Welcome to Country? Welcome to Lunacy!

Brendan Kerin, a cultural educator from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council in Sydney, gave a controversial Welcome to Country a couple of weeks ago at an AFL match. Here’s my take on it.

Okay, so first of all, I understand his point. Welcome to Country isn’t performed to welcome Australians to Australia. However, I would argue that being welcomed to the current lands we’re gathered on is in essence the same thing. If you grew up in the Inner West of Sydney, then being welcomed to the lands of the Wangal, is the same thing as being welcomed to your own lands. It’s divisive is it not? According to the University of New South Wales, “A Welcome to Country is a ceremony performed by a local Aboriginal person of significance to acknowledge and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands.” And that’s the problem. If an Aboriginal elder is “giving consent” to be on their land, it means it’s not our land. Of course this ceremony is going to divide Australians.

Secondly, Mr Kerin says the ceremony is not designed to cater for white people. Okay, if it’s only an Aboriginal thing, then why force white people, or any other people for that matter, to sit through it? If it’s not for us, why do it at all, especially if it’s upsetting to so many people?

Thirdly, claiming that Aboriginal people have been doing the ceremony for 250,000 years-plus is just ludicrous, although I’ll assume he was just using poetic licence to indicate that the ceremony has been going on for a very long time. But why not be accurate in your language? If he’s a cultural educator, why not use the correct facts and not hyperbole? According to the National Museum of Australia, Aboriginal people have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. Encyclopedia Britannica states that Australian Aboriginal peoples were some of the first humans to migrate out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. So why did he exaggerate and say 250,000 years? Will next year it be a million years? Or maybe a billion years?

BC – Before Cook – Okay, I guess that was a bit of a joke as some of the audience seemed to find it quite amusing. Interestingly, if Captain James Cook never sailed to Australia, then we probably wouldn’t be playing AFL and there would be no need for Mr Kerin to be giving a Welcome to Country at a gigantic stadium.

He also mentioned you could get into a lot of trouble if you wandered onto someone else’s lands without being welcomed. Well, that’s just not valid anymore. We can pretty much travel anywhere we want to in Australia, as long as it’s public land, and we’re not going to get in trouble. Australia is a free country, so we are free to travel to any part of it. If Mr Kerin truly believes that Welcome to Country is still valid, then he should be setting up border crossings at every one of the 250-plus Aboriginal nation groups. Why are we only welcoming people at football matches and entertainment events? If it’s truly about crossing into a different tribe’s land, then we should be doing it all the time as we drive down the Bruce Highway crossing through multiple lands.

Mr Kerin’s Welcome to Country was met with a strong backlash, but he remained defiant and responded to his critics on NITV saying, “We can sit back and look at the absolute stupidity and the ignorance of what people are saying over what I said. It’s mind boggling. I expected them to come out, because that’s what they do. By seeing people like Andrew Bolt, Pauline Hanson, Jacinta Price, Warren Mundine, confirms I’m on the right path. I was only given a very short amount of time, and I went over that. If I was going to do it again, I would go a little bit longer. But I wouldn’t change a word.”

Personally, I just don’t think Welcome to Country is relevant in modern Australia. Sure, I don’t mind it being used on ceremonial occasions, but people don’t go to, or watch, the football, or entertainment or artistic events, to be lectured about racial politics. That’s not the reason they’re there. It’s an unwelcome imposition. Recorded Welcomes to Country on buses and the like and at the start of online meetings and so on, in my opinion, is going too far. Telling us that sovereignty was never ceded, or “Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land”, does not feel welcoming in the slightest. Actually, it’s aggressive language. It’s hostile language.

This constant welcoming people to their own lands is actually proving to be counterproductive for Aboriginal relations, because it’s starting to piss people off now. It may have just started with a few eye-rolls here and there, but pushing this further will ultimately result in open resistance. As I indicated in the title, Welcome to Country? Welcome to Lunacy!

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn