Only About Children Hawthorn

At Only About Children (Oac) Hawthorn, we acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Land - the Wurundjeri people - and are excited to explore opportunities to respectfully engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, histories, and cultures as a community. We want to create a community space that is working towards authentic awareness of Wurundjeri culture, by developing respectful relationships with local Elders and broader members of the Wurundjeri community.   Our approach to strengthening personal and professional relationships will be to advocate for all staff members to reflect on their engagement with Wurundjeri people and perspectives and to create a holistic approach to reconciliation at our campus. We aim to critically examine our current understandings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and reflect on how our engagement with these perspectives relates to our own personal values. We are committed to respectfully embedding Wurundjeri perspectives, histories, and culture within our learning and broader discourse.   We visualise our pedagogy, engagements with children, and learning environments as spaces and experiences that offer many possibilities for acknowledgement and appreciation of Wurundjeri culture. We consider the ideologies, culture, language, and experiences of the Wurundjeri people an integral part of how the Oac Hawthorn community respectfully thinks about its history, present, and future – and aim to foster children’s understanding of diverse ways of being, helping them to grow into culturally literate citizens of this Land.  Only About Children Hawthorn, we aim to contribute to reconciliation through embracing strategies for social change - supporting an Australia that acknowledges and appreciates its rich Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories- and are excited to see the cultural and societal shifts that emerge with such change.