It’s NAIDOC and this year’s theme is “Heal Country”.
This update looks at what healing country might mean for all of us.
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An exploration of the meaning of Healing Cuntry on the Naidoc Website
Country…sustains our lives in every aspect – spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially, and culturally. It is more than a place, it is spoken of like a person. Country is family, kin, law, lore, ceremony, traditions, and language. Through our languages and songs, we speak to Country; through our ceremonies and traditions we sing to – and celebrate Country – and Country speaks to us.
Increasingly, we worry about Country.
In this Conversation article, Bhiame Williamson looks at what it means to heal country and three ways we can all help. Far from being powerless to protect Country, there is much an everyday Australian can do. Here are three examples:
1) Make a submission to the Juukan Gorge inquiry.
2) Donate to charities that support Indigenous land and sea management programs.
3) Write an email to your local MP and ask how they’re supporting local Indigenous land and sea management programs, including ranger groups or cultural burning initiatives.
Return to Uluru
In this historical narrative, Mark McKenna examines one event in 1934 – the shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokununna by white policeman Bill McKinnon, and subsequent Commonwealth inquiry – a mirror of racial politics in the Northern Territory at the time.
Through speaking with the families of both killer and victim, McKenna unearthed new evidence that transformed the historical record and the meaning of the event for today. As he explains, ‘Every thread of the story connected to the present in surprising ways.’ In a sequence of powerful revelations, McKenna explores what truth-telling and reconciliation look like in practice.
The ailing Murray-Darling River system is almost constantly in the news but we hear very little from the people who’ve cared for this country and its water for millennia.
To make people aware of the environmental disasters from their point of view, Aboriginal elders, custodians and others from the Basin’s waterways offered an open invitation to their water healing ceremony at the birthplace of the Murrumbidgee River. Led by Uncle Max Harrison, with Sue Bulger, Bruce Pascoe, Richard Swain, Wayne Thorpe
