We Are Warriors: Healing Country, Breaking Cycles – A Conversation with Tina Haywood

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Episode description:

We Are Warriors: Healing Country, Breaking Cycles – A Conversation with Tina Haywood | UHP S4E9

In this powerful episode of The Unnecessary Harm Podcast, Shane Varcoe sits down with Tina Haywood, a proud Yupunguthi and Gungalita woman who has turned a lifetime of trauma into a frontline mission of healing. Tina is a trauma counsellor, former Australian Defence Force member, author of We Are Warriors: An Aboriginal Woman’s Life, founder of Blue Butterfly Skye, and one of Australia’s most authentic voices in Aboriginal youth suicide prevention.

Tina’s story is not a polished one. It is raw, honest and hard-won. Growing up across Queensland and the Northern Territory, she witnessed firsthand how alcohol entered her communities and hollowed them out, turning vibrant, loving families into strangers to themselves. She watched the ‘demon drink’ do what it all too often does: promise relief and deliver devastation. Funerals followed funerals. The intergenerational wounds compounded. And a young girl who had no guardian angel decided she would become one for everyone else.

The conversation moves through some of the most important terrain the UHP has ever covered. Tina unpacks intergenerational trauma not as an abstraction but as a lived reality, the stolen generation, children moved from home to home, re-traumatised by the very systems meant to protect them. She talks about her healing camps, programs that take at-risk Aboriginal youth out of the environments that broke them and reconnect them with country, culture and identity as a suicide prevention strategy. You cannot heal in the place that hurt you. You go away, build your armour, and come back strong.