As a Griefologist Rosemary is a specialist.  She is a qualified educator & assessor, program designer and facilitator, loss & grief counsellor, public speaker and a published author.  The foundation to these abilities derives from her lived experiences of grieving through her personal loss and grief from 1987-1992.  During her personal grieving journey she set up the Sacred Site Within Healing Centre in 1993.

Rosemary is a proud South Australian Aboriginal woman with ancestry and ancestral links to Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains and Wirringu from the West Coast. After the Death of their beloved mother, Rosemary and six of her eight siblings became part of the Stolen Generation. It’s a traumatic story, but by reconnecting with her Spiritual Ancestors, Rosemary managed to survive the many years of loss, grief and fear.

Years later, as an intuitive researcher and respected academic trying to make sense of her experience, Rosemary had a life-changing epiphany. She realised her own contemporary loss and unresolved grief was compounding and complicating the broader, systemic cultural losses and unresolved grief that all Aboriginal people have experienced since invasion/colonisation. She saw how all Aboriginal Australians – an entire community – was being funnelled into disadvantage.

Rosemary utilised this intuitive research to develop a new and innovative academic cultural methodology. She reframed the deficit western construct of ‘Aboriginal disadvantage’ and re-classify it under the umbrella of Griefology. The unique and innovative model she personally developed – The Seven Phases to Integrating Loss and Grief^© – is the path to Aboriginal prosperity.

Rosemary’s work centers on the belief that addressing loss and inter-generational suppressed unresolved grief is essential for healing contemporary Aboriginal individuals, families, and communities. It’s also a crucial step in overcoming barriers to participation in society and accessing mainstream services.