My first client here at Bonnie’s was an experience I will never forget, a young mum with three children who had escaped an abusive marriage. When I first met this particular family, mum was clearly overwhelmed. She was stressed, she was tired. She had lived in different refuges for almost two years and her seven-year-old […]

It was New Year’s Eve 2021 and I was at work when I got the call that my Dad was in the hospital. The doctors had tried everything, and it wasn’t looking good – at that moment all I wanted to do was go home and be with him. The thing was, he lived up […]

Face to Face Creative Space is back! Ruth, my co-facilitator and I are so excited that after 2 hard years of trying to run this group during COVID lockdowns and restrictions we can finally be in each others  physical presence again.  The Creative Space is a program that focuses on the healing nature of art […]

Here at Bonnie’s, I’m the person who approves brokerage requests from my colleagues for the families they are working with. This means my team of workers will pop by, or write to me requesting anything their family needs. The requests range from social connections, removalist, medical needs and day to day expenses.    However, the […]

  12 months seems like a long time to help a woman to safety from domestic violence but it’s not. Not when abuse has existed in their families for years, even decades. As a caseworker, it’s my job to do everything to help break this cycle. In some cases it can take years, in other’s, when […]

Growing up in my hometown was pretty dreamy. It’s a coastal town, where weekends were always at the beach. You know, sunbaking, swimming, maybe even snorkeling but surfing? Nah…that was for the boys.   It’s no secret surfing is traditionally dominated by men. It’s better now, but it’s taken a while.   So after a […]

  My name is Peta, I am a Gooreng Gooreng / Kabi Kabi woman and also one of the Family Workers here at Bonnie’s. These last two years have been tough on all of us with this COVID going on!  For me the journey has been very challenging. The only time I got a brief […]

  I’ve found these last few months of mothering hard. Mostly because I’ve had to be more than a Mum, and a wife, a daughter and a Bonnie’s family worker – I’ve also had to be a teacher.    In this last year, mothers everywhere have had to homeschool their children and it hasn’t been […]

  I grew up in Zimbabwe and there is no place like Bonnie’s over there.  I still remember my Mum telling me about a time she wrote to a famous Zimbabwean magazine column asking for help because of how my Dad was treating her. She waited months and months for a response, until she finally […]

The Taliban are back. As I sit in my living room, the TV blaring, my pregnant belly kicking, I can’t believe I am seeing my parent’s nightmares become a reality, again. I might never be able to go back to Afghanistan- back to my country, my hometown.  I am originally from a town called Mazar-I-Sharif. […]

  There’s a lot of things to miss right now – friends, family, travelling outside my LGA, travelling outside my state… travelling anywhere.  But what I’m really missing at the moment is food. And not just food itself (I’m definitely not starving), but rather the experience of food. The comfort, spontaneity and excitement of having food […]

  “Do people speak up when they hear or see violence? Or do they just turn a blind eye and pretend it’s not their business?”  After working in DV for so long, I still ask myself these questions. Despite all the new TV shows, podcasts and social media I’m still caught wondering about how much […]