Women of Strength - Tanika Perry

A Warami and Bundjalung woman, community engagement specialist, and mother of two, Tanika Perry knows that strength isn't something you're born with - it's something you build.

Strength Is Built, Not Given

Tanika Perry doesn't speak about strength in the abstract. For her, it's a lived and earned thing — something forged through navigating adversity, showing up for your community, and doing the hard work even when it's quiet and unseen.

"The strength of a woman comes in different forms," she says. "The way that you overcome certain adversities in your life is what I think builds that strength. You're not born with strength."

It's a perspective shaped by a life lived at the intersection of personal and professional purpose. As a community engagement specialist, Tanika works daily to create change for Aboriginal communities. As a mother, she works just as hard at home — holding that same future in her hands in a much more personal way.

Doing the Work For the Next Generation

What drives Tanika is clarity about who she's working for. Not just the communities she serves in a professional capacity, but her two children — the ones watching everything she does and absorbing what it means to show up, persist, and lead.

"The work that I'm doing now is changing this next generation, and I really hope that my kids know that, and they can see that I have done this hard work for them."

There's a quiet weight to that sentence. The understanding that the work we do now plants seeds for lives we may not fully see grow.

A Vision Without Shame

Ask Tanika what she hopes the world looks like in ten years and her answer is both practical and deeply human. She wants the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to stop widening. She wants conversations about culture to happen openly, without shame. She wants language living, spoken, daily language - to be reclaimed and revitalised.

Language revitalisation, she points out, is already happening in some communities — and she wants to see it deepen everywhere. These aren't abstract aspirations. They're the shape of a more honest, more whole country.

Connected to Country

Running beneath everything Tanika shares is an understanding of where strength ultimately comes from: the land.

"We have the strength from within. We have the strength every day we walk on Mother Earth, so we need to utilize that more and connect to the real country."

It's a form of grounding that's both ancient and urgent, a reminder that connection to place, to culture, to community, is not nostalgic. It's nourishing. It's the source.

And on the question of whose land this is, Tanika is unambiguous.

"This land always was and always will be Aboriginal land."

What Strength Looks Like

Tanika Perry's strength is the kind that looks outward. It's in the work she does for communities she believes in. In the example she sets for children who are watching. In the conversations she insists on having even when the room isn't ready.

It's the strength of someone who has decided that the future is worth fighting for — not because it's easy, but because someone has to.