What’s Western Australia’s Third Story?
Guests at our launch in Perth on 24 March 2025
A new chapter for ThirdStory is a new possibility for meaningful space and dialogue in WA, writes Jethro Sercombe.
Our Western Australian beginnings
Some may not know that WA is our largest office (mostly by luck, Perth is our Chief Executive Keren’s home town), so it felt fitting that the first launch of Third Story would be in the West, in our shared studio by the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) in East Perth.
Dr Simon Forrest, long standing academic and Noongar Elder told us that this part of the river, now called Claisebrook Cove, was once the Claise Brook, where it entered the river after travelling through Perth’s system of great lakes. Before colonisation, this was an important source of fresh water, and as a result an important place for meeting and living. It was only the dredging of the mudflats that created Heirisson Island that allowed the salt water to rush through to this part of the Swan.
But one can imagine a different version, where those mudflats remained, and normal seasonal variation allowed the salt and fresh to combine. We’ve often thought about Tyson Yunkaporta’s description of the brackish water that forms when the winter freshwater comes downstream to meet the salt as a time of ‘Ganma’ (in Yolgnu). This is a time of dynamic interaction, when forces meet in an act of new creation.
20 years of social change, 10 years in WA
For over 20 years, Innovation Unit has been at the forefront of driving real change through place-based innovation. From the UK to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and everywhere in between, our global teams have worked on impactful projects—reimagining public schooling in Bermuda, co-designing family violence refuges in Western Australia, and improving learning outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.
After a decade of collaboration, last week we were excited to launch ThirdStory.
Joined by many of our partners, clients, family, friends and supporters, many of whom have helped shape this change, Monday’s launch event shared how this new chapter allows us to evolve, build stronger local partnerships, and stay deeply connected to the communities we serve.
That's because we believe the third story is where the possibilities lie. It’s where new ideas and approaches emerge, and where we get to write our own future. At ThirdStory, we believe in the power of collaboration, trust, and building meaningful change.
Isolation and innovation
People often say that the WA music industry is able to do innovative things because of its isolation. We’ve seen some exceptional innovations emerge in WA over the last 10 years - some we’ve been involved with and some we haven’t. Initiatives like Parkerville’s Our Way Home project, Wungening Moort, FINWA’s Family Partner project, Anglicare WA’s Sunshine Project, Bunbury Primary’s work in combining digital readiness and reconciliation, or the school-community partnerships of the Child and Parent Centres across the state.
The shadow side of our isolation is that often these Innovations remain as ‘beautiful exceptions’ rather than ideas that transform whole systems.
Looking beyond ‘beautiful exceptions’
We do see some bright spots in WA’s approach to systems change. The WA Alliance to End Homelessness has been an extraordinary movement of change amongst WA Homelessness providers, fundamentally changing service mindsets. Social Reinvestment WA is on its way to seeing wide acceptance of early intervention investment as a way out of a criminal justice mess.
Western Australia has some awesome potential to lead if we can begin to look beyond our silos of organisation, or system, or state. We should see our most impactful innovations spread, or see the stories and principles at the heart of them begin to change mindsets and action of people across our systems.
Yunkaporta also says: “There are a lot of opportunities for sustainable innovation through the dialogue of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living...the problem with this communication so far has been asymmetry - when power relations are so skewed that most communication is one way, there is not much opportunity for the brackish waters of hybridity to stew up something exciting.”
This creates a challenge for us. Our third story can’t be some act of extinguishing our past, but where we find a space ‘in between’ to acknowledge and bring forward things that other voices have been trying to tell us for a long time.
Our Story for Change
Over the course of this rebrand, we’ve been looking across our practice at what our Story for Change is - in the emergent practices (and language) that our team employs, it can be hard to describe the thing that creates this potential for possibility.
Our Story for Change describes 3 offers: ‘Gathering people and perspectives’, ‘Illuminating new pathways’ and ‘Realising a new future’; Relationships, Insight and Action. Each of these further describe practices in learning partnerships, evaluation, service and system design and the coaching and implementation work needed for system transformation.
We believe that when we bring these together they offer a vision for a way to make some of the big changes we know we need. More importantly, when we do them right, when the right spaces are created and the right people are gathered, we can change those power relations to ensure that something exciting is produced in the stew.
The Third Story is the one we get to create ourselves, not the one written for us.
The launch in Perth was just the beginning (like many Perth creatives, we’ve also moved to Melbourne) and we’re looking forward to continuing our conversations with people on the east coast of Australia, in Aotearoa, and in Bermuda and the Caribbean as we embark on this exciting new chapter.
Reach out to our team in WA if you’d like to write your own story - you can contact Jethro at Jethro.sercombe@thirdstory.org.
