James Doogue

In the latest edition of Quadrant Magazine, the editor and Australian historian Keith Windschuttle writes about the now ubiquitous 'Welcome To Country' ceremonies which are a modern invention. They achieve the opposite of a welcome. It tells those who don't have a speck of indigenous blood, that they don't belong, regardless of the contribution they have made to modern society.

The full article describes the short history of the 'Welcome to Country', the reason it was invented, and the reactions of some indigenous people to the invention. You can read it here: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2022/07/sacred-traditions-invented-yesterday/

Here's some key points Windschuttle makes:

Wherever Labor governments have gained power in recent decades they have made it compulsory for every government instrumentality, and many independent organisations they fund, to begin every public meeting with a cere­monial acknowledgement: the welcome to country of Aboriginal traditional landowners.

This ritual is now so ubiquitous it is virtually inescapable, and is now performed far more frequently than singing the national anthem or raising of the Australian flag. It was surreptitiously introduced by academic and government bureaucracies without any public debate, let alone public support, and its authors have never been named or their purposes justified. Nonetheless, since the passing of the Native Title Act in 1993, it has been foisted on a mystified public as though it had the sanction of deep indigenous tradition.

Wikipedia, where the entry is mostly written by commentators who brook no opposition, claims the welcome to country is "thousands of years” old. The site nonetheless has only been able to trace any evidence for the ceremony back to 1973.

As the Northern Territory MP, the traditional Walpiri woman Bess Price, later told a reporter from the Australian, these cere­monies were not meaningful to traditional people. "We don’t do that in communities,” she said. "It’s just a recent thing. It’s just people who are trying to grapple at something they believe should be traditional.”

Moreover, rather than being a symbol of reconciliation, many of its utterances are, on any objective assessment, disrespectful. Most of those who make them never take the trouble to discover the actual name of the local clan but simply acknowledge nameless "elders” or "the traditional owners”.

In February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened the forty-second Australian Parliament by hosting a welcoming ceremony by the traditional Aboriginal owners, the Ngunnawal people.

……….the traditional owners of the land where Parliament House stands, and indeed most of the ACT, are the Kamberri people, after whom the first white landowner, Joshua John Moore, named his land grant in 1824. If she is right — and her book is the most thorough analysis of the subject — then the Australian Parliament was acknowledging the wrong people, or at the very least using the wrong name for whoever actually qualifies as the descendants of the local Aboriginal people. This is hardly a show of respect for Aboriginal people, as its originators claimed. For those with Kamberri genes, it’s an insult by omission.

You would have thought that the federal parliament would have had the resources to research the question properly, and that the Prime Minister’s office would have ensured they did, before allowing Rudd to go ahead with the blunder of using the wrong name at the opening of his first parliament. Today, in 2022, the Parliament has rectified the situation but has only got things partly right. It now includes both Kamberri and Ngunnawal names in its ceremony, despite the latter’s dubious claim to authenticity.

If Australian leftists want to continue inventing Aboriginal traditions, they obviously need to lift the quality of their research. In fact, we would all be better off if they gave away the whole tawdry game. Most of the white dignitaries who speak these rites are merely going through the motions and, as Bess Price says, genuine Aborigines don’t recognise them as part of their own traditions. No one can seriously claim they contribute to inter-racial respect or reconciliation.

The truth is, the welcome to country is a demeaning ritual, embraced by urban Aboriginal activists and their white supporters for the same reasons Hobsbawm attributes to the authoritarians and social engineers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: to mould the behaviour of their subjects to the preferred political position through "liturgical sophistication and zeal and a conscious manipulation of symbols”.

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