12/08/2026
🌿 Welcome to Country & Smoking Ceremony 🌿
At the end of Term 2 our kinder community came together for our Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony. The Committee and staff pay particular thanks to Thane Garvey. The event was a gift to our Centre and something we value and are committed to ensuring we undertake each year.
Our Centre has the privilege of being located on Wurundjeri Country. We are reminded of this everyday by the manna gum and wattle that surround us, the Bunjil that fly above, and the thriving eel estuaries below in the Birrarung, the Yarra River.
We acknowledge that long before our Centre existed here, this area has been a significant site of intergenerational learning for millenia. We acknowledge and celebrate the value and importance of Indigenous knowledges and what they can bring to our children.
We also acknowledge the harm and dispossession that has occurred in this area over the past 200-years. It was here in Warrandyte that the Pound Bend Reserve was established in the 1850s. Aboriginal Reserves were sites to contain Aboriginal Australians as a means to confiscate Aboriginal land and attempt to the eradicate culture and people. This had, and continues to have significant implications on Aboriginal peoples, and on Aboriginal children.
Truth telling is an incredibly important part of reconciliation. Justice, healing, and structural change will not occur without it. And it begins with our children.
Our Centre this year has begun its journey to developing its first Reconciliation Action Plan via the Narragunnawali: Reconciliation in Education program. Long overdue we are excited to begin this journey and look forward to sharing more on it when we launch it later this year. We are already achieving a number of our draft Actions but we acknowledge we have a long way to go.
We look forward to building a strong relationship with the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung into the future. ❤️💛🖤
