NAIDOC Week – By Dr. Kumudini Abeysuriya
Source:Brisbane Sri Lankan Newsletter – Dæhæna – July 2022
NAIDOC Week is celebrated each year in the week starting on the first Sunday of July, to recognise and celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Australia’s First Nations Peoples. It is an invitation and opportunity for migrant communities such as ours to appreciate the perspective of the First Australians who have lived on and cared for this land since time immemorial.
NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. Its origins are traced to Aborigines Day held annually on the Sunday before Australia Day for several decades upto 1955, marked as a day of protest to increase awareness of the trauma and injustices of colonisation on the First Australians. The day was shifted to the first Sunday in July since 1955 and became a day of remembrance and celebration of the heritage and
achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It subsequently became a week of celebration that took on the name of the Observance Committee – NAIDOC Week.
Each year, a theme is chosen to reflect important issues for First Nations Peoples and focus the events of NAIDOC Week. This year it is Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! with the explanation: “We have a proud history of getting up, standing up, and showing up. From the frontier wars and our earliest resistance fighters to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities fighting for change today – we continue to show up. … It must be a genuine commitment by all of us to Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! and support and secure institutional, structural, collaborative, and cooperative reforms.”
The invitation to all Australians to join at a common table of reconciliation for a just and equitable country through remediation of the systemic disadvantage experienced by First Nations People, is one that we cannot ignore. Nearly five centuries of European colonisation of our own motherland gives us a degree of appreciation of the heavy hand of
colonial masters on the natives of lands taken. As current residents of this advanced country, we benefit from the ‘Western’ development founded on the colonial project built on the devastation caused to Australia’s original inhabitants.
Australia’s newly elected government has promised to hold a referendum on a ‘Voice to Parliament’ within its first term. The invitation of NAIDOC Week is to prepare ourselves for our civic duty at the referendum by being well informed about the ‘Voice to Parliament’ and other elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart that calls for “Voice, Treaty, Truth” (a past NAIDOC Week theme).
Kumi Abeysuriya
Dr. Kumudini Abeysuriya is a resident of Brisbane with a keen
interest in reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
Australians.
Image courtesy – https://www.naidoc.org.au/awards/current-theme
