NAIDOC Week – theme announced: Always Was, Always Will Be

A number of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services will have already placed the NAIDOC Week dates (5-12 July 2020) into their calendars. An announcement earlier this week by the national NAIDOC committee means they can now work toward acknowledgement of the 2020 theme – Always Was, Always Will Be.

The 2020 theme recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years, and acknowledges that Australia’s story began at the dawn of time, and didn’t begin with documented European contact.

NAIDOC Week is an opportunity for all Australians to come together to celebrate the rich history, diverse cultures and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the oldest continuing cultures on the planet.

During NAIDOC Week, all Australians are asked to embrace and acknowledge the true history of the country – a history which dates back thousands of generations, with the footprints of First Nations peoples the first to fall on Australian soil, with a deep and ongoing spiritual and cultural connection to the land and sea being maintained to the present day.

“All Australians should celebrate has that we have the world’s oldest oral stories and that our First Peoples engraved the world’s first maps, made the earliest paintings of ceremonies, invented unique technologies and built and engineered structures that predate well-known ancient sites such as the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge,” a NAIDOC spokesperson said. 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were Australia’s first explorers, our first navigators, first engineers, first farmers, first botanists, first scientists, first diplomats, astronomers and artists, and NAIDOC Week “is about seeing, hearing and learning the 65,000+ year history of this country – a country that was criss-crossed by generations of brilliant Nations,” the spokesperson added. 

To access further information about the NAIDOC 2020 theme please visit the website, here.