To an outsider NAIDOC Week may seem to be oddly named. The National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) is named after a committee, something that few marketing gurus would recommend. But in hard times movements for change often begin with a committee, and that is the case with NAIDOC week.
It arose out of the experience of Indigenous Australians that they were neither respected nor listened to, and from their determination to change things. They thought it inappropriate to celebrate Australia Day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, because that was the beginning of their dispossession. In the face of considerable opposition they began to organise.
Although Australia Day is still celebrated on the anniversary of Indigenous expropriation, showing that the committee still has much work to do, NAIDOC Week provides an opportunity for all Australians to join in celebrating the culture and aspirations and hopes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The theme of NAIDOC Week this year is 'Voice, Treaty, Truth. Let's work together.' These words express the heart of the Uluru Statement, an Indigenous account of the current situation of their peoples and of what needs to change. It is a monument to the work of Indigenous activists in the maintenance of language and culture and in advocacy for rights. Voice, Treaty and Truth summarise the proper demands they make on non-Indigenous Australians. 'Let's work together' expresses the joint response for which they hope from the descendants of the First Peoples and of the later arrivals who supplanted them.
Voice is the first word of the NAIDOC theme. For most human beings communication by voice is central to identity. To be unable to speak or to be deprived of your native language is a grave disadvantage and affliction. The possession of a shared language connects people in families, tribes and ethnic groups and is central to their culture. For that reason Indigenous Australians place a high value on the preservation and use of their languages, whose use was actively discouraged in education and in public life. They lost their voice and with it the natural connection to clan, tribe and country.
To have a shared language enables you to join in conversation about the things that matter to you. You have a voice in the decisions that concern you. The experience of Indigenous Australians has largely been of deprivation of that voice.
When traditional forms of hunting,