The Women Who Guided Me

Rachel Whytcross is the founder of Shine Om and works as a sibling transition specialist, supporting families through what she calls one of the most significant and most under-served seasons in family life: the arrival of an additional baby. A former primary school teacher of over a decade, and also a yoga teacher and mindfulness coach, Rachel built her signature program, the Joyful Parenting Proj...

Anne Endres is a Canberra midwife and IBCLC lactation consultant who has supported hundreds of families through pregnancy, birth and feeding. Multiple women in this community pointed me toward Anne. She is considered something of a breastfeeding guru here. I heard Anne's name again and again before we sat down, always from women who said the same thing: she was the person who finally made fee...

Narelle Dickinson has worked in the fertility, pregnancy and postpartum space for 25 years. She began her career in an obstetric hospital unit after an early plan to become a forensic psychologist didn't pan out, and quickly found her calling working with women. Over time her practice broadened into donor conception and surrogacy counselling, and obstetric loss and birth trauma. She now suppo...

Kellie Hermes is a Canberra-based birth and postpartum doula, Reiki practitioner and mother of four, and the founder of Adorabirth. Her path into this work began with her own births,  including the loss of her first baby, and the deeply supported water birth of her daughter that followed, guided by a continuity-of-care midwife who believed completely in her body. That experience of being trusted t...

Jacinta Lagos is an Argentinian-born filmmaker, birth photographer and videographer now based in the United States. She started out as a wedding videographer, then documented her own two pregnancies and discovered birth photography as its own genre, before training as a doula because she refused to just be “a fly on the wall.” Allowed to Birth: The Journey of a Global Midwife is her debut as a fea...

Rhiannah Pohlman (rhiannahrose.com.au) is a naturopath and counsellor supporting women navigating pregnancy and birth after a traumatic experience. Trained by Dr Catherine Bell, she is a birth cartographer, helping women map their births, advocate for their choices and build contingency plans, alongside nervous system regulation and birth story integration. She brings all of this together through...

I'm in Perth at the moment visiting my family, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down with my mum and talk to her about her birth story, so how I was born. In the lead up to my son's birth late last year, my parents came over from Perth, and I remember asking my mum about her birth story. I found it a really empowering thing to listen to, and it gave me a lot of strengt...

Dr Catherine Bell is the creator of the Birth Map, a birth advocate and Managing Director of Maternity Choices Australia. After her own birth experiences left her with questions she didn't have the knowledge to answer, and after listening to countless mothers say they wished they had been better informed, Catherine set out to close that gap. In this episode Catherine walks us through what the...

Dr Jan Jamieson has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese medicine in Canberra for over 42 years. She holds a Masters of Traditional Chinese Medicine from Western Sydney University and is currently a PhD candidate at ANU, where her research sits at the intersection of fertility and ethics in Chinese Medicine. She is AHPRA registered and a member of the Australian Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine...

Anna Siebert (somawomenswellbeing.com.au) is a somatic psychotherapist, former doula and childbirth educator, and the founder of Soma Women’s Wellbeing in Canberra. She has spent decades working at the intersection of trauma, the nervous system and women’s health. Anna is a woman who has sat inside the system, been failed by it in ways that should not happen, and built something extraordinary in r...

Sasha Hopkins (barefootvibes.com.au) is an endorsed midwife, birth educator and host of The Breech Birth Podcast, based in south east Queensland. She is one of a small but growing number of practitioners in Australia actively working to bring vaginal breech birth back into the conversation. When I found out my son was breech at 38 weeks, Sasha was the first person my doula Kylie told me to call. I...

Kylie Coad (heartfelthealingtherapies.com.au) is a birth and postnatal doula, hypnobirthing practitioner and the first wise woman in my own birth story. Kylie supported both my wife Ellen and I through our pregnancies, and most of the women you will hear from in this podcast came to me through her. I have wanted to record this conversation since I started this podcast. Kylie was with me at the ver...

Tracey Anderson Askew (transformparenting.com.au) is a birth educator, coach and parenting specialist with nearly thirty years of experience guiding women through pregnancy, birth and early parenthood. Tracey runs Transform Parenting, a program that takes you all the way from pregnancy through to the first years of raising your child. I first met Tracey about four weeks postpartum, introduced thro...

Lo Mathias (talltreespelviccare.com.au) is an endorsed midwife based in Canberra specialising in internal pelvic release work — a deeply embodied approach to preparing the body for birth and healing postpartum. Lo also offers scar work and closing the bones ceremonies to women preparing for birth and recovering postpartum. A few days before recording this conversation I had my first session with L...