INVITED SPEAKERS
We are excited to welcome the following invited speakers to the ACMHN 2026 stage.
Tracy Beaton
Tracy commenced her nursing career in New Zealand initially as an enrolled nurse. She completed her psychiatric nurse training at Cherry Farm Hospital and then went on to train as a general and obstetric nurse. Tracy career has spanned clinical practice over 35 years and is now working as the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Victoria. Tracy is a values-driven registered nurse with extensive experience in leading transformative initiatives to enhance mental health nursing practice, child protection systems and improve outcomes for children, young people, and communities. Tracy has delivered complex, system-wide reforms across Government and Community sectors in mental health, nursing and working with vulnerable populations.
Vanessa Browne
Vanessa Browne is a proud Larrakia and Wulna woman, mother and Mental Health Nurse and Nurse Practitioner with a scope of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples mental health. She has over 20 years experience in mental health and has worked in several areas within acute adult services. She is currently working in the Community Mental Health services in CAHLN and remains passionate about mental health and her mob’s well-being. She is also the President of the CATSINaM Board pursuing her other passion of supporting First Nations Nurses.
Emeritus Prof Wendy Cross
Wendy has many years’ experience as clinician, academic and applied researcher (and Principal Investigator) with a focus on mental health, health services evaluation and workforce. She has developed clinical best practices and workplace training extensively focused on public health services. She has received a combined total of $11 million in research and teaching grants, has more than 200 publications across all domains (H-Index 39), has supervised multiple research candidates to successful completions and is regularly sought after for thesis examination. She reviews for a variety of health-related peer reviewed journals.
Wendy is a long-standing academic and has held senior appointments across Australia and was the previous Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic at Federation University, Australia. Wendy holds a number of honorary professorial appointments. Currently she is a TEQSA expert; Chair of the Australian Osteopathic Accreditation Council (AOAC) and the previous Chair of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Accreditation Council (ANMAC). She holds numerous board director positions as well as participating in multiple national committees in health and education. In 2017, she was appointed as a National Mental Health Commissioner in Australia for a two-year term.
Over many years Wendy has provided unconditional support via clinical supervision, for many nurses, including those who are in non-mental-health nursing specialties. She is a very proud mental health nurse and life fellow of the college.
Carol Mudford
Carol is a Registered Nurse and a shearer, who has combined both careers to address suicide prevention in the shearing industry. She took a short break from nursing following family illness during the covid lockdowns of 2020, that turned into a few years working in the shearing sheds of western NSW. Her return to nursing (in a rural suicide prevention program) coincided with the tragic loss of 3 shearers to suicide, which inspired action of a long-held idea: to ‘do something’ for the shearing shed family. With the grassroots support of the global shearing community, sHedway has grown from a humble Facebook page to an internationally recognised health promotion charity that holds stalls, workshops and training for suicide awareness and mental fitness across Australia and NZ. Carol lives in Dubbo, NSW and travels the shearing sheds with her dog, Dusty.
Dr Kylie Smith
Dr Kylie Smith was until recently Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associate Faculty in the Department of History at Emory University in Atlanta. While in the US, Kylie taught courses on race and health in US history and authored two monographs in the history of psychiatry.
Her first book, Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing, published by Rutgers University Press in 2020, won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing and the American Journal of Nursing’s Book of the Year Award in the area of History and Public Policy.
Her new book, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in January 2026. Initial research for the book was supported by the National Library of Medicine (NIH) G13 Grant, and thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities program, the book has been released in print, as a free downloadable E-book, and an Open Access Digitally enhanced monograph on the Manifold Scholar platform.
ACMHN 2026 Destination Partner
