Dr Jacinta Walsh - Download Biography

Dr Jacinta Walsh, skin Numbin, is a Jaru Kitja Yawuru woman with English and Irish heritage. She is a proud mother to three young men and a Lecturer and Indigenous Research Fellow with the Monash University in the Faculty of Arts, School of Philosophical, Historical, and Indigenous Studies.  She was adopted and raised in a loving and adventurous non-Indigenous, multicultural family in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  In 1998,  Jacinta approached Link-Up and began a lifetime journey of reconnection with her birth mother who is of Irish descent, and her birth father, a Jaru Kitja Yawuru man from the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Jacinta’s PhD tells the life story of her great-grandmother Mabel Ita Frederick, a Stolen Generations survivor born at Lugangarna (Palm Springs), a sacred Jaru birthing place in c1907. With many others, Mabel was stolen by police in 1911 at the age of four or five, and sent to the Beagle Bay Mission. She never saw her mother again. Jacinta's thesis echoes the voices of many First Nations families who have and continue to look deeply into living memory, Country, the archives, and the scholarship of others, to remember their ancestral lineage and love for themselves. Jacinta advocates for culturally informed, careful and compassionate research, Aboriginal family standpoints inside of the academy, Aboriginal family access to all the archives that relate to them, and intergeneration truth-telling, reconciliation, and healing through life story research and writing.

Jacinta is a member of the Victorian Stolen Generations Reparations Package Advisory Committee and the First Nations Biography Working Party (FNBWP) of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). 

“No matter how strong global resistance is, the survival of our humanity depends on US ALL to end separation, individualism, any leadership model built to divide people from each other, dominate women, children, and our environments; any system designed to separate us, exploit us, and extract resources from our natural world without repercussions. It is time to lead by example and through actions that are Country-centered, heartfelt, compassionate, and humble, emphasising the life-giving importance of our global and biodiverse ecologies, communities, the safety of women and children worldwide, multiculturalism, and the right to life of all human and other-than-human beings on Earth. This is our future. I call on US ALL to fight for it"



Dr. Jacinta Walsh, July 2026