Reconciliation Week

Did you know that Reconciliation Week goes from 27 May to 3 June every year, regardless of what days of the week they fall on? (I didn't!)

27 May is the date of the 1967 referendum, when over 90% of voters supported the removal of 2 small sections of the constitution relating to Indigenous Australians. Before the referendum, the constitution said that the Commonwealth had power to make special laws in respect to "the people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any State" (i.e. only the states were allowed to make laws about Indigenous Australians). And it also said that, "In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives should not be counted." (The Australian constitution no longer mentions Indigenous Australians at all.)

3 June marks the date of the High Court Mabo decision, which overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius, or ‘land belonging to no-one’. Short for Mabo and others v Queensland (No 2) (1992), the Mabo case fought the legal concept that Australia and the Torres Strait Islands were not owned by Indigenous peoples because they did not use the land in certain ways.

Nungalinya College celebrated Reconciliation Week with an evening of songs, dances, testimonies and prayer. It was such an encouragement to join with Indigenous brothers and sisters in Christ to worship God and acknowledge that Jesus came for all people – black fellas and white fellas alike.

Give thanks for the unity that we have in Christ, regardless of our backgrounds. And pray that Christians in Australia will lead the way of reconciliation.