Recognising how far we still have to go to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures are treated with equality and respect—by both governments and the broader community—is a responsibility that belongs to all Australians, writes ANDY HAMILTON SJ. This NAIDOC Week calls on all of us who are committed to building a more just nation—one that acknowledges its historical and ongoing debts.
The story of NAIDOC Week speaks not only to Aboriginal and Torres Islander people. It speaks to all of us Australians who are committed to a more just society that recognises its debts. For us at Jesuit Social Services its story is our story, its cause our cause. The story includes the struggle to be heard, the small gains made, the building of support by non-Indigenous Australians, the larger hopes disappointed, the new challenges, and the long road that has always stretched ahead. Even the acronym NAIDOC which stands for the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee speaks of an early demand for a national day that included Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It has consistently been refused but is still pressed, it looks to the past and to the future.
The campaign for a National Day arose out of small movements among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for recognition and inclusion. They demanded that the date of the landing of the First Fleet, a symbol of Indigenous dispossession, should not be celebrated as Australia Day.
From 1940 the National Day was held on the Sunday before Australia Day and was named simply as Aborigines Day. In 1955 it was moved to the first Sunday of July in order to mark it as a day to celebrate Aboriginal culture as well as to protest. In the same year the National Aborigines Day Committee was formed, which in 1991 was changed to recognise the distinctive culture of Torres Strait Islanders. Its request to make National Aborigines Day a Public Holiday was also denied.
The long history of NAIDOC and of its antecedents provides compass bearings in the turbulent aftermath of the failure to pass the Referendum on the Voice to Parliament. The process that led to the Referendum, for all its limitations, marked the growth of Indigenous organisation, leadership and confidence. It also marked a growing understanding among all Australians of the war and dispossession involved in the colonial settlement of Australia, the racial discrimination involved in the Stolen Generations, and the continuing inequality of Indigenous Australians.
Australia Day, the focus of NAIDOC’s history, is now more a day of contestation and of public education as it is of celebration.
The failure of the Referendum to pass, the racial prejudice that it revealed, and the continuing disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous children and deaths in custody and other indices of inequality, however, also disclose how much needs to be done if Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their culture are to be recognised and treated as equals by other Australians and our Governments. That is the cause of all Australians.
