1939 Cumeragunja Mission Walk-off
2022-02-04 00:00 - 23:59 (Australia/Sydney)
In 1939 the Aboriginal people walked off Cumeragunja Mission in New South Wales in protest at living conditions and restrictions.

Cape York Peninsula Heads of Agreement Signed
2022-02-05 00:00 - 23:59

Word of God Sunday
2022-02-06 08:00 - 17:00
The Word of God Sunday is devoted to the celebration, study and dissemination of the Word of God. We will celebrate it in Australia for the first time on 6 February. So our podcast, The Revolution of Tenderness, will consider the Word of God in Catholic Social Teaching. With help from Scripture scholars, we will explore passages of Scripture that are quoted in Catholic Social Teaching documents.

Episode 1 features Professor Mary Coloe.

1973: Woodward Royal Commission into Land Rights
2022-02-08 00:00 - 23:59
On this day in 1973 the Woodward Royal Commission into Land Rights in the Northern Territory was established. The Central Land Council situate this event in its historical context here.

1965: Freedom Ride in Australia Begins
2022-02-12 00:00 - 23:59
A group of Sydney University students organised a bus tour through western and coastal New South Wales towns in 1965. As the National Museum of Australia website explains:

Their purpose was threefold. The students planned to draw public attention to the poor state of Aboriginal health, education and housing. They hoped to point out and help to lessen the socially discriminatory barriers which existed between Aboriginal and white residents. And they also wished to encourage and support Aboriginal people themselves to resist discrimination. The students had formed into a body called Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA) in 1964 to plan this trip and ensure media coverage.

Charles Perkins, an Arrente man born in Alice Springs, who was a third year arts student at the university, was elected president of SAFA. The group included Ann Curthoys who would later write a history of these events, Jim Spigelman who would later become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and Darce Cassidy, an arts student who was also a part-time reporter for the ABC.

Source: https://indigenousrights.net.au/civil_rights/freedom_ride,_1965

2008: Apology to the Stolen Generation by the Australian Government
2022-02-13 00:00 - 23:59
On this day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to Indigenous Australians, and especially the Stolen Generation, for past government policies of removing First Nations children from their families. The National Museum of Australia explains here how the journey to a national apology began with the Bringing Them Home Report.

Watch the apology in the video below.

2015: Death of Faith Bandler AC
2022-02-13 00:00 - 23:59
Faith Bandler AC, activist for Indigenous and South Sea Islander rights, passed away on this day in 2005. An obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald highlighted her achievements:

Faith Bandler changed people’s hearts and minds in support of human rights and social justice. Her smile, no doubt, helped. The National Trust listed her as a national living treasure in 1997 and the Herald, in 2001, included her among the 100 most influential Australians of the 20th century. The Good Weekend, in 2011, included her in a list of 50 women considered the most influential in the world.

Her greatest achievement was her 10-year campaign for Aboriginal rights leading to the 1967 referendum which changed the Constitution and included Aborigines in the census. She worked for Aboriginal education and housing, was a founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the Australian Republican Movement, campaigned for the rights of South Sea Islanders and wrote six books, including Wacvie (1977), a biographical novel about her father.

Read the full text here.

1958: Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders established
2022-02-16 00:00 - 23:59

1990: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission established
2022-03-05 00:00 - 23:59

1913: Founding of Canberra as Australia's captial
2022-03-12 00:00 - 23:59

Harmony Week
2022-03-15 08:00 - 2022-03-21 17:00
Australia celebrates Harmony Week in the days leading up to the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It is a time to celebrate cultural diversity and share the message that everyone belongs.

Find out about Harmony Week events near you here. It is a great time to reflect on chapters 6 and 7 of Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship).

“The image of a polyhedron can represent a society where differences coexist, complementing, enriching and reciprocally illuminating one another, even amid disagreements and reservations. Each of us can learn something from others.” Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, n 215.

National Close the Gap Day
2022-03-17 08:00 - 17:00

2019: Death of Deacon Boniface Perdjert
2022-03-18 00:00 - 23:59
Deacn Boniface, a respected Elder and the first Aboriginal permanent deacon, passed away in 2019. As the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council’s tribute page for Deacon Boniface says:

His words and actions spoke loudly to the members of the Wadeye Community – of which he was a deeply loved and respected Elder – but also to the Catholic Hierarchy with whom he shared his wisdom on many official occasions. http://www.natsicc.org.au/a-tribute-to-deacon-boniface.html

On the first anniversary of Deacon Boniface’s death we share for your reflection these words that he wrote in the later 1970s:

God did not begin to take an interest in people with the incarnation of his Son, nor with Abraham. My people existed here in Australia thousands of years before Abraham. In all that time God was with my people. He worked through their culture. He was saving us despite human weakness. He was preparing us for the day when he would see the features of Aboriginals in the image of his Son. So i must recognize, I must use the things of God that are in my culture. I mus use them in his service. If I do not do this, my faith and my service are shallow. They are pretending. They belong to someone else, not me. God has asked us t love him with wjhole mind, heart and soul. So i must give myself to God as an Aboriginal. This is what God wants or he would not have made me what I am. http://www.natsicc.org.au/a-tribute-to-deacon-boniface.html

National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence
2022-03-18 00:00 - 23:59
This national day is observed in Australia. Find resources to help you to mark this day here.

1866: Beginning of Sisters of St Joseph at Penola, SA
2022-03-19 00:00 - 23:59

2005: Abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC)
2022-03-24 00:00 - 23:59

1877: Death of Caroline Chisholm
2022-03-25 00:00 - 23:59

1941: Death of William Cooper
2022-03-29 00:00 - 23:59
William Cooper was an inspirational Aboriginal leader in New South Wales and Victoria in the early part of the 20th century and a founding secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League. The league was created to lobby state and federal governments on behalf of Aboriginal people. The powerful symbolic gesture of a Day of Mourning on 26 January, along with a petition to the British monarch calling for Aboriginal representation in federal parliament, inspired generations of activists working for justice for Indigenous Australians. National Museum of Australia

1897: Death of Jandamarra
2022-04-01 00:00 - 23:59
Jandamarra was an Aboriginal resistance leader of the Bunuba people in Western Australia. Find our more about his story here.

1997: Bringing Them Home Report published
2022-04-05 00:00 - 23:59
The report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families was published on this day in 1997. Read the Bringing Them Home Report here and access information and teaching resources on the Stolen Generations here.

1991: Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission Final Report signed
2022-04-15 00:00 - 23:59

ANZAC Day
2022-04-25 00:00 - 23:59
Detail from Poppy Fields in Summer by Laurentiu Lordache.

For Reflection

“…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2: 4).

Anzac Day has come to be considered one of the most sacred days in the year for many Australians, honouring the sacrifice of those who gave their lives so that others could live in peace and freedom. We remember grieving families, cities in rubble, and fields turned to mud and ashes. We remember broken bodies, spirits, minds, and lives: the terrible cost of war. We remember children, women, and men killed or maimed in military operations. We remember all Australians who served, and who serve today. We continue to work wholeheartedly for justice and peace in our world so that war will be no more.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

From For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Prayer

God of love and liberty,
we bring our thanks this day for the peace and security we enjoy, which was won for us through the courage and devotion of those who gave their lives in time of war.

We pray that their labour and sacrifice may not be in vain, but that their spirit may live on in us and in generations to come. That the liberty, truth and justice which they sought to preserve may be seen and known in all the nations upon earth.

This we pray in the name of the one who gave his life for the sake of the world,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.
from the ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee

Music

The Last Post (Composer unknown, 17th Century, Britain).

ANZAC Day
2022-04-25 00:00 - 23:59

1998: Death of Shirley 'Mum Shirl' Smith, Aboriginal community leader
2022-04-28 00:00 - 23:59

2016: Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen appointed Bishop of Parramatta
2022-05-05 00:00 - 23:59
Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv is the first Vietnamese born bishop to lead a diocese outside of Vietnam and the first Vietnamese born bishop in Australia. He was born in 1961 in Dong Nai in Vietnam. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, his family has been dispersed.

In 1984, Vincent Long became a professed Conventual Franciscan friar (OFM Conv) and studied for the priesthood in Melbourne. After his priestly ordination on 30 December in 1989, he was sent to Rome for further studies and was awarded a licentiate in Christology and Spirituality from the Pontifical Faculty of St Bonaventure.

He served as an assistant and then parish priest for seven years in Kellyville within the Diocese of Parramatta and for seven years in Springvale in Victoria before being elected Superior of the Order of Friars Minor Conventuals in Australia in 2005. He served as Assistant General in Rome from 2008 until 2011, responsible for the Asia-Oceania section of his Order.

In 2011, he was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne in which role he served for nearly five years. On 16 June 2016, Bishop Vincent Long OFM Conv was installed as the fourth Bishop of Parramatta at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta.

Find out more about Bishop Vincent here.

1992: Introduction of mandatory detention of asylum seekers in Australia
2022-05-06 00:00 - 23:59

1970: First anti-Vietnam War Moratorium march in Australia
2022-05-08 00:00 - 23:59

1997: Wik 'Ten Point Plan' to extinguish native title announced
2022-05-08 00:00 - 23:59

National Sorry Day
2022-05-26 00:00 - 23:59
Our Home (2019) – Patrice Muthaymiles-Mahoney OAM (1975 – )

Sorry Day has been observed since 1998, one year after the Bringing Them Home report was presented in the Australian Federal Parliament. This report detailed the impact of the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Sorry Day offers an opportunity to reflect on the hardship faced when children were taken into institutional and foster care by governments and church agencies and placed with non-Indigenous families. These Stolen Generations suffered greatly from being removed from their loved ones at such an early age, and for many the scars were life-long. However, Sorry Day is also an opportunity to “acknowledge the strength of Stolen Generations Survivors and reflect on how we can all play a part in the healing process for our people and nation.”

Going Deeper

https://www.reconciliation.org.au

Prayer

Almighty and loving God, you who created ALL people in your image.

Lead us to seek your compassion as we listen to the stories of our past. You gave your only Son, Jesus, who died and rose again so that sins will be forgiven.

We place before you the pain and anguish of dispossession of land, language, lore, culture, and family kinship that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have experienced. We live in faith that all people will rise from the depths of despair and hopelessness. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families have endured the pain and loss of loved ones, through the separation of children from their families.

We are sorry and ask God’s forgiveness.

Touch the hearts of the broken, homeless, and inflicted and heal their spirits.

In your mercy and compassion walk with us as we continue our journey of healing to create a future that is just and equitable.

Lord, you are our hope. Amen.

Aboriginal and Islander Commission of the National Council of Churches in Australia, (NATSIEC) 2003.

Artwork

Our Home (2019) by Patrice Muthaymiles-Mahoney OAM (1975 – )

Music

Took the Children Away by Archie Roach.

Took The Children Away – Archie Roach

1997: Bringing Them Home Report tabled in Parliament
2022-05-26 00:00 - 23:59
