National NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia in the first week of July each year (Sunday to Sunday), to celebrate and recognise the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NAIDOC Week is an opportunity for all Australians to learn about First Nations cultures and histories and participate in celebrations of the oldest, continuous living cultures on earth. You can support and get to know your local Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities through activities and events held across the country.
The 2023 NAIDOC Week theme is For Our Elders. Across every generation, our Elders have played, and continue to play, an important role and hold a prominent place in our communities and families. They are cultural knowledge holders, trailblazers, nurturers, advocates, teachers, survivors, leaders, hard workers and our loved ones.
Our loved ones who pick us up in our low moments and celebrate us in our high ones. Who cook us a feed to comfort us and pull us into line, when we need them to. They guide our generations and pave the way for us to take the paths we can take today. Guidance, not only through generations of advocacy and activism, but in everyday life and how to place ourselves in the world.
We draw strength from their knowledge and experience, in everything from land management, cultural knowledge to justice and human rights. Across multiple sectors like health, education, the arts, politics and everything in between, they have set the many courses we follow.
The struggles of our Elders help to move us forward today. The equality we continue to fight for is found in their fight. Their tenacity and strength has carried the survival of our people. It is their influence and through their learnings that we must ensure that when it comes to future decision making for our people, there is nothing about us – without us. We pay our respects to the Elders we’ve lost and to those who continue fighting for us across all our Nations and we pay homage to them.
NAIDOC Week is a time for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community to celebrate their care of country, and their history of survival as a nation. This week is an opportunity for all Tasmanians to participate and celebrate with their local Aboriginal community.
During this year’s NAIDOC Week Film Showcase, our second year running, we went completely regional hitting Bicheno, Scottsdale, Smithton and New Norfolk, in that order!
We took the film Ablaze on the road. The film follows Yorta Yorta man, opera singer and Senior Lecturer in and Indigenous Arts and Culture at the Victorian College of the Arts Tiriki Onus on a journey to discover if his grandfather Bill Onus was the first Aboriginal film maker. Bill was an entrepreneur, performer and activist, being particularly active during the 1967 Referendum.
We covered 880km bringing the film to the regions including holding Referendum Conversation Tables at each film plus set ups in Swansea, St Helens and the Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation (CHAC) NAIDOC Community Day at trawmanna in Smithton. This was one of the highlights of the trip with all manner of cultural activities going on from making ochre, a smoking ceremony, cooking mutton bird and white bait fritters and more.
Many thanks go to the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) for our NAIDOC Week grant and Woolworths New Norfolk for the snacks.
NAIDOC Week
NAIDOC Week is a time for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community to celebrate their care of country, and their history of survival as a nation. This week is an opportunity for all Tasmanians to participate and celebrate with their local Aboriginal community.
Truth-telling about ownership of this country prior to the arrival of colonisers still needs to be told, acknowledged and recognised in the Constitution. The call to be heard, the Statement from the Heart, remains as a generous gift to the Australian people by the original owners of this land that we all walk on today, and one from which we all benefit.
Reconciliation Tasmania is committed to walking with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to continue to advocate for structural change whether in the form of Constitutional recognition, a Voice to Parliament, a Makarrata and real truth telling about the land we call Australia.
Across every generation, our Elders have played, and continue to play, an important role and hold a prominent place in our communities and families.
They are cultural knowledge holders, trailblazers, nurturers, advocates, teachers, survivors, leaders, hard workers and our loved ones.
Our loved ones who pick us up in our low moments and celebrate us in our high ones. Who cook us a feed to comfort us and pull us into line, when we need them too.
They guide our generations and pave the way for us to take the paths we can take today. Guidance, not only through generations of advocacy and activism, but in everyday life and how to place ourselves in the world.
We draw strength from their knowledge and experience, in everything from land management, cultural knowledge to justice and human rights. Across multiple sectors like health, education, the arts, politics and everything in between, they have set the many courses we follow.
The struggles of our Elders help to move us forward today. The equality we continue to fight for is found in their fight. Their tenacity and strength has carried the survival of our people.
It is their influence and through their learnings that we must ensure that when it comes to future decision making for our people, there is nothing about us – without us.We pay our respects to the Elders we’ve lost and to those who continue fighting for us across all our Nations and we pay homage to them.
In 2023, how will you celebrate For Our Elders?
NAIDOC Website
NAIDOC Week 2023
Last year during NAIDOC Week Reconciliation Tasmania toured the state with a NAIDOC Week Film Showcase featuring the incredible, haunting and breathtakingly beautiful film Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow.
The film, which took 17 years to film, is described as a: A love story, a legendary concert, a personal tale of trauma and transcendence Kura Tungar-Songs from the River was a collaboration between two of Australia’s greatest artists—singer-songwriters Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter—working with Paul Grabowsky and the 22-piece Australian Art Orchestra.
Using footage combining conversations, rehearsals, and the opening night, with breathtaking images of Hunter’s Ngarrindjeri country in South Australia, the film is a portrait of artists at the peak of their powers and a profoundly moving story of loss, love and what it means to truly come ‘home’.
We took the film to the major cities, Hobart and Launceston, and also regionally, to Queenstown and Burnie.