In an era of metrification and managerialism there is widespread acceptance that a lack of Aboriginal wellbeing reflects a culture of welfare dependency. But Indigenous wellbeing is more complex than simple equations suggesting "getting off welfare" will achieve betterment. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to issues of Indigenous disadvantage. Social work literature establishes that moral, social, and political aspects of working the social are in tension with technical and rational aspects. This paper draws on Charles Wright Mills's concept of the "sociological imagination" to render an historical, social-structural, and biographical account of addressing wellbeing within West Australian Kimberley Aboriginal communities since the 1970s. Highlighting the actualities of community as shaped by time, place, and interaction, an argument is made for developing a social work imagination that researches "what is happening here" through ethnographic approaches that consider the intersectioning of history, biographies, and social systems. Without such local knowledge and engagement, effective social policy cannot be enacted from the centre.

One month before the June 2007 Federal Government Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory some 55 West Australian Aboriginal child protection workers attended a 3-day summit in Fremantle. Their purpose as front-line practitioners from across the State was to identify how more nurturing and healing communities could be developed and supported in a climate of despair. This paper reports on how the summit was designed and on some of the ideas and concerns that emerged within this dialogical space of cooperative inquiry. The project was a partnership between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal representatives of university, government, and community-service bodies. Aboriginal practitioners identified the complexity of what was happening in their experience and where changes were needed. Integral to this participation and coproduction of knowledge by Aboriginal child protection workers was the provision of a safe space for the articulation of reflected experience. Implications for policy, practice, and curriculum of both process and outcome dimensions to considering Aboriginal views on this contentious issue are discussed.

In this chapter we argue that top-down and templated systems of child protection can fail many Aboriginal children and families by not responding to the particular and situational circumstances involved. The homogenising of the category 'Aboriginal' and constructing Aboriginal as 'problematic', presumes that families who are Aboriginal are in some way deficient, consequently ensuring that the experience of trauma for Aboriginal people is not something that happened in the past. For those coming to the attention of child protection authorities, trauma remains a continuing thread across many family systems such that it is hard to distinguish cause from effect. While systems concerned with protecting children are necessary, we argue that the ways those ends are pursued can visit further trauma on Aboriginal families and their children.

The Council of Australian Governments' 'Protecting children in everyone's business: National framework for protecting Australia's children 2009-2020' (2009) (the Framework) declares a need for a shared agenda for change; suggests a public health model applied to child protection will deliver better outcomes for children; and, sets a target for a substantial reduction in child abuse. The Framework provides interested parties with an opportunity to observe Australian federalism and child welfare administration at a critical juncture. This article identifies three threads to be teased out from the Framework by social work educators and students for critical examination: the Framework itself; a nationally consistent approach to working with children checks; and, the child protection data upon which the Framework relies. Addressing these threads goes some way to meeting the Australian Association of Social Workers' education and accreditation standards while engaging future practitioners with the on-going task of making child protection happen.

There is much in Karger's (2012) article with which to agree. Australian admission standards to qualifying social work programs have lowered over the past two decades and clearly "marketisation shapes social work education in manifold ways" (Karger, 2012, p. 311). Karger's (2012) paper is important in that it lays out some of the structural factors shaping our discipline. He does this in a manner urging engaged thought and dialogue by all involved in Australian social work. In my commentary, I focus on how marketisation and broader cultural changes impact on social work education and practice, and detail how the West Australian "marketised" situation is playing out somewhat differently from the situation Karger (2012) described for south-east Queensland.

"Ontological" sounds like one of those esoteric and abstract concepts so annoying to those embedded in the "real" world of practice. Ontological questions relate to matters of actual existence and action. In this paper I argue that starting in the ontological or lived experience has been a central thread of social work since the time of pioneering social worker Jane Addams. Her work documenting an interpretive praxis offers an anchoring for the continuous renewal of social work. This paper aims to link the past to the present and further to identify the ontological power of ethnographic methods in continuing these "homemade" traditions. Beginning with a reflection on my practice and subsequent research, the paper considers six interpretive projects I supervised. A common thread is their contextual generation in the lived experience of the always-embodied researcher/practitioner. Setting aside the epistemological debate around qualitative, compared with quantitative, approaches, this paper examines what interpretive research does and explores the power of ethnographic methods in social work research and practice. Seven contemporary interpretive research cases map how located experiences of gender, indigeneity, practitioner-being, migration and other possibilities usefully inform the project of social work. All share generation from a particular practitioner's "local knowledge" and in that sense are "homemade". All differ by virtue of being responsive to each researcher's positioning in time and place. Homemade social work is a way of doing social work research. This way of making knowledge through exploring, demonstrating and publishing responsiveness to the diversity of problematic issues in an always-changing world has the advantage of turning reflected practitioner experience into an asset for a researcher rather than being considered a contaminating deficit. Such theoretically informed projects constitute ways for social work as a discipline and profession to rise to the challenge of being research-informed while building on what it is that social work practitioners do.

Chris Murray, a young African-American male, admitted on a scholarship to a social work masters program, reflexively explores his negotiation of difference in dialogue with an Australian female social work educator twice his age. Standpoint theory and the concept of intersectionality are used to frame Chris' experiences at a private northeast US university after achieving an undergraduate degree in his southern home state. His initial access to university came through military service. Chris was interviewed by the author as part of her international study project examining social work students' experience of diversity in the classroom. The open-ended interview was designed to allow self-identity of difference. Chris ethnographically recounts to a stranger a subjectivity statement of who he is in relation to studying social work. Chris' story works the hyphen between the binary of subjectivity and objectivity through the particulars of his personal history and world-view and his expectation that I as a social work educator share his seeking of social justice. His detailing of what moved him to become a social worker and contextual complexities negotiated along the way connect to wider discourses on how agency and structure play out in lived experience in seeking social justice.