Ceremony: All Our Yesterdays for Today

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for 65,000 years or more? The First Knowledges series series provides a deep understanding of the expertise, wisdom and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians.

We perform ceremonies every day. Some are personal, some highly organised and others are repeated for generations. For First Nations Australians, ceremonies create the backbone of cultural practice.

Ceremony: All Yesterdays for Today tells how Indigenous ceremonies link people today to those of the past in a continuum of inherited stories, places and memories – from rights of passage to smoking ceremonies and Welcomes to Country, and many others.

The authors focus on examples from their lives, including personal ceremonies from Quandamooka waterways and lands, community-centred ceremonies held by Warlpiri people in the Tanami desert, stories told to them by Elders and experiences of performing at Opening ceremonies for national events. Stories of ceremony are vast and diverse and many ceremonies are of a secret scared nature and cannot be told to those not initiated or intimately connected to the people, as the authors acknowledge. Rather, this book highlights the importance of ceremony across time and place on both a personal as well as national level that recognises and celebrates Australia’s First Nations history and culture.

‘Ceremonies can take many forms; in First Nations cultures it is the sense of intergenerational observance that connects us to our families, our Countries and our histories. Ceremonies are a way of connecting all our yesterdays to today.’
– Wesley Enoch

About the series: Each book is a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and editors; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.

About the author

Wesley Enoch AM is a proud Quandamooka man from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island) and is an internationally acclaimed playwright and artistic director.

Georgia Curran is a research fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Georgia's research interests focus on Indigenous music and language, performance ethnography, cultural continuity and change and the maintenance and revitalisation of endangered musical traditions.

Wesley Enoch and Georgia Curran
Published August 2025
Paperback
224 pages
198mm x 130cm
ISBN 9781760764074