Source : the age
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Two days after a neo-Nazi demonstrator booed Bunurong elder Uncle Mark Brown while he was delivering a traditional Welcome to Country at a Melbourne Anzac Day dawn service, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton were asked about it.
Albanese said it’s an organisation’s own prerogative to open events with a Welcome to Country but noted they are “matter of respect”. Meanwhile, Dutton said it’s “fair enough”, as a mark of respect, to have a Welcome to Country for the opening of parliament, but “to do it for the start of every meeting at work, or the start of a football game, I think other Australians think it is overdone and cheapens the significance of what it was meant to do … It’s dividing the country, not dissimilar to what the prime minister did with the Voice.”
During the fourth leaders’ debate, Peter Dutton took a strong stance against Welcome to Country ceremonies at sports games.Credit: AAPIMAGE
Putting sentiment to one side, on a fact basis, Dutton’s statement isn’t entirely correct. He’s conflated two different concepts.
What is a Welcome to Country, and how is it different from an Acknowledgement of Country?
“There are two different things that have become conflated in this debate,” federal politics reporter Natassia Chrysanthos tells host Samantha Selinger-Morris in a new episode of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s podcast The Morning Edition.
“People say, ‘[Welcomes to Country] are overdone. They don’t need to be done before every meeting at work’. You’re probably not talking about a welcome in that context. You’re talking about an Acknowledgement … they are different practices performed with different intentions.”
To listen to the full episode, click the player below or read on for a summary of the conversation.
Welcome to Country ceremonies are performed by First Nations peoples on their tribal territory, welcoming people to the particular land, waterways, seas and skies those from that Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island nation have a reciprocal relationship with. This is different to an Acknowledgement of Country, which can be given by First Nations peoples and non-First Nations people alike, though is typically given by the latter.
“[Acknowledgement of Country] is what you see more at the beginning of meetings or events, sometimes in the workplace,” Chrysanthos says.
An Acknowledgement of Country is precisely what it sounds like: highlighting whose territory you are existing in. A Welcome to Country, meanwhile, taps into an ancient custom that’s existed since precolonial times. Both have been subject to debate and ridicule recently, months before Anzac Day.
“The Welcome to Country is basically something that’s not new. It’s been going on for centuries,” Kamilaroi elder Uncle Len Waters tells Selinger-Morris.
“Basically, when other tribes used to trek a long way by foot … could even be hundreds of miles … they would arrive at the tribal lands of the people that invited them. And once they got there, they would gather and wait to be welcomed onto their tribal lands,” Waters says.
Uncle Len Waters is a Kamilaroi elder in Tamworth who has been performing Welcomes for decades.
Waters says the main emphasis of a Welcome to Country is to renew old relationships and form new relationships, but “importantly, to mend relationships that might have conflict because, if there was conflict there, you weren’t invited on to Country, weren’t welcomed on Country. That’s the way it goes back for millennia, I suppose.”
Waters highlights how in the past, First Nations peoples were not allowed to practise a lot of their cultural customs, ceremonies and languages. In the context of the thousands of years of First Nations history, Welcomes to Country were only recently introduced into the mainstream as interest in – and tolerance for – First Nations cultures heightened among settlers.
“As much as we want to say, ‘Well, yeah, let’s forget about the past’, we’ve got to hold the past there because that’s the way we learn and that’s the way people carry on these legacies,” Water says.
“To get rid of Welcome to Country to me, I would sort of start to lose faith, I think, in humanity itself. I just think, ‘What type of people are we?’ … we’ve got to be better than what we have been in the past, but we’re only going to get better in the future if we allow ourselves to be better in the future. And that means the notion of inclusiveness.”
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