Beyond Awareness: Understanding Aboriginal Australia
Most people know parts of Aboriginal history. Far fewer truly understand the human impact behind it. Beyond Awareness: Understanding Aboriginal Australia is a reflective learning experience designed to move beyond facts and into deeper understanding. Through storytelling, historical insight, guided reflection, and emotionally grounded learning, Donna Hensen helps you explore identity, culture, colonisation, the Stolen Generation, survival, and contemporary Aboriginal realities in a way that feels personal, human, and deeply thought-provoking. This course is not built around compliance or memorising information. It is designed to encourage reflection, challenge assumptions, and build genuine cultural understanding through emotional connection and lived experience.
International award-winning Australian Aboriginal artist, educator, and teacher.
On behalf of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child sexual abuse, Donna spent several years interviewing Aboriginal abuse victims in indigenous communities. As a trauma counsellor and community liaison, Donna supported many clients through this difficult process.
Donna has been teaching the latest counselling techniques to clients such as Gestalt Therapy Australia’s upcoming year three students, University Queensland Psychology students, and many more, bringing a modern approach to counselling that reduces stress and anxiety within clients.
Donna is a Wailwan/Wiradjuri woman from outback NSW. Donna is from the stolen generation, and she wanted to create training resources to educate mainstream Australians (without blame, guilt, or anger) about Aboriginal people and to bring Indigenous wisdom to the counselling field.