Much to celebrate as NAIDOC Week turns 50, but also much to learn

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 19:32:59 +1000

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://theconversation.com/much-to-celebrate-as-naidoc-week-turns-50-but-also-much-to-learn-259900>

"In 1938, when Australia celebrated the sesquicentenary – 150 years since
Captain Phillip and the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove – the organisers
wanted Aboriginal people to be involved in a re-enactment.

More than 25 Aboriginal men were rounded up from Menindee in western New South
Wales. They were told if they did not perform the role of running up the beach
away from the British, their families would starve.

Ngiyaampaa elder Beryl (Yunghadhu) Philp Carmichael, who was three at the time,
recollected years later that all she could remember was the crying:

All the women were crying. Whether they were taking them away to be
massacred, no one knew.

The re-enactment was of course a fallacy of what really happened on January 26
1788 – it was a “white-washing” of history.

The mistreatment of the Menindee men illustrates the anger that was simmering
over the status and treatment of fellow Aboriginal kin.

Protests against Australia Day, which had been growing since the 1920s, led to
the Aboriginal Day of Mourning, the first national gathering of Indigenous
people speaking up against discrimination and dispossession.

The emergence of Aboriginal protest groups nearly a century ago gave birth in
the 1970s to what eventually came to be known as the National Aborigines and
Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC), which this year celebrates its
50th anniversary."

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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