How do you make people look at something – say, domestic violence – that they might usually try to avoid? For Tauranga Women’s Refuge, the answer is Grim Tales, a coffee table book, made in collaboration with The Incubator. Each of the 13 stories in the book is a true tale of surviving domestic violence, rewritten […]

Kylie Watson, The Home Handywoman runs DIY workshop days for our women at Bonnie’s. She’s showing them how to do the fixing for themselves. We usually start our workshop days the morning, going for a wander around Bonnie house to find the electricity meter, the mains power, the water and the gas. We go through how […]

You might remember a post on the blog from a couple of weeks ago about Irish women on the walls. Here’s another group of women using art to reclaim space, this time in Egypt and the Middle East.   “There’s no doubt that the whole project leads to the same thing. The main target is […]

Chris Downey, singer in Burning Season (a Sydney metalcore band), tells us about how they came to write a song against domestic violence and donate the proceeds to Bonnie’s. I originally wrote the song maybe a year ago. I wrote it because it’s something that’s affected my girlfriend quite badly, so that kind of spurred […]

Street harassment is a real problem for women, making them feel unsafe in public places. For these young Mexican women, the answer is…confetti and microphones! In Mexico City, street harassment is rampant and the usual response is to ignore it. Las Hijas de Violencia – a five woman punk group/ performance art collective – have […]

Recently Bonnie’s worker Alison, and Ruth from Rosebank CSA ran a fantastic group called ‘Tree of Life’. It was a scrapbooking group that ran over eight weeks, working with seven women who had experienced domestic violence and/or homelessness.  The Tree of Life process encourages the women to use scrapbooking to speak about their lives differently. […]

A new community-care initiative from Bonnie’s: a weekly women’s health group for Hindi and Urdu speakers. Meet Nancely… Our Hindi and Urdu speaking women’s health group takes place one day a week on a Friday. The group is mainly for women of Indian descent but any women who speak Hindi or Urdu language, they are […]

I’d never been to a Sorry Day event before, and I didn’t know much about it. But it’s an important day for Bonnie’s, so this year, on Thursday 26 May, the staff took a day away from our desks. We bundled into a few cars and drove down to Liverpool Regional Museum to remember the Stolen […]

We’ve been so excited by the energy and vision of young Australians recently. Orange Sky Laundry (you might know them as the Young Australians of The Year 2016) and Homie Street Store are two projects making a real difference to people who are living on the street. Clean clothes and a non-judgemental ear: these simple things […]

A recent call from Jodie of Bunnings at Villawood was another reminder of the generosity of the community we work in.  Jodie had raised funds and was making up toiletry bags for women who arrive at Bonnie’s and may be without the basics most of us take for granted. This personal donation from Jodie was […]

We wanted to give a shout out this month to some of people and organisations that make a difference to what we can do here at Bonnie’s. The Footpath Library is one of them. They help our work here so much by providing free books for the women and children we work with. The Footpath […]

If you had never seen an airplane before, you would probably think it was impossible to fly. If you’ve never heard of women who were historically significant, would you believe you could become one? Women on the Walls and Women of the Rising are two projects from the Royal Irish Academy. Both are about acknowledging […]