This NAIDOC Week (July 7-14) is a time for non-Indigenous Australians to honour the culture of our First Peoples and the tenacity with which they have insisted on their culture and their rights, reflects ANDY HAMILTON SJ.
This year, The National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) Week is particularly important. It commemorates an initiative taken in hard times, an act of defiance and a demand to be heard.
NAIDOC Week was built on pride: the pride that led Indigenous people who recognised that they were neither respected nor heard to work for change. They saw how inappropriate it was to celebrate Australia Day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet. This date marked the beginning of their dispossession. In 1938, the 150th anniversary of the landing, January 26 was made a national holiday. In the same year a Congress of Indigenous people met in Sydney. Its members marched on January 26, that they named Mourning Day .
Australia Day is still celebrated on the anniversary of Indigenous expropriation, but NAIDOC Week was born and continues. The date was changed to expand the occasion beyond protest to a celebration of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander heritage. It provides an opportunity for all Australians to join in celebrating their culture, aspirations and hopes. And to listen to their voice.
The theme of NAIDOC Week this year is: Keep the Fire Burning. It echoes the importance of lighting and controlling fire in Indigenous cultures before Settlement. Fire lay at the heart of the meals, the feasts, the care for the land, and the community life of Indigenous Australians. To keep it burning was a communal task of mutual service. It was the difference between a thriving and energetic community and one that had lost hope and was dying out.
This year, NAIDOC Week marks the determination to honour the fire in the heart that gave birth of the Week, and to ensure that it continues to blaze. For non-Indigenous Australians NAIDOC Week is a time to honour the culture of our First Peoples and the tenacity with which they have insisted on their culture and their rights. For all of us, this day is a time to reflect on and struggle for the just society that inspired its beginning.
