VPS Celebrate NAIDOC Week With Learning and Art

Worimi Midigahs, do you hear those Yidakis (didgeridoos) being played? This is one of the things that happened at NAIDOC Week. 

NAIDOC is an important celebration because it highlights the history and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and it keeps their culture alive to continue to thrive.

At VPS we all take NAIDOC Week seriously, but Ms Nay was fully on board in leading the day. You might be wondering how the assembly was organised – it’s all thanks to Mrs Nay.

She told us, “I was lucky to have contact with Hayley Goodrick who runs the Djagala education program and she is a brilliant organiser as well as teacher so she made it easy to organise the day.”

This year’s NAIDOC WEEK theme is 50 Years of Deadly, with deadly meaning cool. Ms Nay says it is amazing that NAIDOC has been going on for 50 years.

For NAIDOC Week, Djalgala Education came to our school and set up a workshop with lots of Aboriginal tools. One at a time, they chose a student to come up and pick an item for them to talk about.

Before that, we had a wonderful assembly. At the assembly, we learned a few new words like worimi (hello) and midigah(friends), and if you put them together, it means ‘hello, friends’. We also learned that didgeridoo means yidaki, and you have to breathe in with your nose and out with your mouth to use it.

NAIDOC Week is held in Australia from Sunday to Saturday in the first week of July, but our school held it on the first day of school, Tuesday the 21 of July. NAIDOC stands for the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.

We all enjoyed this important day and had so much fun learning new things about Aboriginal culture.  It was also a great way to start the term.  It was deadly, and we’ll finish with one more word we learnt: Yanu! (Goodbye).