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National Forgiveness Week began with a small Aboriginal community choosing grace over revenge — and now it’s becoming a powerful force for healing and unity across Australia, Fiji, Vanuatu, and beyond.

The Never-Never is a remote region in the Northern Territory of Australia, a vast picturesque place of deep gorges, crocodile infested rivers and diverse tropical habitats.

There, in the small town of Beswick (Wugularr), the Aboriginal community has been holding a week of forgiveness every year since 2006 to encourage the practice of forgiveness. They remind one another to forgive misunderstandings, grudges, cold-heartedness, quarrels and outright sins, both small and large.

Lorraine Bennett, one of the Beswick Church elders, said, “We love forgiveness. When we forgive, we feel such joy in our hearts.”

Now, with the assistance of the Roper Gulf Regional Council they are launching the message of forgiveness out to broader Australia as National Forgiveness Week — an inaugural national initiative of the Aboriginal people to Australia.

National Forgiveness Week in Fiji

Forgiveness Week began with an unknown African tribe sometime in the 19th Century, where each tribe member pledged to forgive any neighbour any wrong, either real or imagined. The week was held annually and culminated with a festival of happiness and rejoicing.

In 2002, after reading an account of the African Forgiveness Week, and after an extended period of prayer, Australian Christian leaders Rob Warren and David Newby took a message to Fiji. Backed by a prayer team in Sydney, they departed to Suva, not knowing anyone in Fiji, and having had only brief communication with one Fijian pastor.

On arriving in Suva, they were taken to a meeting of the Assembly of Christian Churches in Fiji (ACCF) where the heads of eighteen Christian denominations were sitting around a table. This meeting had been convened to discuss the mitigation of judicial sentences handed down to a Fijian commando unit which had been involved in a military rebellion in November 2000.

When invited to speak, Rob told the chairman they were not there to discuss the topic at hand. The chairman, Ratu Epeli Kanaimawi, asked why they had come. They conveyed the message that God had given them: God wanted Fiji all to hold National Forgiveness Week (NFW) across the country, not confined to churches, but out in the open, to teach people the principles and value of one-on-one forgiveness.

Every denominational leader at that meeting voted to hold NFW throughout the island nation of Fiji. Rob and David returned many times over the next eighteen months to encourage the churches in their endeavour. Despite these efforts, the ACCF reluctantly admitted that the idea of NFW was simply too big, and they could not do it.

Then Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase heard about National Forgiveness Week. He liked the idea and passed it through his cabinet. He organised and funded it from the government purse with a $700,000 budget. It was held in 2004 in all the cities of Fiji and in twenty regional centres.

Immediately prior to the inaugural National Forgiveness Week, Fiji’s Prime Minister was invited to address the United Nations in New York. He told them about the impending eight-day event. After speaking, a long line of delegates formed wanting to congratulate him and shake his hand in response to the National Forgiveness Week initiative.

Fiji National Forgiveness Week (which they called National Reconciliation and Forgiveness Week) addressed issues of forgiveness at multiple levels in society through cultural gatherings and public events where ministers spoke openly to the unchurched about the importance of one-on-one forgiveness. They encouraged the practice of forgiveness in local communities, businesses, schools and families.

The effects of forgiveness were felt nationwide, with positive daily reporting in print and broadcast media throughout the week. It was received and celebrated with great effect as the ‘food’ of forgiveness was laid at the feet of 850,000 people.

Some highlights of Fiji National Forgiveness Week 2004 can be viewed below.

Line of Latitude

Back in Australia, the prayer team perceived a line of latitude running from Fiji into Australia. When they checked an atlas, the line went through Vanuatu. So, David and Rob travelled to Port Vila, not knowing anyone there either. Through a chance meeting in the main street of Port Vila, they were introduced to the Ministers’ Fraternal unity group. The ministers had heard about what happened in Fiji and were quick to adopt National Forgiveness Week into their calendar. But as with Fiji, the churches of Vanuatu were unable to undertake such a large vision.

David and Rob went back to Vanuatu on numerous occasions to encourage the churches but to no avail, until the same thing happened: the nation’s Prime Minister, Edward Natapei, heard of it and funded it with a budget of five million Vatu. In 2010, Vanuatu held its inaugural National Forgiveness Week (which they called Vanuatu Forgiveness Week).

During the week people reconciled with one another as the message of forgiveness was put into practice throughout the community. In the village of Pango, on the outskirts of Port Vila, a contingent from the small island of Moso arrived. The two communities had been feuding over the killing of 22 villagers back in the 1850s! Then after 160 years, they came to forgive and to be forgiven. They publicly repented before one another and exchanged gifts. Tears of repentance and joy were shed on that momentous occasion. After sharing a meal, they formed two lines and progressively embraced. It was a truly wonderful sight to behold.

Vanuatu Forgiveness Week provided a platform for many families and villagers to forgive and reconcile. It was held predominantly on the two islands of Efate and Espiritu Santo but fell away when the PM lost office shortly afterwards, and sadly, to date, has not been held since.

Australia and the Beswick Church

After rechecking the line of latitude on a map of Oceania which the prayer team had perceived earlier, they found that the ‘line’ ended in the desert region of the Northern Territory in Australia. But there was nothing at the end of the line, so they sought a more detailed map. There in the desert was a small remote Aboriginal community called Beswick. So, in 2005, concurrent with their efforts in Vanuatu, Rob and David went to Beswick with the same message.

The local Aboriginal Church had ‘ears to hear’ and began Beswick Forgiveness Week the following year. This spilled over into surrounding communities but was mainly confined to Beswick itself. Year after year, the Beswick Church faithfully held Forgiveness Week in September prior to the onset of the wet season.

The practice of payback is firmly entrenched in the Aboriginal way-of-life. Put simply, payback is revenge. When someone is hurt then the family members retaliate. Payback is deemed to be complete only after equitable suffering has been meted out to the offender or their family.

There is no word for ‘forgiveness’ in the Aboriginal language, but forgiveness is slowly changing Aboriginal mindsets from a culture of payback to one of gracious forgiveness.

One influential man named Sammy said that his brother-cousin had been run down and killed in Katherine by an Aboriginal truck driver. Sammy’s family met to discuss what they should do to the truck driver or his family as payback.

On the agenda were various punishments, when Sammy spoke up. “Why don’t we forgive him?” suggested Sammy. They asked him to explain what he meant. After a lengthy discussion, they decided to exercise forgiveness as their right of payback. So, that is what they did, and the truck driver was set free from Aboriginal lore by their act of forgiveness.

The Forgiveness Message Grows

Gradually, the National Forgiveness Week prayer team disbanded, and in 2014 David passed away. Rob tried to generate a broader interest in National Forgiveness Week but to no avail. Although never forsaking what God had told him to do, he could not see any way forward and began to lose heart after trying and failing so many times.

In 2020, Rob was invited to lunch with a prominent prayer leader in Australia, Sue Tinworth. She offered her assistance and called for a new prayer team to be formed, drawing on her array of contacts. People joined from all over Australia and the prayer team grew to 70+ people who regularly came together on Signal and Zoom to support a fresh push towards an Australia-wide National Forgiveness Week.

The group took on new initiatives, including Bougainville Forgiveness Week and Forgiveness Week proposals in Papua New Guinea. They also pursued a renewed approach to Fiji to reinstate NFW after an eighteen-year hiatus. The break was caused by the Bainimarama government’s cancellation of Fiji National Reconciliation and Forgiveness Week in 2007.

After five years, the NFW prayer team felt it was God’s timing to stimulate Beswick Forgiveness Week. However, unbeknownst to the NFW team at that time, the Beswick Church had already begun organising NFW on their own initiative. They had approached the Roper Gulf Regional Council and had secured funding for chairs, portable toilets and showers to expand the reach of National Forgiveness Week.

The team linked arms with the Beswick Church initiative as they arranged NFW for the new time slot of 27th to 29th June 2025. The three day event was planned as the culmination of a community outreach in Beswick in the earlier part of the week.

National Forgiveness Week had been twenty years in the making, slowly growing from its humble beginnings towards a truly national event. We watch and wait in anticipation of what God is doing as the seeds of forgiveness are sown into Australia by our First Nations people.

For more information about National Forgiveness Week please see www.forgivestories.com/nfw. Robert Warren’s book When Angry Hearts Forgive can be purchased at Amazon.