SVD student, Shehan Fernando, says his pastoral experience in Central Australia has been a great learning experience in his training for life as a missionary, as he encounters Christ in the people and the land.

Shehan, who is Sri Lankan, and has been undertaking studies and formation at Melbourne’s Dorish Maru College, arrived in Santa Teresa in March, and will be based there until September when he moves on to Alice Springs.

National Reconciliation Week in Australia is observed in the last week in May, beginning this year on ‘Sorry Day’ (Sunday 26) and continuing through to the 3rd of June. The dates for NRW remain the same each year, yet they are not random: they commemorate two significant milestones on the reconciliation journey: the successful 1967 referendum, and the High Court Mabo decision respectively.

NRW in 2019 also coincides with the second anniversary of the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ – a statement issued by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders at their gathering in Central Australia in May, 2017.