NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia to celebrate the history,
culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NAIDOC is
celebrated not only in Indigenous communities, but by Australians from all walks of life. The
week is a great opportunity to participate in a range of activities and to support your local
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.
NAIDOC originally stood for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance
Committee’. This committee was once responsible for organising national activities during
NAIDOC Week and its acronym has since become the name of the week itself.
Always Was, Always Will Be. recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared
for this continent for over 65,000 years.
We are spiritually and culturally connected to this country. This country was criss-crossed by
generations of brilliant Nations.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were Australia’s first explorers, first navigators,
first engineers, first farmers, first botanists, first scientists, first diplomats, first astronomers
and first artists.
Australia has the world’s oldest oral stories. The First Peoples engraved the world’s first
maps, made the earliest paintings of ceremony and invented unique technologies. We built
and engineered structures - structures on Earth - predating well-known sites such as the
Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge.
Our adaptation and intimate knowledge of Country enabled us to endure climate change,
catastrophic droughts and rising sea levels.
Always Was, Always Will Be. acknowledges that hundreds of Nations and our cultures
covered this continent. All were managing the land - the biggest estate on earth - to
sustainably provide for their future. Through ingenious land management systems like fire
stick farming we transformed the harshest habitable continent into a land of bounty.
NAIDOC Week 2020 acknowledges and celebrates that our nation’s story didn’t begin with
documented European contact whether in 1770 or 1606 - with the arrival of the Dutch on
the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula.
https://www.naidoc.org.au/
