What Kimberley Indigenous women entrepreneurs can teach us about leadership, agency and community
For many entrepreneurs, business is described through the familiar language of growth, opportunity, innovation and financial sustainability.
But for the Kimberley Indigenous women at the centre of Maree Cutler Naroba’s doctoral research, enterprise can represent something much more profound.
It can be a pathway to healing.
Maree, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, has been exploring how entrepreneurship supports healing and social and emotional wellbeing among Kimberley Indigenous women. Her research draws on yarns with 27 Indigenous women entrepreneurs and identifies eleven healing pathways woven through their experiences of creating and building businesses.
At a Maganda Makers gathering in Derby in May, Maree shared a poem inspired by that research, She is the Spinifex Spiral.
The poem captures an idea that sits at the heart of her work: for many of the women involved, enterprise and healing are not separate practices.
Business can become a place where culture, identity, creativity, connection, purpose and economic agency come together.
Enterprise as more than economic participation
Through She is the Spinifex Spiral, Maree invites us to see entrepreneurship through a different lens.
The businesses described through the poem are not simply commercial enterprises. They are also places where women reconnect with culture and Country, honour family and ancestors, develop new skills, rebuild confidence and create opportunities for those around them.
The poem moves deliberately beyond conventional measures of business success — profit margins, growth and competitive advantage — to consider the deeper forms of value that can emerge through meaningful work.
It speaks to creative practice, cultural preservation, social connection, financial recovery, identity, purpose and community impact.
Importantly, these experiences are interconnected.
Individual healing can strengthen families. Enterprise can create opportunities for daughters, sisters and communities. Cultural knowledge can be carried forward through contemporary forms of business. Economic participation can become an expression of agency and sovereignty.
In this framing, entrepreneurship is not solely about an individual business owner succeeding.
Its impact can ripple outward.
Eleven pathways to healing
Maree’s doctoral research identifies eleven healing pathways emerging through the experiences of the women who participated.
The poem brings these together powerfully, touching on memorial and identity, social connection, creative practice, skills development, cultural preservation, spirituality, future vision, financial recovery, community healing and breaking intergenerational cycles.
Rather than presenting healing as a linear process, Maree uses the image of the spinifex spiral — rooted in Country, resilient through changing conditions and growing in cycles rather than straight lines.
It is a powerful metaphor for a form of development that does not necessarily conform to the structures mainstream systems expect.
Instead, it recognises that healing, enterprise, culture, family, identity and community may all be operating at the same time.
As Maree’s poem suggests, meaningful work can itself become part of the healing process.
Rethinking what we value
There is an important challenge within this research for the systems that seek to support entrepreneurship and economic participation.
What happens if we measure an enterprise only through its financial performance?
What might remain invisible?
For the women reflected in Maree’s work, the value created through business may also include renewed cultural connection, greater confidence and professional identity, stronger social relationships, opportunities for family and community, and the ability to imagine and build a different future.
These are not peripheral outcomes, they can be fundamental to understanding what the enterprise makes possible.
Maree’s research therefore invites a broader consideration of how entrepreneurial ecosystems recognise and support value — particularly when economic activity is deeply connected to culture, community and wellbeing.
Her poem describes an ecosystem that learns “how to support rather than extract” and “how to honour rather than exploit”.
That distinction matters.
Leadership grounded in agency and contribution
There is also a powerful leadership story within these experiences.
Leadership here does not necessarily come through title, position or formal authority. It can be expressed through the decision to create, contribute, preserve knowledge, build economic independence, support others and interrupt cycles that might otherwise continue into the next generation.
It is leadership grounded in agency.
And it reminds us that leadership can emerge through everyday acts of creation and responsibility — particularly when those acts strengthen the people and communities around us.
For the 27 women who entrusted their stories to Maree’s research, entrepreneurship offers a lens through which to understand something far larger than business alone.
It can be about reclaiming the right to create.
The right to contribute and the right to build a future on one’s own terms.
And, in doing so, the possibility that one woman’s enterprise can become part of her family’s, and her community’s, healing.
About the research
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Maree Cutler Naroba is a PhD candidate at Griffith University. Her doctoral research explores how entrepreneurship supports healing and social and emotional wellbeing among Kimberley Indigenous women. Drawing on yarns with 27 Kimberley Indigenous women entrepreneurs, her research maps eleven healing pathways woven through business practice.
Her poem, She is the Spinifex Spiral, was shared at the Maganda Makers gathering in Derby in May 2026 and captures a central insight from the research: that for many of these women, enterprise and healing were never separate practices.
Maree’s thesis is currently under examination.
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