It is NAIDOC week, from 2-9th of July 2023 and this year’s theme is ‘For Our Elders’.
“Across every generation, our Elders have played, and continue to play, an important role and hold a prominent place in our communities and families. They are cultural knowledge holders, trailblazers, nurturers, advocates, teachers, survivors, leaders, hard workers and our loved ones.”
During a team lunch last week Murawin staff members shared what resonates with them about NAIDOC 2023 theme.
Our team shared their memories of learning from Elders through the organic day-to-day activities, watching Nana cook her ugari fritters, or the first times watching Elders fish. The gentle but strategically focused and authentic passing down of cultural knowledge, traditions and ways of life from which we learn and employ intuitively.
The team agreed there was a beautiful juxtaposition present as Our Elders’ guidance and nurturing us on our journeys, while simultaneously we are standing on their shoulders.
Our CEO, Carol Vale, is a Dunghutti woman who works tirelessly to guide and nurture not only her family, but Indigenous and non-Indigenous people around her. Carol ensures any non-Indigenous Murawin team and clients lean in to Indigenous allyship.
“NAIDOC week is such a special week that celebrates the strength, resilience, uniqueness and specialness of Indigenous Australians and we share this with our non-Indigenous family, colleagues and friends who continue to show up and journey with us every day.”
We remember Murawin’s co-founder and COO Greg McKenzie and the importance he placed on ensuring the wisdom and cultural ways of our Old People are woven into the operations of Murawin. Both Carol and Greg’s guidance continually reminds us that if we face situations of others we cannot understand, we can acknowledge the absence of shared experience and can listen. They have both provided the workplace platform that empowers us to bring our truths to the table, be genuine, and to feel comfortable to speak up and support Indigenous issues, as allies.
This NAIDOC week, we invite all Australians to remember, recognise and celebrate 60,000 years of the accumulative knowledge of Elders and ancestors of this country, while also looking forward to coming together later this year to vote YES for an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. Together we can all lean into this invitation to strengthen our Nation. We can together combine the robust strengths of our two worlds, the past worlds of different ancestors which we can now bring together and heal our Nation’s gap.
