The inaugural Dubbo Women’s Festival — International Women’s Day, Friday 8 March 2024, Western Plains Cultural Centre. Free, all day, built around the seasons of a woman’s life.

In her own words

Ange is a warm and compassionate psychologist with many years of experience and training within the field of perinatal psychology and early parenting. She is passionate about supporting parents with perinatal depression and anxiety, birth trauma, perinatal loss at any stage, transition to parenting and strengthening the infant-parent bond.

Ange’s interest in perinatal and infant mental health began early in her psychology career, working with mothers and infants, children and families in a family therapy setting. After having children of her own, she became even more passionate about supporting parents and nurturing the parent-infant relationship.

Ange tailors interventions that suit her clients’ needs, employing a flexible and trauma-informed approach. Within a relational framework, she seeks to foster a safe, non-judgmental space for clients to explore the challenges that accompany the transition into parenthood. Ange is committed to providing a safe space where clients can enhance their confidence and regain a sense of trust within themselves as they move through their perinatal journey.

The stage of life nobody warns you about

The morning panel at the first festival was pitched at younger women and took on the transition to motherhood — a phrase that covers an enormous amount of unspoken ground. Perinatal depression and anxiety. Birth that didn’t go the way it was supposed to. Loss, at any stage, including the losses that never get named out loud.

Ange’s field is that ground. And her particular framing is worth sitting with: she works on the relationship, not just the individual. Strengthening the bond between an infant and a parent isn’t a soft add-on to treating a mother’s anxiety — in perinatal psychology it is often the treatment.

The other thing she names, which regional women recognise instantly, is trust. Not confidence in parenting technique — trust in yourself. A woman who has had a traumatic birth or a loss frequently arrives having stopped believing her own read on things. Getting that back is slow work, and it needs a room where nobody is grading you.

This is also precisely why the childcare downstairs mattered. A woman cannot listen to an hour on perinatal mental health with one ear on a crying child in the corridor.

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The day around it

Free admission. Childcare on site, so women could sit through a full session. Dedicated spaces for mothers and children. Free lunch. Transport arranged for groups who otherwise couldn’t get there. A separate early event for teachers and students. Two panels — the morning one on menstruation, contraception, fertility and the transition to motherhood; the afternoon one on perimenopause and menopause.

Women had a cervical screening on the day. Women made breast screening appointments they’d been putting off. That is what happens when you put the services and the women in the same room and remove every excuse not to turn up.

The event team was Sharon Quill, Joanne Phillips and Lorna Brennan, working with some forty local partners.

How one day became a week →  |  The festival programme →  |  First Believers →