Changemaker Of The Year: Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts
Congratulations to Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts on winning Changemaker Of The Year at the 2024 marie claire Women of the Year Awards.
The marie claire Women of the Year Awards celebrate game-changing Australian women who have fought with passion, led with bravery, and inspired with creativity. The awards recognise exceptional women doing extraordinary work and striving to build a brighter future.
Vanessa told marie claire:
“My role as a survivor – now that I’m free – is to also free young people.”
At just ten years old, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was forcibly removed – stolen – from her family, community and kinship systems. After eight years in various out-of-home care placements, Vanessa fled the system, reconnected with kin and returned to country for the very first time. Only then did she begin to heal.
In her debut memoir Long Yarn Short, Vanessa embarks on an extraordinary work of truth-telling, exposing the ongoing violence visited on Black children, their families and their communities by the systems that claim to protect them. As a survivor of out-of-home care, a practising lawyer fighting for the freedom of others and now also a mother herself, she takes an unflinching look at the heartache and trauma caused by racist family policing, the shameful rates of child removals and the steady pipeline of First Nations children into the criminal justice system.
Long Yarn Short is a story of struggle, grief and love; a call to action from one of the most powerful voices of her generation. As a leading expert in children's and young people's rights, Vanessa invites readers to imagine solutions for a better world – a world of support and empowerment, not punishment – and demands that they listen when she says, ‘We are still here.'
Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts is a proud Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul woman, who has degrees in both law and social work, and was recognised with an Australian Human Rights Medal in 2019. She is a human rights lawyer and Fulbright scholar whose current research is focused on unveiling the intersections of human rights, child removal and the implications of forcible removal, ensuring that First Nations child survivors and those impacted are heard, while providing solutions towards ending child removal. In 2024, Vanessa was appointed the inaugural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner for the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Long Yarn Short (UQP) is Vanessa's first published book.
To read more about Vanessa, head to the full marie claire article here.
