This year HACSU is encouraging you to get involved in NAIDOC Week celebrations that are held across Australia each year to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

NAIDOC isn’t just celebrated in Indigenous communities, but by Australians from all walks of life, and the week is a great chance to join in a range of activities and support your local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.

This year’s theme, ‘Always Was, Always Will Be’, recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared for this continent for over 65,000 years. They 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 Nations people engraved the world’s first maps, made the earliest paintings of ceremony and invented unique technologies. They built and engineered structures that well and truly predate famous sites such as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge and, through ingenious land management systems like fire stick farming, 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 in 1770, or 1606, and it invites all Australians to embrace the true history of this country that dates back thousands of generations.

It’s about seeing, hearing and learning the 65,000 year history of this country, which is Australian history, and we want everyone to celebrate that we have the oldest continuing cultures on the planet and to recognise that First Nations sovereignty was never ceded.

We’ll be attending events around the state next week and we’d love to see you there to support the local aboriginal community. For more info please contact HACSUassist.

In unity,

Tim Jacobson.