Following her heart
Highlights
- ACU alumna Nicola Barker turns personal adversity into purpose, using her social work career to support Aboriginal communities and improve access to health and education.
- She applies lived experience and advocacy to drive change, including work on truth‑telling and empowering Indigenous voices in education.
- Nicola’s journey highlights how ACU study can equip students to lead social change, strengthen communities and advance equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
It was meant to be the year that Nicola Barker’s life got on track. In her first week at university in Canberra, she was full of optimism and anticipation for the year ahead. But things took a dramatic turn when a few sips of an energy drink triggered sudden cardiac arrest.
“I’d never in my life had an energy drink, and it just caused my heart to go off,” says Nicola, who was 19 at the time.
She was diagnosed with chronic heart failure, a condition she manages with medication and regular visits to a cardiologist.
While her heart is now doing well, her initial recovery was “a pretty tricky time, and not the best way to start university”.
“It was rough, especially for my dad,” says Nicola, now 28. “My mum died very young and so my dad was really worried about me, but it was just one of those unfortunate things you have to get through.”
Nicola is a Murawarii woman from Brewarrina, a remote NSW community with a large Aboriginal population, but she spent much of her childhood on Gumbaynggirr country in Coffs Harbour.
After years living in Canberra, where she completed a Bachelor of Social Work at ACU in 2018 and was employed as a social worker with the ACT Government, she moved back to Coffs when her family home was lost in a house fire.
“I had a beautiful job in Canberra, doing great work with Aboriginal families and earning a good wage and all that sort of stuff, but that all changed when our house burned down at the end of 2019,” she says.
Nicola and her siblings pulled together and each made sacrifices for the good of the family.
“We lost everything, my dad was in hospital, and my teenage siblings needed support to rebuild their lives, so I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to come back’.”
Nicola spent her first year back at Coffs Harbour working as the Aboriginal Health Coordinator at the North Coast Primary Health Network, before landing her “dream job” with the Galambila Aboriginal Health Service – a clinic she attended as a client when she was younger.
While Galambila has served the Aboriginal community on the Mid North Coast for 20 years, Nicola is the service’s first-ever social worker.
“When I first started working here, one of the clinicians said, ‘How do I know you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you were my doctor when I was a little girl’,” she says.
“It’s really come full-circle. I was a client here and now I’m a clinician, working at empowering Aboriginal people in this region, helping them to build resilience and take their health into their own hands, and I really love this job.”
Justice and truth-telling
Social work is in Nicola Barker’s blood. Her parents were both community workers in Brewarrina and neighbouring Bourke, but her mother fell ill when Nicola was three. With no specialist or intensive care hospital in the local area, Nicola’s mother was moved six hours away to Dubbo to access the care she needed.
“My mother passed so suddenly that many of my family didn’t get to see her, as she was so far away,” she says.
“She was only 28, and I guess her death was one of the reasons I became interested in Aboriginal health and education and closing the gap.”
While Nicola maintained a strong connection to her Brewarrina community, her father moved the family to Coffs Harbour to give his children the opportunities that weren’t available out west.
At high school in Coffs, Nicola was the target of racial taunts from her classmates.
