Marlene Longbottom

Associate Professor Marlene Longbottom is a Yuin woman of the Wodi Wodi and Wandi Wandian clans from Roseby Park Mission (Jerrinja) on the South Coast of New South Wales. She is a mid-career researcher and an Associate Professor at the Indigenous Education and Research Centre, James Cook University, and a practising social worker. She has nearly 30 years of experience across human services and academia, working in New South Wales, the Torres Strait and Far North Queensland.

Marlene's research shapes how she practises social work, and what she sees in practice feeds back into the research. That praxis carries through to policy. Her findings inform recommendations for practice and policy reform, including those in the Holding Hope report for the NSW Ombudsman and the solutions set out in Defiant Resistance for dismantling the structural barriers Indigenous women face when seeking safety.

For more than 17 years, Marlene has led and collaborated on community-based research set by the priorities of Indigenous peoples in urban, regional and remote communities. Her work examines service systems and their effects on Indigenous families, with a focus on trauma, violence and the intersecting systems that shape the lives of Indigenous women and young people.

Marlene has published in national and international journals and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and Purdue University in the United States. She has contributed to nationally competitive grants worth more than $7 million and is an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

She is lead Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Indigenous project Navigating the Carceral Interface (IN220100009), funded at $1.287 million. She holds a Discovery Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award (DAATSIA) through that project.

Marlene co-authored the Holding Hope report for the NSW Ombudsman, reviewing 43 cases of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people who died by suicide between 2011 and 2020. The report sets out systemic failures and the reforms needed to improve safety, accountability and wellbeing for young people and their families.

She is a member of the Queensland Family and Child Commission Child Death Review Board and has given expert evidence in coronial inquests and two Queensland Commissions of Inquiry.

Defiant Resistance: Shattering the Silence on Violence against Indigenous Women (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2026) is a sole-authored monograph built from yarning with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who survived violence, and with the families of women who were killed. The book gives a structural account of violence in which police, courts and other institutions are part of the infrastructure of violence, not neutral responders to it. One chapter follows the legal processes after women's deaths.

Book reviews:

Professor Julia Tolmie (Faculty of Law, University of Auckland) reviewed the book in Current Issues in Criminal Justice (2026). She called it "hugely significant" for showing that coercive control, used as the only lens on intimate partner violence, carries a white neoliberal view of the problem. She noted its treatment of police and courts as part of the infrastructure of violence against First Nations women, drew parallels with Aotearoa New Zealand, and strongly recommended the book.

Book endorsements:

"This important, accessible landmark study prioritises the voices of Indigenous women in speaking about violence… Impassioned and provocative, this book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Indigenous women and violence." Emeritus Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The University of Queensland.

Media and recognition

Government agencies consult Marlene for expert advice on violence, trauma and social justice. She has appeared in The Conversation, IndigenousX, NITV's The Point, SBS Insight and ABC's The Drum.