Families from St Teresa's and St Patrick's College this year travelled from their home communities to celebrate this year's NAIDOC. Over 800 family members and friends of the school communities, gathered on Warrgamay Country (Abergowrie) to dance, sing, cook, share, listen, yarn and celebrate the longest living cultures in the world.

 The three-day experience offered our communities an enriching opportunity to strengthen relationships to better support our students on their learning journey. The focus of the celebration was cultural leadership, celebrating culture and strengthening family and community connections was the focus of our student-led NAIDOC celebrations. 

The celebration was organised by the students of the two secondary catholic colleges. For several months students from St Teresa's and St Patrick's met via zoom and face to face to lead, discuss and develop a plan for the celebrations. The students embraced and actioned this year's NAIDOC theme, 'Get up! Stand Up! Show Up! by developing a cultural event for families and their school communities. 

At the students' requests, the schools were able to organise families to travel from all over Queensland and as far south as Melbourne. Families travelled from the Torres Strait Islands, Gulf, Yarrabah and Palm Island. Our students invited their families to bring traditional food, cultural practices and traditions to share. Each family shared in the preparations and sharing of traditional knowledge and practices. These included care for Country knowledge, traditional weaving, preparing traditional food, making traditional spears, teaching cultural dance and song, or helping to facilitate the important yarns at the yarning circle. 

The NAIDOC Celebrations nestled in between School Immersion and On Country experiences. It really was an amazing experience. One that I think is both unique and quite ground-breaking in the way we have used a student voice to create a culturally rich/family focused event to support learning and leadership of our students.