A ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony, done in the correct manner, may well be a welcome addition to our culture, (Chris Kenny, Australian newspaper, September 21, 2024), but considering the manner which it is performed now, it is not. It is now a highly politicised intrusion upon just about every government, large public activity, and many corporate and social activities, including Qantas flights, and it has no place in these events and locations.
Although there have been people living on this continent for perhaps sixty or seventy thousand years, there are disputed claims regarding whether they are direct ancestors of the current groups of Aboriginal natives. They could have been humanoids of another genus or homo sapiens groups that have been obliterated by the current native groups. There are no positive remains to identify them, just a few signs of their former existence. We know that there was a migration into northern Australia between ten thousand and five thousand years ago and they must have displaced some earlier groups.
However, even five thousand years is a long period in our species history and the various tribal groups managed to become custodians of their own particular areas of land, land which they did not own but for which they were spiritual custodians. Although in constant conflict with neighbouring tribes, they did allow some movement across borders and there were welcome to country ceremonies, to ensure a peaceful passage or short stay, of which we really don’t know a great deal. There is no recorded history.
The pre-cursor to the current ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony was initiated, by media and/or entertainment personnel, for a special international sport event in the 1970s, in response to the Māori ‘haka’ and as such it had some relevance. If reserved for similar events it would still have relevance and could be a friendly addition to our current culture, a culture which has not drawn very much on the older Stone Age culture of the earlier natives.
However, this is not how this ceremony is performed today. As there were many tribes in pre-colonial days, so there should be many ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies necessary, each unique to the old tribal areas. These tribal areas are generally understood but few, if any of those claiming Aboriginal heritage, live on those land now, even fewer speak the language or know the old customs and culture and none live according to pre-colonial cultural ways. Dress, dance, and words in ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies are all modern fabrications, developed for theatrical effect. For many early colonists, or visitors, the only welcome they received was a spear and that dated back long before Captain Cook.
But worse than that, these ceremonies are being used as an opportunity to try and tell those who attend, often with little or no enjoyment, that they are not really welcome, they are intruders into somebody else’s country and land, not modern Australia. They are occasions when both visitors and Australians, of all sorts of ancestry and length of time living in Australia, are told that Australia is not a sovereign nation, that sovereignty still belongs to the descendants of the original Aboriginal natives, who will always claim Australia as their own land, excluding all the newcomers. It is a ceremony of exclusion and division rather than being a ceremony of welcoming and unity. And to make it worse, some of those ceremonies are being performed by people who are not even full Aboriginals but of mixed heritage, sometimes even less than 50 per cent Aboriginal native.
The Aboriginal industry is actively trying to split Australia apart, to divide residents into those with approved Aboriginality and all other, no matter how long they have been in Australia. It is an insult to all immigrants and to the development which has taken place since the arrival of the first fleet of colonists, a development embraced by all those of Aboriginal heritage in Australia. Nobody wants to return to the society and culture of pre-colonial days.
‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies should be abandoned, except for very special international occasions, when all Australians can welcome their visitors. Then it becomes a unifying ceremony and it can drift into our modern culture, as it should.
