Martine Beaumont
What We Carry

FIRST: SHE IS FAMILY

Martine is my sister-in-law. Which makes writing about her slightly strange and completely obvious.

There are people you meet through work and then there are people who have been part of the family furniture for years.

Martine is the second kind.

So I have had the odd position of watching her work from close enough to know the human being, while also being able to stand back and think: actually, what she does is pretty extraordinary.

Her professional world crosses psychotherapy, leadership, law, risk, workplace mental health and psychosocial safety. Her personal world carries family, art, strong women and the kind of conversations that tend to keep going after everybody else has gone home.

Sometimes the people closest to us are the ones we forget to properly look at.

THE WORK

Martine works upstream.

Rather than waiting until a workplace is already in crisis, her work asks what leaders, systems and cultures are doing before somebody burns out, breaks down or quietly decides they cannot do it anymore.

She is the founder and CEO of Select Wellness. Her current work sits heavily in psychosocial safety, workplace mental health, leadership and organisational performance.

And what I like about that is that it shifts the wellbeing conversation away from telling individuals to be more resilient inside systems that may be actively exhausting them.

Wellbeing is not much use as a perk if the way the work is designed is the thing making people unwell.

THE ADVERTISING WORLD

This is where our professional worlds unexpectedly overlap.

I come from advertising, PR, media and marketing. Martine came at the industry from another direction entirely — human behaviour, risk and workplace wellbeing.

But she has ended up right in the middle of some of the media and advertising industry's most important conversations about how people are treated at work.

Martine led the development of the Media Federation of Australia's People First psychosocial safety playbook and has worked across the broader media, marketing and advertising ecosystem on practical ways to reduce psychosocial risk.

Which feels particularly relevant in an industry built on deadlines, pitches, client pressure, long hours, big personalities, rejection, creativity and the strange expectation that passion should somehow make exhaustion noble.

Creative industries are brilliant at talking about ideas. We have historically been less brilliant at talking about what the process can do to the people making them.

THE WOMEN BEFORE US

And then there is Maxine.

Martine comes from a long family connection to the arts.

Her mum, Maxine, was in the original Hair.

That detail makes me smile because Hair was not exactly a quiet little cultural moment. It was counterculture, music, politics, sex, protest, youth, freedom and a very public challenge to what respectable society thought people — particularly women — were supposed to be.

And decades later, Martine is sitting in a room in Dubbo asking women to think about the generations before them, what they inherited, what shaped them and what they want to carry forward.

The women before us do not disappear. Sometimes they are still in the room, even when nobody has said their name yet.

THE WOMEN WE BRING WITH US

Martine also brought Rachael Beck into the Inspired by Her circle.

That matters to me almost as much as anything on a professional biography.

Because The Orana Woman has never really grown through cold approaches or perfectly mapped strategy. It grows because somebody says, “I know a woman you should meet.”

Renee Webster introduced me to Vianney McAllister. Martine brought Rachael Beck into Inspired by Her.

One woman opens a door. Another woman walks through it. Then she holds the door for someone else.

Sometimes the women who shape a project are not the ones standing at the centre of it. They are the ones who say, “I know someone you should meet.”

GROUNDED

Then Martine came to Dubbo herself.

For the 2026 Orana Every Woman Festival, she led the opening session of Grounded: How to Lead, Live & Belong.

The starting point was women — who we are, what we carry and how our experiences shape us.

Martine was joined by regional women from different generations, because none of those questions make much sense if we pretend a life exists outside family, history, culture, place and the expectations handed down to us.

The session moved between leadership at work, leadership at home, friendship, community and the very ordinary ways women become responsible for holding everything together.

Not leadership as a title. Leadership as a way of being in relationship with other people without disappearing from your own life.

What do we carry because it matters — and what do we carry simply because nobody ever told us we were allowed to put it down?

WHAT WE CARRY FORWARD

Maybe that is the thread through all of it.

Workplaces carry culture. Families carry stories. Women carry expectations.

Creative communities carry people forward by introducing them, recommending them, inviting them and making room.

Martine's work asks what happens when we become more conscious of all of those things.

Not so we can throw everything away. So we can choose what is worth carrying.

We inherit a lot. The interesting part is deciding what comes with us.

— Sharon