” (Myra8). The insights shared about the devastating effects of growing up without answers to these questions give sharp weight to what is at stake when cultural and relational ties are severed.

The findings make clear how privileging legal permanency over cultural and relational domains holds serious implications for Aboriginal children. Participants’ understandings are explored in relation to the four key domains applied in the literature; taken together, they depict permanence as a complex, holistic construct that is grounded in relationships, culture and sense of place and Country.

3.1. Relational Permanence: “There’s Always a Place for You.”

The experiences and beliefs shared about family life and child rearing reveal a construct that aligns with core elements of relational permanence identified in the literature, a form of permanence considered by young people in care to be more important to the permanency derived from a child’s legal status in a placement (Sanchez 2004, p. 10; Corrales et al. 2025).

Permanence is built on relationships across extended family and community networks rather than from legally permanent care arrangements that are based on dominant Western, nuclear-family-based models of family. As one participant, Karina, said, the child’s sense of permanence benefits from “the same relationship with all of us, like he loves us all!,” an account of multiple meaningful and supportive ties that sheds light on how relational permanency functions via heterarchical rather than dyadic bonds or hierarchical, family systems.

Conceptualizing permanence in this way challenges the emphasis on the primacy of the infant–maternal bond underpinning attachment theory, which is well-established as being at odds with Indigenous child-rearing practices (Choate and Tortorelli 2022; Neckoway et al. 2007; Wright et al. 2025) yet remains central to permanency planning and other child and family practice frameworks. Participants see the distribution of cultural and caring obligations across extended family and community networks not as destabilizing, but as crucial for the nurture of children’s sense of security and belonging, a form of permanence that spans generations and feeds into other domains. Myra articulated this clearly:

I think if you’re always in your own home, with your own mob, you always feel that security … [permanence is] feeling secure …

[S]ometimes you mightn’t have what [material possessions] they’ve got next door … but you … got each other! … It’s a family, you’re together! You’re always gonna be known as “This is John’s sister”, or whatever … There’s always a place for you. So [as] … a child, you’ve known all your life … “That’s your parents, they’re your brother and sisters.”

(Myra)

Myra highlights the importance for Aboriginal children of having the opportunity to learn and live out their place within these webs of connection. These crucial ties supported the development of a sense of belonging and interrelation:

I think Aboriginal families work a lot differently to non-Aboriginal families … in many ways. It’s kinship for example; you’ve got mob everywhere and … if you know where you’re from and who you are and who your mob is, you’ve always got that connection.

(Myra)

Annie described relational structures typical in Aboriginal families, which depart fundamentally from Western, nuclear-family-based models—aunties who are like mothers, grandmothers called “Mum”, and cousins: “[who] in my world, they’re my aunties and uncles.” Gracie Lee, a grandmother and community worker, emphasized that children must understand their positioning within these networks, to engender a fundamental sense of belonging. Crucially, Gracie Lee stressed that belonging extends well beyond immediate family and that this wider circle of enduring relationships offers children vital protective functions; hence, children’s removal disrupted these foundations, with damaging, long-term impacts:

[T]o know that they’re in a stable home it gives them that sense of belonging. And that comes from within. Like ‘I belong in Nan’s house’ or ‘I belong in Auntie’s house’.

Growing up strong from within. If my Mum was alive when [my children] were little, I would have left them with her. Because to me that’s where they should [be] …

[I]t’s where you set up that safe environment and culturally it’s usually where there’s aunts and uncles, Nans and Pops … [A] strong circle of … strong Aboriginal people around them. And it doesn’t necessarily mean immediate family. Like [my] community is so strong.

(Gracie Lee)

Gracie Lee emphasized kinship as a foundational element of children’s sense of permanence and what it means for children to know their Mob. Like Myra, she highlights strengths in the organization of Aboriginal family structures and the fundamental importance for children of knowing their place within those networks.

Gracie Lee brought warmth and humor to her account of belonging and permanence in Aboriginal communities, recalling how her own children “couldn’t get away with anything” in the community. Her standing as an Aboriginal community worker meant she heard about any mischief before her children even got home. She noted the particular importance of grandparents and community Elders, whose role in raising children had become more critical over time. The story speaks to the collective vigilance described in a number of Yarning Circles and interviews embedded in extended networks and the ways in which multiple caring relationships function as both nurturing and protective:

I can only reflect on what happened with me and my family and my children. … as kids, they couldn’t get away with anything where we lived … because everybody … knew me as the worker … in the community, as an Aboriginal woman in the community. So my two [children] were stumped; they couldn’t do anything, because I did hear about it before they even got home! [laughing] … [Y]ou have to have that strong connection within the community, plus the Elders. But, your Nan … and the Pops … play a major role in raising our children. They did back in the day, but it’s more so now, especially with all … the other [bad] influences around …

(Gracie Lee)

Nancy and Lola, community sector executives and parents interviewed jointly, stressed that awareness of these networks is not enough—children must have living, active connectedness with them, formed over time, through genuine, meaningful connection:

If you spend time [together] … in my family, my kids are like siblings to their third cousins … And it’s about having the networks and kids knowing who’s who, who looks out for them, who’s there, where they can go [when in need]. And kids are smart, they will go to whoever they need to go to, but it’s around having those people and networks available for the kids.

(Lola)

Other community members related stories about the measures they took to uphold strong connections across vast distances, including through frequent extensive travel, efforts that other family members relied on to maintain relational and cultural continuity:

My three grandchildren … lived within two hours’ drive. But I make that drive, because that’s me being strong with how I want them raised up … I have an older 19-year-old grandson, and I will ring him up and say ‘We’ve got the weekend free. Would you like me to come and pick you up?’ … He’s an Aboriginal boy that’s been brought up in his Dad’s family … non-Aboriginal … Him and I … are really close …

I’ll do what I need to do for my grandkids and … that’s where the strength comes through is … having that elder presence. A lot of our kids that don’t have that strong elder within their lives, I think they’ve gone by the wayside a bit. They have … not learned respect. And … they don’t have respect for themselves, so they go down the wrong pathway.

(Gracie Lee)

These findings align with the research of Corrales et al. (2025, p. 6), who identified a relational permanency model requiring “a fundamental reconceptualization that shifts the focus from placements to relationships.” Notwithstanding mitigating factors,9 research also demonstrates that children in relative/kinship care experience better outcomes across key indicators, including wellbeing, mental health, behavior and placement stability, compared to children in foster care (Winokur et al. 2014), and that placement outside extended networks can hinder Aboriginal children’s development of cultural identity and connection (Krakouer 2023).

3.2. Physical Permanence: “[S]ome People Like to Move Around and That’s Their Sense of Security”

The understandings relating to physical permanence that emerged in the analysis depart from the existing literature in two important ways. First, participants highlighted the common practice of mobility between communities, a convention normalized in Aboriginal families that serves to maintain family and cultural ties and the meeting of associated obligations, which clashes with Eurocentric assumptions that stability requires minimizing movement and anchoring children to a single home environment (Prout 2009, p. 178). Indigenous community organizations highlight the importance of mobility and shared care for supporting children’s long-term wellbeing, identity development, and sense of belonging and stability (SNAICC 2017, p. 7). Stability from this perspective might encompass multiple home environments across a child’s extended kin networks and not only a single, fixed household, a view that is supported in findings from the current study. As Nancy noted, “some people like to move around and that’s their sense of security.” Community members interviewed perceived physical forms of permanence as culturally grounded and adaptive, extending existing Australian scholarship on Aboriginal mobility (Dockery 2016; Prout 2009). Their insights challenge ideas of permanence that tie belonging to a fixed place, or to the “sedentarism” described in the mobility literature (Prout 2009), ideas that are especially alienating for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander families involved with child and family systems for whom mobility is a valued familial and cultural practice.

Participants’ conceptualizations also displayed a clear absence of materialistic elements. In a discussion with her colleague Lola, Nancy related an interaction with a non-Indigenous out-of-home care agency manager regarding an Aboriginal child who had experienced placement instability. The manager had recommended the redecoration of the child’s room, against the child’s express wishes. As Nancy explained:

she loved her room, it was the one place in the house that she loved to be able to go to … I hear what the non-Aboriginal manager is saying … maybe it’s not decorated in a way that’s suitable or maybe it’s not the biggest room … but … that’s where she feels right now is … that’s a wonderful room. But it doesn’t mean that that’s the best room for her or the best place for her. Or that she’s definitely got an attachment to the people …

Lola was critical of the manager’s “preconceived judgment … around having to have the flash (expensive) room. It’s materialistic … not meeting the kid’s needs,” whereas to Lola and Nancy, feelings of safety and sense of ease in their living arrangements were more significant than inappropriate material considerations more aligned with Western standards of living.

Second, participants identified a dimension of physical permanence that has been largely disregarded in the existing literature: the profound significance for Aboriginal children of being “on Country.” Whether through living on or near, or visiting, the lands where they are from, that is, from which their Mob originates, connection to Country carries deep cultural meaning and is fundamentally linked to children’s development of cultural identity and wellbeing. Being on Country can involve ceremony, social interactions, staying with extended family members and other everyday activities of cultural significance, such as fishing from a riverbank with an aunt or uncle (Healing Foundation 2013). Indigenous scholarship describes the connection to Country that comes from being on Country as a transcendence, that grounds Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being. From this perspective, “Aboriginal law and spirituality are intertwined from land, people and creation, forming the foundation of culture and sovereignty” (Featherstone 2017, p. 114).

Whilst it is important to note that for some, physical permanence was immaterial, other community members described the power of this connection: “I just think it’s identity and if the kids aren’t connected to … family, community, culture, Country, how can they ever heal and have an identity? And identity is the foundation for your very being” (Nancy). Similarly, Myra explained connection to Country as crucial to healthy development in Aboriginal children, intertwined with other elements of Aboriginal identity that underpin wellbeing:

I think [children] growing up connecting to their family, their Country, yeah their history, everything! If they can connect with all of that … within yourself, it’s powerful!

(Myra)

Bruce, who experienced serious difficulties during adolescence, described the influence of an “Uncle’s” mentorship and how learning about his connection to Country was transformative:

[H]aving an understanding of my belonging and my connection and knowing that if I hurt myself, it would hurt so many other people, helped bring me to a space where my life started to change in a good way. And that mentorship and that connection and care put me on a good path.

So it was learning about our traditional ways. Learning about our connection to Country and to each other and to the natural world and understanding that we’re in a part of the web of life … that we have a belonging and a place. And that drinking and violence and self-destructive behaviour and lateral violence … it’s not an Aboriginal thing. That’s something that we’ve become [but] it’s not who we are. And learning that helped me change my life.

(Bruce)

This account underlines that permanence, including its physical dimension, may be facilitated by people well outside a child’s immediate family and geographical area, including Elders and distant relatives, whose roles may be easily overlooked through a legal-permanence-focused lens. Bruce and other community members highlight the transcendence of physical permanence beyond geography and sedentarism and the enrichment arising from cultural practices that, on the surface, might appear at odds with institutionally defined notions of stability and legal permanence. These conceptualizations contribute to the evidence base on the significance for children’s wellbeing of ensuring therapeutic child and family system practices and programs that enable Aboriginal and/or Torres children and young people to return home to Country.

Participants’ conceptualizations of ‘physical’ permanence highlight a tension within the Western permanency literature, which separates place, culture, and relationships as individual domains, a distinction that does not necessarily align with Aboriginal worldviews. For participants, being on Country was not only about location or environment; it concerned cultural identity and relational belonging. In this sense the “physical” domain is inseparable from the cultural and relational domains, despite generally being treated as distinct in Western framings.

3.3. Legal Permanence: “You Grow up with It! You Learn It!”

Legal permanency is privileged in NSW child protection legislation, resulting in the prioritization of legally permanent arrangements over relative/kinship care. Participant accounts of permanence challenge this approach and its underlying presumptions about stability. For Lola, the distinction is fundamental:

Well, it depends on what you see as permanence and what you see as stability, doesn’t it! … [I]n the Western world stability might be that [a child] stay[s] at that place[ment] for the next 18 years … But stability for lots of our kids in the communi-ties is around … being amongst your community, amongst your family and learning culture and all that kind of stuff. So it’s got a whole different perspective … the cultures don’t fit within each other, like individualistic cultures versus collective cultures!

(Lola)

Community members viewed adoption as particularly unsuitable for Aboriginal children. One account clearly articulates the transgenerational harms caused when Aboriginal children grow up disconnected from family and culture. Annie described the impact on her cousin, who was adopted in infancy into a non-Aboriginal family; she learned the truth about her adoption and Aboriginal identity incidentally, and only when her own children were older. Annie expressed sadness at how unnecessary the situation was, since her parents had attempted to prevent the adoption and take on the care of her cousin, who she described as

… different to the rest of us … she was brought up with a white family and she’s got no culture whatsoever. Where[as] if she was with my parents, she probably [be] like me! [S]he knows nothing about her culture … And now she’s sorta like strugglin’.

[H]er elder son … he was the one who wanted to find us, because he kept saying to his mum: ‘I keep getting asked if I am Aboriginal!’ … [S]o she went to her [adoptive] mum and asked … and she said ‘Yeah, you’re adopted’.

And she looks just like my aunty … I know that if she was brought up with us, she’d be talking the lingo (language) … And her kids, her grandkids are gonna miss that. Because … there’s only so much we can teach them … ‘cause you grow up with it! You learn it! And when you explain things to her, it’s hard because you’ve gotta explain things in whitefulla’s way. Because you explain in blackfulla’s [way], she don’t get it.

(Annie)

Annie’s account shows clearly how crucial it is that Aboriginal children grow up living within and connected to broader extended family networks, immersed in culture on a daily basis, and how the loss compounds across generations.

Others across Yarning Circles and interviews raised the convention of changing a child’s surname through adoption orders, which severs vital markers of familial and cultural identity. For Aboriginal people, the erasure of surnames is especially harmful; names are essential to be able to respond to the widely used greeting used: “What’s your name, sis? Who’s your Mob? Where you from?”. This is a deceptively complex means of immediately locating family, kin and community connections (Dudgeon and Ugle 2014; Bamblett et al. 2012). In my experience as a former Aboriginal caseworker at Link-Up (NSW) Aboriginal Corporation, many of my clients who were removed as children and placed in non-Indigenous care found this greeting deeply confronting. It often intensified the sense of alienation they already carried, an experience documented throughout the Bringing Them Home report (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997).

Nancy described challenging a non-Aboriginal carer seeking to adopt an Aboriginal child who had been in her long-term care since infancy and discovering through deeper conversations that the adoption was more about the carer’s needs than the needs, wishes and long-term wellbeing of the child:

So [I said] ‘You’ll love him as much as you love him now, he’s been with you since he was a baby, he’s staying with you until he’s 18. What’s going to be different … if you were to adopt him tomorrow … doesn’t he know that he’s here forever anyway?’

[The carer said] ‘Oh yes.’ And then … ‘Well, he’ll have the same name as me.’ [I said] ‘… if you love them and you’re caring for them … why does a piece of paper make a difference?’ … I get why they (carers) need permanency, but … everyone’s got a different perception or a different view [of what permanency means].

The anecdote illustrates the carer’s failure to recognize the critical importance of family names to Aboriginal identity and sense of belonging, positioning the child’s name and, by extension, their Aboriginality, as expendable in the pursuit of legal permanence. Lola, meanwhile, challenged the attachment-theory-related assumptions underpinning Western approaches to achieving permanency more directly:

“I struggle around permanency in the Western world … when kids are raised in family and community or in a cultural way, it’s about all the chippin’ in (sharing a child’s care). So living with Nan is not a big deal for a couple of years [instead of] living with mum … because the networks of relationships are pretty much equal.”

Grandmother and therapeutic worker Bronwyn described how she and other senior women in her family organized care for her great nephew when they could not provide immediate care. Her account reflects a common practice described in Yarning Circles and interviews, in which senior Aboriginal women in the family draw on extended Aboriginal family networks to intervene and respond to children’s care needs. This approach prioritizes relational and cultural permanence, prioritizing safety, whilst maintaining continuity and belonging within family and community, rather than relying on legal orders or fixed placements. Multiple community members described this protective form of care as the norm and a strength in Aboriginal families.

In Bronwyn’s case, she and her sisters identified another nephew to take on day-to-day care. It was ultimately the relationships and family-led decision-making, rather than any imposed legal arrangements, that served the child’s best interests, as she explained:

I had one of my great-nephews in care and he couldn’t be with [his] mum [or] dad and both mum and dad’s Aboriginal. And we were asked, both … myself or my sister [his grandmother] to take him into care and at that time we both couldn’t, so I suggested that my other nephew take him into care. And that was a decision that we made between us. So that went back to the courts and that was made and it went really well. So it’s not always the one family, it may go to others [extended family]—the niece and nephew or someone within the family … It stays within the family … There’s always someone.

(Bronwyn)

It is important to note the experience of Marcy, who attributed difficulties in adulthood to the instability she experienced in multiple childhood placements, highlighting the substantial harms caused from a lack of relational and cultural connection. Although she initially linked adoption to permanence and as more “legal and solid,” and a lack of legal status for children as problematic, as Marcy went on it became clear that staying within that family would have exacerbated issues with cultural identity and that it was the felt security of her foster placement, rather than its legal status, that was more meaningful. When that security was lost due to the breakdown of her carer’s relationship, the consequences were lasting:

I went to a lot of different foster homes. But I felt like … even though they were my foster parents … I call them my parents and I always wanted to go back [to them] … [I] probably … [would] not have that strong [Aboriginal] connection and community … I think not staying within that [foster] family, because it split, it caused me to … act out of pain and hurt as a young child. And then it led me into mak[ing] wrong choices as an adult … because I’d been moved around so much. So then I ended up in prison. Then I met [Aboriginal] women in the prison … I didn’t have that same connection with Indigenous women in prison [as they did with each other] …

(Marcy)

Leila, who experienced removal in her childhood during the Stolen Generations era, questioned whether lessons from those policies had been properly absorbed. Familiar with the contemporary NSW child and family practice landscape, Leila expressed concerns that the mechanisms typical in permanency-planning-related approaches risked replicating historical harms, particularly given chronic workforce constraints already preventing adequate monitoring of cultural plans and contact orders:

[Child protection workers are] too stretched to manage their caseloads now; they say there’s going to be open adoptions, who’s going to monitor all that? What ‘great workforce’ is going to be recruited to manage? They can’t do a cultural plan and ensure that kids in foster care remain in contact with their family and kin [now]. How are they going to manage open adoptions? … We already know any kid that gets adopted wants to know who their family is. So, how’s that going to work, let alone contact with, you know, such culturally different people? … We’ve got so much in-formation about what happened to all those kids in the Stolen Generations … Why would we go down that pathway? …

(Leila)

Whilst it is important to note that community members overall saw some value in placement continuity, they consistently rejected the central claim that legally permanent placements constitute stability for Aboriginal children, affirming cultural and relational notions of permanency as fundamental to healthy child development and long-term wellbeing.

3.4. Cultural Permanence: “Strong in Your Roots About Who You Are and Where You Come from”

Cultural permanence emerged through extended Aboriginal family and community connections, with proximity to these networks enabling the identity formation and cultural engagement that strengthen a children’s sense of permanency and ground their development and aid children’s immersion in culture. Participants described interdependent relationships between cultural and relational domains, each reinforcing the other.

Participants understood these connections together as engendering a sense of Aboriginal identity, each aspect strengthening Aboriginal children’s sense of who they were and in the process supporting cultural permanence. Community members saw close, enduring relationships with extended Aboriginal family members and culture as the foundation of that permanence. Myra drew a vivid contrast between Aboriginal adults who knew their culture and their Mob and those who do not, capturing the profound difference this makes in a person’s life:

I think knowing who your mob is… and I’ve seen a lot of people who say they think they’re Aboriginal and they might be Aboriginal and they’re trying to find out. But they have no idea and they’re adults

So … when they were children, they’ve lost all … the freedoms I suppose, the connections, the families. I think the ones who know who they are, know their culture, know their Mob, have got this … connection. They’ve got this sense of … identity, they’ve got their family … They’ve got everything, really. White people would say, “No, they haven’t got a house, haven’t got a job, they haven’t got money in the bank,” you know, “they’re not rich!” But then … I think the ones who haven’t got their identity and … don’t know, they’ve missed out.

(Myra)

Leila framed belongingness to be as fundamental as food or shelter, arguing that child protection indicators focused on material factors fail to capture what Aboriginal children actually require for safety and healthy development. A strong cultural identity allows children to draw confidence and resilience, understood here in the sense of Aboriginal cultural strength, grounded in connection to family, community, Country and culture, rather than as individual psychological properties, from their heritage:

[It’s] about belonging, like if they [children] know their story … It’s really about knowing who you are and knowing where you’re from, knowing your place in that family … and also being okay with that …

I think if you’re strong in your own roots and your own foundations about who you are and where you come from, whether it’s from good, bad or otherwise … [then you can say] ‘I know who I am and I know where I come from’ … I’m not going to feel like I’ve got to justify to anybody about … who my family is, or whether I’m accepted.

(Nancy)

For Marcy and Leila, who took part in a joint interview, this connection carries almost an embodied quality and justified the efforts needed to ensure children’s safety whilst maintaining connection to Mob and culture:

[K]nowing stuff, being involved in stuff … being involved with other people [who have] a strong culture, so you know about your culture, you get to learn about your roots … as long as it was a safe family.

(Marcy)

Yes, that’s like that for all kids, isn’t it? It’s in their best interest to be safe … that’s the crux of that thing … you should be with your mob, with the people who are like you, with the people who are going to … reinforce the things that are already there in your mind and your body and your genes.

(Leila)

Other community members explained culture and family as not only imperative to sustaining a sense of Aboriginal identity but inherently linked. As described by Karina in her Yarning Circle, “To me culture’s like … everything … If I didn’t know where my family was from I’d probably feel lost,” to which Karina’s colleague Annie added, “It’s your identity; it’s who you are and where you’re from … If people haven’t got that, then … [life’s] hard.”

Lola and Nancy, colleagues whose work in a child welfare practice that includes developing cultural plans for Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, viewed placement within Aboriginal extended family as the best way to sustain cultural connection, since kinship placement enabled children’s everyday involvement in family life:

When you talk about [child] placement, all of it comes back to that connection, every single time …

(Nancy)

And lots of our cultural plans, it’s all focused on increasing [family] visits and exploring … ‘cause that’s just your basic foundation. The kids need to know who they are and where they fit within their family. And I suppose one of the hard things is … you hear caseworkers say ‘But when there’s contact [between the child and their family], they’re [the family] not doing cultural stuff’. And they’re talking about [the children] not seeing like a dot painting [Aboriginal artform] … for example …

(Lola)

[W]hy is it for our kids, our contact has to be when they do their cultural [support] … Like, they should be having family time, like everybody else [in care]!

(Nancy)

Their relationships are culture! Far out! Yeah definitely.

(Lola)

Lola and Nancy criticized the ways child protection systems limit children’s chances to learn culture through everyday relationships and shared family life. They observed that systems that place children outside extended Aboriginal family and community networks confine cultural learning to formal casework tasks, stripping it of the lived, relational experiences through which culture is typically learned.

In NSW, the Care Act (s 86) allows that the Children’s Court may make contact orders in respect of a child in care, which may establish minimum contact entitlements, impose restrictions, or deny contact altogether, based on considerations such as the child’s best interests and risk. Lola and Nancy argued that these orders were often rigid, limiting contact to a fixed number of visits each year, an approach they saw as incompatible with maintaining Aboriginal children’s family and cultural connections and for responding to individual need and circumstance. In their view, this rigidity stemmed from an inappropriate emphasis on Western conceptualizations of permanency that prioritize legal status, and in doing so undermined the relational and cultural permanence essential to Aboriginal children’s wellbeing:

[W]hat they’ve [the courts and child protection practitioners] seen as the best interest of the child is around the child having parents or carers, [guardians/adoptive] parents … a home that … meets Western materialistic standards, that they [the children] possibly see their parents once a month, if you’re lucky … [Y]ou can’t learn culture by seeing your family once a month, because culture is taught through being around [family] and connection … Just knowing you’re Aboriginal is a small … tiny part; it’s about living! You live culture; you don’t just do an activity once a month or whatever it is. So … it can be struggle to fit that into what the expectation of the systems are.

(Lola)

Similarly, and in a separate interview, Leila understood cultural permanence as grounded in children developing a strong sense of belonging; she viewed caseworkers as holding a critical institutional responsibility to support Aboriginal children to grow up knowing where and how they fit within their Mob. Leila expressed frustration with what she saw as some former child welfare practitioner colleagues’ limited understanding of Aboriginal family and cultural life, particularly given the power of their decisions to either sustain or undermine continuity in children’s cultural and familial connections:

I’ve supervised FaCS [government child protection] workers who’ve [written] on the cultural plan of a child [to] watch NITV [National Indigenous Television]. Now how’s that a cultural thing? How is that going to be anything to do with anyone’s culture? And they’re quite serious, they’re just like ‘Well how else is the child going to learn about Aboriginal culture … when they’re in a non-Aboriginal placement?’

I’m like, ‘They’ve got to hang out with other Aboriginal kids, they’ve got to hang out with Aboriginal adults and teenagers. And they’ve got to have the opportunity to spend hours … sifting through what the difference is between how they live in their non-Aboriginal placement, to how other Aboriginal kids are living. And if they don’t have that opportunity … they’re going to be different when they leave that place[ment] and have to move into their cultural lives, they’re not going to have it.’

(Leila)

Participants universally emphasized that developing cultural knowledge requires meaningful and sustained interaction within familial and cultural networks; this could not be incidental or managed contact but immersive, everyday connection. For some, culture and family were indivisible. This standpoint resonates with Indigenous-led scholarship, for example Krakouer’s empirical research demonstrating that cultural connection involves “identity formation and the practice of culture, enacted as a choice over time” (Krakouer 2023, p. 822; Krakouer et al. 2023b) and affirms the need to allow Aboriginal children and young people “space and time to continue to learn and be immersed in, their culture throughout [out-of-home care] and beyond” (Krakouer 2023, p. 829). The temporal dimension Krakouer identifies reinforces the fundamental importance of supporting children to remain safely within their extended Aboriginal family and community networks as the primary means of learning “deep culture” (Krakouer 2023).

Together, these four domains pose a challenge to legislative and practice frameworks rooted in legalistic, Western constructs of family, attachment and belonging, frameworks that rely on measures such as the severance of parental rights, limits on judicial discretion, and rigid decision-making timeframes. The findings make clear that children’s multiple bonds within extended Aboriginal family and community networks are not a risk to be managed, but a crucial source of protection, nurture and identity. Privileging legal permanence over these relational and cultural foundations carries profound and lasting consequences for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children.

4. Discussion

Aboriginal community members who participated in interviews and Yarning Circles for the current study understood permanence as the relational, emotional, spiritual, social and cultural state children derive from the maintenance of bonds and caring relationships across extended Aboriginal family networks. To achieve genuine permanency, children needed to be allowed to form a strong sense of cultural identity. As one participant explained, “I think knowing who your Mob is… the ones who know who they are, know their culture, know their Mob, have got this … connection. They’ve got this sense of … identity, they’ve got their family … they’ve got everything really” (Myra). Children’s complex familial and cultural networks were identified as crucial to Aboriginal children’s healthy development, including safety, stability and holistic wellbeing. It was the connections within these systems, especially with family members with significant roles and obligations in a child’s life, that engendered permanence and connectedness and further nurtured children’s sense of belonging through the passing of cultural knowledge. As one community member stressed, “you can’t learn culture by seeing your family once a month … culture is taught by being around family” (Lola).

The findings revealed a construct of relational permanence inherent in the webs of extended family, community members and Elders, which hold particular significance for preserving cultural belonging under systemic pressures toward adaptation. Ties with grandparents, older siblings and others who hold certain obligations toward children can offer a form of stability that, in a “shared care” context and when supported and maintained through quality casework, functions as protective for children’s long-term social and emotional wellbeing. Relational permanency thus carries greater relevance for Aboriginal children than legally focused models of permanency, particularly where networks facilitate cultural knowledge-sharing and other everyday activities and special events that serve to immerse children in culture and support the development of a sense of identity and belonging.

The idea that relational permanence for Aboriginal children is grounded in kinship networks rather than legal status is not new; it reflects age-old structures of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander societies. Fejo-King (2013), for example, shows that in a Northern Territory context, Aboriginal kinship systems provide a far-reaching, culturally embedded framework of care that Western child protection models fail to recognize and incorporate. The normative nature of these child-rearing practices is well established in Indigenous-focused scholarship. Extended family and community networks, including grandparents, aunties and uncles, cousins, siblings and Elders, routinely share care of children in ways that engender belonging and support children’s safety and healthy development into culturally grounded adults (Bourke 1993; Stangeland and Walsh 2013; Wharf 1989). Practices similar to the Champagne/Aishihik practice, for example, recognized as “intermittent flowing care” (Wharf 1989, p. 54), maintain connections for affirming, relational and culturally based purposes without compromising safety, wellbeing, identity or stability (Australian Law Reform Commission 1986; Geia 2012, pp. 280–82; Malin et al. 1996; SNAICC 2005). Further research confirms the influence of cultural connectedness as an additional protective factor for Aboriginal children in care (Krakouer et al. 2023a; Bamblett 2014).

Participants attested to the impact of severing these connections, with many having experienced the removal of siblings and relatives under historical child welfare practices. Their accounts demonstrated the elevated vulnerability to psychological distress and identity fragmentation experienced by Aboriginal children cut off from family, community and culture, including ultimately becoming strangers within their own Mob as adults. Preventing such outcomes is critical to breaking cycles initiated across the Stolen Generations era. These policies of systematic forced removal of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children produced intergenerational disconnection and profound, enduring consequences for children’s, parents’ and families’ social and emotional wellbeing (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997).

Participants’ understandings of permanence also challenged Western assumptions about its physical dimensions. For Aboriginal children, physical permanence is not necessarily achieved through remaining in a single environment. Rather, regular movement between households, often occurring as part of the cultural practice of “mobility”(Prout 2009), engenders stability, belonging and connectedness. More than one house may feel like home—a place where a child belongs, feels safe, and knows where and how they fit in. What child protection systems may frame as instability, Aboriginal communities recognize as normative child-rearing (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, p. 480). Staying with your Mob—even across multiple home environments—is valued as a strength, with children developing security through distributed relationships rather than dependence on singular bonds. Legal status and material wealth were accordingly regarded as far less important to child wellbeing than cultural and relational permanence.

This understanding finds support across a broader international body of permanency scholarship, which establishes connectedness, rather than legal status, as the foundation of permanence. Testa differentiates between children’s subjective “sense of permanence (lasting permanency) [and] the legal status of the placement (binding permanency), [with the former] most closely related to the child’s wellbeing” (Testa 2004, p. 530). Early permanency planning research similarly found that children’s perception of permanence is rooted in feeling included in a placement rather than its legal form (Lahti 1982). Stott and Gustavsson (2010, p. 620) warn that fixation on legal permanence, particularly adoption, can pressure and ultimately sever the relational, community and cultural connections that constitute relational permanence for young people.

Jurisdictions such as NSW, where legislation and policy give precedence to adoption and guardianship over other care arrangements, illustrate the disproportionate weight given to legal permanence. As Davis highlights, adoption is “never … recognised in Aboriginal communities,” where traditional child-rearing practices may see children cared for by extended family, often for prolonged periods, without any severing of the parent–child relationship (Davis 2019, p. 371). Aboriginal adoption remains a possibility under NSW legislation and, even where numbers remain low, this represents a grave and ongoing concern.

A child and family system organized around models of permanency planning like those implemented in NSW across the 2010s exemplifies forced cultural adaptation, rendering the relational networks that sustain Aboriginal children’s belonging and identity development less significant than legal status. The NSW permanency reforms illustrate the “top down” approach identified in the cultural adaptation literature—presumed applicable to all children regardless of race, ethnicity, culture or language (NSW Minister for Family and Community Services 2012; NSW Government 2017) and implemented without the genuine community participation that Barrera et al. (2013) identify as essential for culturally grounded reform.

The Family is Culture review report recommended that NSW amend care and adoption laws “to ensure that adoption is not an option for Aboriginal children in [out-of-home care]” (Davis 2019, Recommendation 21). Garvey et al. (2024), drawing on a systematic review of health and wellbeing evidence, reach a similar conclusion: child welfare reform must prioritize kinship care and family reunification over legal-permanency-driven approaches. Placement outside extended family and cultural networks, severing the customs, language and practices integral to daily life and identity formation, carries well-documented risks to mental health and cultural continuity.

Aboriginal communities have long proposed alternative frameworks emphasizing self-determination, proper implementation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle, nationally consistent cultural care standards, and appropriate contact arrangements (Krakouer et al. 2023a; SNAICC 2005, pp. 10–24). These models have received insufficient support relative to legal permanency mechanisms that systematically undermine the cultural and relational connections essential to Aboriginal children’s wellbeing—a gap the current findings makes more urgent to address. Holistic planning around care arrangements must balance all domains of permanence, with legislation and practice recognizing that cultural and relational notions of permanency, not legal status, are foundational for Aboriginal children’s security, belonging and wellbeing.

5. Conclusions

In contrast to the legally grounded frameworks exemplified in the NSW child welfare reforms, the findings from the current research reveal Aboriginal children’s permanence as contingent on relationality and a strong sense of cultural identity. The Aboriginal community members who contributed their knowledge and insights to the current study consistently articulated permanence as a holistic, multilayered inner state rather than a placement type, or an imposed classification, that is grounded in social, emotional and, to an extent, spiritual qualities, realized through cultural continuity and supporting a sense of belonging that was wholly unrelated to legal status. Achieving cultural permanence relied, in particular, on children’s ability to learn about their Aboriginal heritage, their Mob, their Country and culture and their place in those spheres. Cultural permanence stemmed from an understanding of identity through immersion in culture and meaningful, ongoing connections with extended family members. These complex networks provided crucial protections to Aboriginal children and included their ties to older children and extended family and community network members who looked out for, and provided care to, children considered at risk.

These aspects of permanence functioned as an interdependent whole and were grounded in particular conceptualizations that most closely aligned with cultural and relational permanence, which were understood by participants to be more consequential for Aboriginal children’s holistic safety and long-term wellbeing than legal permanence. Relational permanence, built through heterarchical bonds across extended Aboriginal family and community networks rather than dyadic child–carer relationships, is the basis on which cultural and physical permanence rest. Cultural permanence, which involves children’s ongoing immersion in language, traditions, cultural obligations and identity formation, depends on children maintaining proximity to those networks over time. Physical permanence, for Aboriginal children, does not necessarily mean fixed habitation; instead, it is the security that stems from connection to Country and Mob, including through the cultural practice of mobility. Legally permanent care arrangements, particularly adoption, were understood to sever these ties, leading to instability and harm for Aboriginal children, reproducing, in practice, the same disconnection and alienation that defined Stolen Generations policies. The alienation and loss caused over that era, articulated clearly in the Bringing Them Home report as lost time and connections that caused a “hole in the heart that can never heal” (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, p. 154), must be prevented from recurring.

Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander community members, leaders, scholars and organizations, who have clearly and repeatedly articulated solutions in Australia, are forced to contend with imposed systems until such time as genuine self-determination and jurisdiction in child protection is achieved. In the meantime, system transformation requires going beyond the surface level, top-down cultural adaptations of child welfare interventions (Okamoto et al. 2014; Wesner et al. 2025); reforms must be Indigenous-led and culturally grounded if child welfare reforms are to avoid the documented harms they claim to address (Libesman et al. 2025; Davis 2019).

The findings from this research affirm the long-held arguments of Indigenous scholars, community leaders and organizations that permanence is cultural and relational (see for example, SNAICC 2016). Hence, at the practice level, there must be a reconceptualization of the notion of permanence to incorporate Indigenous understandings. Legislators, policymakers and practitioners must recognize cultural permanence as foundational in Aboriginal child wellbeing and at a minimum accord it equal weight to legal permanence in any child and family frameworks or interventions. The decolonization of child protection systems requires that distributed relational care within kinship networks be understood as a legitimate, culturally grounded path to stability and not a problem requiring legal resolution.

Further, normative child-rearing practices such as shared care or children regularly moving amongst family members with whom they hold significant relationships must not only be recognized as parenting and family strengths but embedded and properly supported in child and family system interventions. As one participant contended, “…why not look outside the box, and … look at different models if a carer … didn’t have the capacity to have somebody in their care full-time, but wanted those children to be connected (to Mob) … [i]nstead of sending a child away from their family to have multiple placements [with people unknown to a child].” (Glynnis)

Culturally grounded reform in the NSW context requires, as long argued by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander community leaders, organizations and scholars, full recognition and genuine implementation of key principles embedding self-determination, participation in significant decision-making and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Placement Principle. Recent provisions arising from recommendations in the Family is Culture review report (Davis 2019), including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young Persons Placement Principle (Care Act, s 12A), are encouraging. However, implementing frameworks capable of operating at the deeper levels required to provide culturally grounded effective, holistic protections for Indigenous children must begin with centering Indigenous understandings. Indigenous communities must lead the redesign of Indigenous child and family system reforms, including critical implementation mechanisms such as assessment tools and decision-making frameworks. Whether acting independently or through genuine partnership with government, these systems must prioritize Indigenous knowledge and holistic understandings of family, belonging, permanence and of children’s long-term safety and wellbeing.

Permanence is a sense of belonging that, as Myra depicted, comes from within, from knowing where you are from and who your “Mob” is. It is the task of the child and family system to protect Aboriginal children’s permanence, not subjugate it.