The Living Well Summit 2025 brought together researchers, health professionals, educators, and community leaders in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) from 9–12 September 2025 for an inspiring exchange of knowledge and practice. The Summit explored what it means to “live well” in remote and desert contexts, centering Aboriginal voices and culturally grounded approaches to health, education, and wellbeing.
The Living Well Summit was a collaboration between Desert Knowledge Australia, Central Australian Academic Health Science Network and the Knowledge Intersections Symposium (Batchelor Institute, Charles Darwin University and Desert Knowledge Research Institute).
Across keynote addresses, panels, and workshops, participants shared innovative models and research on:
- Birthing on Country and culturally safe maternity care.
- Strengthening primary health care to reduce preventable hospitalisations.
- Addressing traumatic brain injury linked to family violence through education and two-way learning.
- Tackling food insecurity and its impact on health.
- Climate change, heat stress, and their intersection with remote health systems and community safety.
- Youth justice reform, bilingual education, and culturally responsive pedagogy.
- Community-led models like Purple House dialysis care and holistic wellbeing frameworks rooted in Country, kinship, and culture.
The Summit integrated graphic recording artists into the programming to assist in the ‘interweave’ of context (the desert difference), collaboration (working better together), impact (knowledge to impact) and new ways (challenges, new ways, hope). The graphic recording outputs can be seen below.
The Summit highlighted the importance of collaboration, cultural safety, and knowledge translation to create lasting impact in policy and practice. It was not just a conference—it was a call to action for equity, dignity, and resilience in desert communities.
Presentations
All presentations from the Living Well Summit are contained in this downloadable pdf.
Use the bookmark function to find specific presentations from both the Corkwood Room and Akaltye Room.
Graphic Recording
The presentations were graphically recorded live and was a key part of interweaving themes of context By Sarah Cook Creative https://www.sarahcookcreative.com/
Corkwood Room
Akaltye Room
