Guests including Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner, Premier Peter Gutwein and City of Launceston mayor Albert van Zetten were treated to traditional dancing with smoking boughs of eucalyptus.

The Takara Waranta cultural celebration is set to become an annual event that is all about friendship, Reconciliation Tasmania co-chair Fiona Hughes said.

"We want to share our culture and we want people to be able to come together and be a part of the whole community, instead of having so much segregation - because I've seen that all my life, growing up in Tasmania," she said.

"A lot of people just see us marching in the streets - and we're a strong people, and we've had to be a strong people to survive. But we're also a happy and contended community, and we want to show the broader community that we can belong together as a people.

"But we need the wider community to understand our culture, and learn from it, and respect it."

In her speech opening the event, Professor Warner said education was a core ingredient in true reconciliation between the Aboriginal community and wider Tasmanian community.

IN OTHER NEWS:

"I want to pay my respects to the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal community, who have survived invasion and dispossession," she said.

"[Despite this] they continue to maintain their identity, their culture, and their Indigenous rights.

"One of the things I lament is the fact that white Tasmanians know so little about Aboriginal culture and history. Clearly our educational curriculum has neglected these issues. In primary school, we now have - in Maggie Walter's words - 'the pretty stuff', such as twine and kelp basket making.

"In secondary school there is not a lot, and much too much emphasis on the Black War, and not enough on the deep, 40,000 years of history and culture. But I think there are optimistic signs that this is changing."

In her Welcome to Country, Reconciliation Tasmania Ms Hughes paid homage to her ancestors.

"The old people who lived in this beautiful country; whose bones are beneath the earth," she said.

"Their carvings and ochre are on stone; their lines of shell along the coast; their whispers on the wind; their lines of language crossing the rivers. Their songs, this country, are weathered in time, like the lines on their - and now, our - faces."

Events were also held in the North-West and South.