The Fire
and the Road
On Country with Jeremy Donovan, and the path our young people are already showing us.
Some roads are laid down in bitumen and policy. Others begin as a track in red earth, beside a fire, when somebody finally listens.
In the East Kimberley, Jeremy Donovan is walking that second road with young people: back toward Country, Culture, story and the knowledge that they are not the problem a town has named them to be.
Before the questions, a kickflip
Before the interview settles into its serious work, there is a skateboard in the story. Jeremy talks about growing up in Sydney, about skating and graffiti, about loving anything that moved fast. The young fellas have told him he is too old. He answers in the only language a skater respects: he can still kickflip the gutter. Their disbelief becomes laughter. The distance between generations narrows by the width of a skateboard deck.
It matters, this small opening. Too often we introduce men like Jeremy by beginning with the worst thing that ever happened to them. We turn a life into a case file and call that understanding. But Jeremy arrives first as himself: funny, profane, quick, alive; a man who can move between the old knowledge and the hard concrete, between ceremony and a skate park, without asking either world for permission.
“The opportunity to see a lens into a world that they come from.”
These young people are not being taken somewhere foreign so an institution can remake them. They are being brought closer to something that already belongs to them. The road is not an escape from who they are. It is a return.
The heart of the work
Jeremy introduces himself as a proud Kuku Yalanji man, born at Mossman Gorge. He names Kalkajaka, Black Mountain, and his traditional Country at Kuna, Shipton Flats. He speaks of his wife’s Country in the East Kimberley and of the kinship that connects him to the young people around the fire. This is not a professional interest parachuted in for a funding cycle. It is relationship. It is obligation. It is love with its sleeves rolled up.
His reason for doing this work is not theoretical. It comes from the place where his own life was once written about by other people. Jeremy had an Aboriginal father and a white mother. He became a ward of the state and, in his words, “was bounced around 26 families before I was five years old.” At thirteen, he entered the juvenile prison system. Eleven juvenile sentences and two adult prison sentences followed.
The system accumulated labels around him the way burrs gather on a trouser leg. The labels did not describe the whole child; they trained the world to stop looking for him.
“I was spoken at, I was spoken about with such a deficit discourse … that I was a nobody. I was never gonna be anything.”
This is one of the cruellest tricks of a punitive system. It takes a young person carrying trauma, names the behaviour but not the wound, then punishes the child for becoming fluent in the language survival taught them. After enough repetition, the label moves inside. It becomes identity. The institution no longer needs to say “you are dangerous” because the young person has learned to say it to themselves.
Jeremy remembers that machinery because he lived inside it. His heart for young people comes from recognising the same old words still being minted and thrown at a new generation: nuisance, problem, menace, terror. Twenty-eight years later, the vocabulary has barely changed. What has changed is the man standing in front of it, refusing the verdict.
Three hundred metres
At eighteen, Jeremy was given the chance to return to Country with his grandparents. There are lives that turn on a courtroom sentence, a locked door, a phone call. Jeremy’s life turned beside his grandparents, in the beginning of an understanding of Law, Culture and Country, and of “the power that Country has when it heals you, when you sit on Country.”
Culture did not erase what had happened. Healing is not an eraser. It gave him a larger story in which the harm was not the final chapter. It gave him somewhere to stand while he looked back at the boy the institutions had described. It gave him a way to see that boy as more than damage.
Then comes an image so precise it feels like a parable made from floodlights. In 2000, Jeremy played didgeridoo at the Sydney Olympics. On the night Cathy Freeman won, he stood high in the stadium, tears in his eyes, watching her light up the world. He turned around. There, in his telling, roughly three hundred metres away as the crow flies, were the floodlights of Silverwater Gaol, where he had once been held.
“I thought that was the distance that my life had come in a short amount of time, and that’s what Culture gave me.”
Three hundred metres. A prison and a stadium. A locked cell and an open sky. The same city holding two possible stories about one Aboriginal man. If we want an analogy for youth justice in this country, perhaps it is there: we keep spending fortunes on the floodlights around the prison while failing to build the path between the two places.
The year after the Olympics, Jeremy travelled to Geneva to speak about the rights of Indigenous people and the abuse experienced inside institutions. An invitation to perform for the Australian Embassy in Germany followed. For the next decade he travelled the world, educating people about Aboriginal Culture and life. Each time he returned home, he returned to Country.
“Culture and Country was what was giving me the keys to the world. These ancient, ancient traditions were giving me permission to thrive in this modern existence.”
Jeremy Donovan
That is not nostalgia. It is an operating system. Country is not a picturesque backdrop to a service delivered by somebody else. It is teacher, archive, relationship, discipline, refuge and future. Jeremy’s life does not suggest that young people must choose between ancient knowledge and contemporary possibility. It shows that deep roots are what allow a person to reach outward without being carried away.
“Nobody sees the beauty of these kids … I don’t see them as a problem. I see them as a privilege.”
Around the fire in the East Kimberley, Jeremy looks at the boys and sees what the town’s anxious language has concealed. He does not deny the harm that can happen. He refuses to confuse behaviour with being. He refuses the lazy arithmetic that adds up police contact, school absence, poverty and a stolen car and declares the answer to be a worthless child.
This is the hinge of Jeremy’s philosophy. Seeing beauty is not sentimentality. It is a practical act of justice. A young person behaves differently when the adults around them are waiting for their intelligence instead of their failure. A community invests differently when it sees a future citizen rather than a future inmate. A funder asks different questions. A journalist writes a different headline. A child receives a different mirror.
Jeremy wants to help young people see their own beauty before the town’s story hardens around them. That is why he works through relationship rather than threat, invitation rather than humiliation. “It seems like we keep putting punitive measures to inspire kids,” he says, “and punitive doesn’t inspire anything.”
Punishment can produce compliance for an hour. Fear can clear a street for a night. Neither can tell a young person who they are, where they belong or what they might contribute. You cannot shame somebody into a future. You cannot incarcerate a person into belonging.
“Find your reflection in this fire.”
Jeremy calls the fire biri. He believes the fire heals. When young people gather beside it, when they listen and feel, the fire becomes more than heat. It becomes a mirror.
The image is powerful because fire does not pretend to be harmless. It can be volatile. It can burn a town down. It can also warm a family, cook a meal, carry ceremony, hold a circle together through the night. The same force can destroy or nurture. Jeremy asks the young people to recognise that force in themselves. Not so they will fear it, but so they can choose what to do with it.
“Fire can be incredibly volatile and burn the town down, or it could actually nurture the whole town.”
Jeremy Donovan
This is accountability without disposability. It does not say that harm is imaginary. It says the person who can cause harm also carries the capacity to contribute. The fire is not extinguished; it is tended. That is the work. Not breaking the spirit, but helping a young person learn its heat, its direction and its responsibility.
Country becomes the classroom for that learning. The alphabet can be drawn in sand. Counting can happen while gathering firewood. Literacy and numeracy do not have to arrive as foreign rules in a room that has already taught a young person to feel stupid. Learning can begin in movement, usefulness, relationship and place.
Jeremy uses the word Dawang, the Miriwoong word for Country, in this conversation. Whatever has been interrupted, the young people still understand the narrative of Country. The knowledge may be distant, but the thread has not snapped. On-Country work does not manufacture identity. It helps young people put their hands back on the thread.
“Not one prison sentence I served made me a better person. Every one made me fucking more damaged.”
Australia has travelled the punitive road for a long time. It is broad, expensive and brightly signed. At every failure we add another lane: more police, more remand beds, higher fences, harsher bail laws, sharper headlines. We call the construction “toughness” and rarely ask why the road keeps circling back to the same place.
There is no polite synonym that improves Jeremy’s truth. Prison did not heal the trauma beneath the behaviour. It added trauma, then returned him to the same world with more damage and fewer possibilities. “When you release a traumatised kid into a traumatised town,” he says, “they continue to traumatise the location.”
A cage is very good at being a cage. We keep condemning it for failing to become a clinic, a school, a family, an Elder, a campfire and Country. Then we pay to build another cage.
Vehicles, food, staff. Jeremy’s estimate for a camp like this one, around $778 per young person for the night.
Per young person, per day. Around $1.53 million a year for a single locked bed. Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2025, Table 17A.20.
The road Jeremy points toward is not soft. Healing demands more patience than punishment and more courage than exclusion. It asks adults to remain in relationship when a young person tests every boundary. It asks community organisations to be resourced for the long work between crises, not merely contracted to clean up after them. It asks governments and philanthropy to trust local knowledge before demanding that it translate itself into the grammar of distant institutions.
Most of all, it asks us to stop confusing control with safety. A town is not safer because a hurting young person has been removed for one night. Safety grows when that young person has an anchor point: a memory of belonging, an adult who sees them, a responsibility that matters, a reason to return tomorrow.
Jeremy is honest that one camp may not change a life. That is not the test. “Does it give them an anchor point to say, ‘I remember what that did for me’?” he asks. A single night on Country can become one solid thing in a life where too much has moved. The anchor may hold when the next current comes.
Back to Country. Back to community. Back to the relationships capable of turning resources into belonging.
The moral argument is enough, but Jeremy makes the economic one too. A camp requires vehicles, food and staff. He estimates a night like this might cost around seven thousand dollars. Detaining even one young person can quickly cost more, before counting the police response, court time, property damage and the longer human cost of deeper institutionalisation.
Our spending tells a story about what we believe. We find enormous sums after harm has occurred and call it unavoidable. Community asks for a fraction of that money beforehand and is told to prove itself again. It is like refusing to buy a water tank during the dry, then commissioning a fleet of trucks after the fire.
“A local investment of just $5,000 can actually change these kids’ lives … for half a million dollars I could change this town forever.”
Jeremy Donovan
The numbers Jeremy gives are not a finished business case; they are a challenge to our imagination. What would happen if justice investment followed relationship? What if money moved to the people who know the names, families, roads, languages and seasons of a place? What if local Aboriginal organisations could build continuity instead of surviving project to project?
Jeremy speaks about his partnership with Kununurra Waringarri Aboriginal Corporation and the importance of leadership willing to invest in diversion rather than repeat what has always been done. That is where hope becomes practical: not in a single charismatic person, but in community-controlled organisations, local workers, families and cultural authority holding the work after visitors leave.
Justice reinvestment should mean more than moving a line inside a departmental spreadsheet. It should mean following the money home.
40 communities across the country are redirecting justice money toward what their own people know works. See the network.
Every initiative by state, stage and evidence. Kununurra sits inside a movement, not an experiment.
Track where justice dollars actually go, and what they buy.
Public record, private workspace, community-governed publishing. The lifecycle from claim to ownership.
Why story is part of the infrastructure
“Dreams are like an infectious disease and they become very contagious when you can take a story from a camp like this and put it into the hearts and minds of Australians.”
Jeremy Donovan
He laughs at the shape of the analogy, but he is right about contagion. Deficit stories spread. A frightened headline travels faster than patient truth. One incident becomes a verdict on a generation. Repetition makes punishment feel inevitable.
But possibility can travel too.
A story can carry local knowledge beyond the fire without stripping it of place. It can help a funder understand what a spreadsheet cannot see. It can let a policymaker hear the difference between a program delivered to community and work led by community. It can give another practitioner, hundreds of kilometres away, the courage to try a different road. It can give a young person a mirror not made from police reports.
This is why story cannot be the decorative layer added after “the real work” is done. Story is part of the real work. It shapes what the public believes, what governments authorise, what funders value and what communities are allowed to remember about themselves. Data can tell us that a pattern exists. Story helps us understand the human meaning of the pattern. Together they can move power.
But story must travel with consent. It must not become another extraction industry, taking pain from community and converting it into attention elsewhere. The young people are not content. Jeremy’s life is not raw material. The storyteller must retain authority over what is shared, how it is interpreted and where it goes. Cultural knowledge must remain held by the people to whom it belongs.
Done properly, storytelling is not speaking for community. It is helping build the conditions in which community voices can be heard on their own terms, and can change where resources flow.
JusticeHub and the next phase
This conversation clarifies the next phase of JusticeHub. JusticeHub cannot be merely a directory of worthy programs or a polished cabinet of success stories. It must become connective tissue: a community-driven place where lived knowledge, local solutions, evidence, relationships and funding can find one another.
The work is to make visible what the dominant system keeps refusing to see. Across the country there are people already doing the slow, relational work: Elders, Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, youth workers, mentors, families, artists, cultural leaders and young people themselves. They are not waiting for innovation to arrive. They are innovating under pressure, often with unstable funding and very little time to tell the story of what they know.
At A Curious Tractor, we sometimes use the image of a power take-off: the shaft that transfers a tractor’s energy into the implement needed for the work. The tractor is not the crop. It does not own the field. Its value is in transferring power where people have decided it is useful.
That is how we understand our role. Not to arrive with a blueprint and ask community to squeeze inside it. Not to become the hero of somebody else’s Country. Our role is to listen long enough to understand where power is already moving, then help connect it to the tools, partners, evidence, story infrastructure and resources that community says it needs. It also means knowing when to get out of the way.
“The platform is not the fire. Community is the fire. Our job is to help tend the connections around it.”
A Curious Tractor × JusticeHub
Communities, verified alternatives, services and detention centres on one national map. See what already exists near you.
For young people, families and workers who need a service today, not a policy tomorrow.
Community-owned stories, carried with consent.
Move resources toward the fire instead of away from it.
The road ahead
The road we need to travel for our young people is not mysterious. Jeremy has named its landmarks: Country. Culture. Kinship. Inspiration. Local investment. Story. Adults who see beauty before behaviour. Institutions humble enough to follow community leadership.
The difficulty is not that we do not know another way. The difficulty is that the old road has contracts, concrete, uniforms, habits and fear behind it. Punishment has an industry. Healing has people holding it together on short grants.
So the task is both intimate and structural. Sit beside the fire. Learn the names. Back the local organisation. Change the funding rule. Share the story. Measure what matters. Build the network. Return. Do not confuse urgency with haste; community trust moves at the speed of relationship. Do not confuse patience with passivity; every child fed into a system that deepens their wounds makes the work more urgent.
And we need more nights like this. Not romanticised as a miracle cure, but understood as part of a long road. A young person looks into the fire. An adult looks at them and sees a privilege. Somewhere between those two reflections, a different future becomes possible.
“Chapter one of many.”
The old road ends at a locked gate. This one keeps going: through red earth, through story, through Country, toward a form of justice that looks less like punishment and more like belonging.
JusticeHub is growing a national community around the knowledge already held in place.
If you are a community leader, young person, practitioner, funder, researcher or policymaker ready to back healing over harm, we invite you to join the next chapter.