I’m going to raise a topic that no doubt will bring out the usual suspects who prefer to cancel than communicate when they disagree, but here goes anyway.

The topic I want to raise is one that in the last few decades has grown to become an Australian norm, performed at major and minor cultural, political, and sporting events.

Unfortunately, this new norm is at risk of being overused by zealot government bureaucrats, attempting to force reconciliation through repetition, instead of accepting slow community adoption.

I’m referring to growing expectations by departmental heads that an ‘Acknowledgment or Welcome to Country’ be performed at every possible opportunity.

Rather than allowing the introduction to become a natural convention used sparingly at select events, it seems our bureaucratic elite have decided that we need to be welcomed to all events, great and small or at the very least acknowledge elders past and present.

Before I make the case that the push by senior government officials to ramp up the use of paying our respects is at risk of destroying this emerging norm, let me take you through a history of the Welcome to Country.

The Welcome to Country or Acknowledgement of Country first emerged, depending on who you believe, either thousands of years ago or at the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin or during the summer of 1976 at the Festival of Perth when Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley performed what they believe was its first incarnation.

“May the good spirit watch over you. You’re looking at the land of my people, we call Whadjuk. Later on, when you go home to your country, may the good spirit take you safely home. May the spirits of my people and the spirits of your people watch over us now.”

A Welcome to Country is performed only by the traditional owners/custodians of the land on which the event takes place.  In contrast an Acknowledgement of Country is spoken by outsiders, be it Indigenous or non-Indigenous Australians, and pays respect to the traditional custodians of the land.

“I would like to show my respect and acknowledge to the traditional custodians of this land, of elders past and present, on which this event takes place.”

While the progressive left is quick to embrace claims that the welcome dates back thousands of years there is little evidence to support their hopes.

In my research, I can find no anthropological or academic paper that convincingly links the welcome, or for that matter the smoking ceremony, to past historical sources.

One would have thought that if there was there would be at least one solid reference of a formal welcome similar to what Dingo and Walley first performed in the diaries of early Australian explorers, anthropologists, or pastoralists. But there is none.

While I may be wrong and if so I stand corrected but the best source I could find was in an article in the American Anthropologist ‘Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country’, (Vol. 116, No. 2, pp. 296–309, 2014), which examined the history of the welcome and what drives its modern equivalent or what they term ‘reparation politics,’ that is the need for modern elites to find ways to ritualise recognition of indigenous culture in colonised societies.

They concluded that the welcome is indeed a modern creation:

It seems likely that Acknowledgments arose in Australian governmental and bureaucratic contexts, energized by actions and statements that prominent Australian politicians authored and put into circulation.

The closest they got to finding anything resembling an historic indigenous cultural welcome was:

Some indigenous people (largely those remote dwelling) who live on country for which they exercise custodianship may enact small rituals to introduce newcomers or visitors to particular places: they water their heads from local water sources, rub underarm sweat on them, and speak to forebears and dreamings at particular locales to make the newcomer known. Such practices as these differ from recent Welcomes in important ways. (p.300)

I wonder how enthusiastic our politicians and bureaucrats would be if they were expected to share underarm sweat to publicly display their embrace of reconciliation? 

Maybe, we should be calling for all our political elites to take the extra step and embrace this more authentic cultural means of a welcome, anything less could be construed as nothing more than a western construct, designed to fit comfortably within western suburb norms. 

No doubt the elite won’t want to hear the account by Spencer and Gillen who in 1927 recorded a welcome conducted in Central Australia which detailed a restrained and gradual encounter of an outsider coming onto a neighbouring tribal group’s land, a meeting that occurred over several hours in silence, ultimately leading to the offer of a temporary wife while on country.

It’s disconcerting how selective the commentariat can be when talking about Australian indigenous culture, some subjects are taboo, such as cultural violence, never to be mentioned in progressive society, while others are spoken about with great reverence, such as fire management and caring for country skills.

But then all cultures have baggage best left behind, just as they have valuable learnings which should be embraced and embedded for future generations, but this does not mean we should make up traditions.

What we are seeing by some activist organisations is an attempt to rebadge a modern tradition into one that carries the weight of an ancient rite that is, ‘thousands of years old’ (Australian Geographic, SBS), ‘always been part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait culture’ (Reconciliation Australia), or is simply ‘millennia old’ (Australian Catholic Mission).

Why do such groups feel the need to oversell something when it has every potential to stand on its own merit, no matter how old it is?  It does not matter if the modern version of the welcome is in fact as old as the dreaming, or it was dreamt up in the 1970s.

Like all good cultural norms – think of the ‘Anzac Spirit, – the welcome needs time to be allowed to evolve rather than being forced into existence.

Let’s explore a little more deeply what the welcome means.  Walley tells us within the welcome that ancestral spirits and spirits of the land are invoked “to watch over our guests and our visitors while they’re in the country”. It is a permission to visit, he says, not unlike a stamp or visa for your passport.

No doubt, this rang true when Australia was made up of 250 language groups or as we are reminded constantly ‘First Nations,’ some form of permission was required to enter a neighbouring nation.

Interestingly, the term ‘First Nation’ and its heritage is also in dispute.  Like the welcome, it seems to be a recent creation, having come into common usage in the 1970s in Canada as a means of raising the status of Indian tribal groups.

The use of particular words over others is an important part of social engineering to raise status, for instance scholars refer to barbarian tribes vs Roman states to differentiate their status, just as extending the length of time a cultural group or practice has been in existence increases its status, the longer the better.

In the years that followed the 1970s the welcome has slowly gained traction, reaching a turning point at the 2008 official opening of Australia’s Commonwealth Parliament, which was also the day of Kevin Rudd’s historic formal apology to Australia’s Indigenous people.

These days it is a common practice at public events big and small to have a welcome or acknowledgement performed. Unfortunately there is a growing level of uncertainty and lack of uniformity as to which events warrant such a ceremonial start.

A web search of state and federal government department sites, including Reconciliation Australia’s, throws up numerous versions of the protocols of when and how a welcome should be performed. Unfortunately there is no consistency of messaging with often widely differing and contradictory advice.

According to the Federal Government’s new aboriginal affairs department the National Indigenous Australian Agency, a welcome should be delivered at significant/large internal meetings or meetings with external participants including branch meetings, inter-departmental meetings and cross government meetings.  In other words, almost all meetings.

In Western Australia there is no one landing page offering a whole of government position on when to run a welcome or acknowledgement, no doubt this is in part the result of the abolition of the old Department of Aboriginal Affairs by the McGowan Government who wound the stand-alone agency into the mega Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage (DPLA). Something the coalition could never counter doing for fear of the progressive backlash.

A search of the DPLA web site generates no advice on when it is appropriate to do a welcome, in turn a detailed search of the wa.gov.au site offers up a smattering of web pages the most useful of which is a publication by the Department of Education dating from the time of the previous government.

In it, the department advises meeting organisers who are seeking clarity on when and how to hold a welcome:

“Aboriginal custodianship of country needs to be recognised at public events” and the term ‘event’ includes, but is not limited to, a ceremony, meeting, function or conference and if there is any confusion that you ‘seek advice from Aboriginal staff or local Aboriginal networks’.

Problem is, the local aboriginal staff may have no connection to country and the local aboriginal network may be difficult to track down or be split into competing groups. 

I suspect you could count on your hand the number of times a junior education bureaucrat has been tasked with consulting either an internal staffer or local network, rather the decision would have been made by management on the run and the go ahead given depending on how invested the departmental leadership is in welcomes.

The WA Health Department on the other hand is much clearer on its advice, stating that a welcome is required at all “official events, where members of the public, representatives of WA Health and other Government agencies or the media are present”.

Whereas “An Acknowledgement of Traditional Ownership is appropriate for events such as meetings of staff of a hospital or health service, small or specialised public information sessions, or smaller conferences.”

This probably needs a rethink, as it’s hard to imagine the merits of having senior doctors asked to stop for an acknowledgment to country before starting a meeting with treasury on what to do about the lack of A and E doctors on call in the Kimberley.

Maybe they should take Education’s advice and go seek the counsel of an aboriginal nurse or doctor working in the Kimberley and ask is this the best use of their time. 

Unfair as my example may be, this is exactly what is happening across government when the woke heads of department think acknowledging elders is more important than helping elders with their medical needs.

I certainly know that in my experience working as the CEO of an Aboriginal Corporation in Fitzroy Crossing not once did anyone start the business of the day or do a welcome or acknowledgement even when meeting with other groups on their country.

It seems this is a very elite thing that has been embraced by those who inhabit ivory towers far from the real world or real indigenous disadvantage.

A review of the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development web site shows that despite the current Minister’s enthusiasm for a good welcome her department has no protocols whatsoever in place of when to stop to do an acknowledgement or welcome to country.

Quite a surprise when considering their role in regional development and the number of events being held on country, mind you, they are so busy with forcing regeneration they don’t have much time for clarifying reconciliation, or even detailing what they have achieved in terms of economic development for indigenous people over the past five years. 

Again, it seems talk of respecting elders and protecting country by shutting down economic opportunities (Fitzroy irrigation) is so much easier than the hard yards of getting indigenous stations back up and running under indigenous management or reducing the level of indigenous unemployment in the Kimberley when there are jobs begging on mines, stations and farms.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a welcome or acknowledgement to country should be respected in the appropriate setting, but what is the appropriate setting?

At times in my current role I’ve zoomed into four government meetings in a single day and each one has started with an acknowledgment, even when participants have been spread from one side of the state to the other.

The fact that people like me who engage extensively with government can go from one acknowledgement to the next, and have not left their desk, raises questions on just how far has this gone without a public debate on its limits.

It’s becoming a tax on taxpayers’ time not to mention on the taxpayer.

We need to talk about the unwritten rules around payment for welcomes.  When is it appropriate to pay taxpayer dollars, how much and to whom?  Without a list of elders, how do junior bureaucrats know who is who, within the pecking order?

This is why government has lists of approved contractors, panels of consultants and set fee schedules; it avoids claims of favouritism or corruption.

An open and transparent system listing elders and a payment schedule depending on event importance would benefit all and help keep confidence in the public over the use of taxpayer dollars to support what seems to be a growing industry.

In fact, one wonders why we are paying at all; do we see envelopes of cash handed over to the local priest by fishermen at the end of the Blessing of the Fleet, or veterans at the end of the Anzac Day dawn service? A free lunch yes, but $800 per event no matter how small?

I am focusing on the heads of department state and federal as they have become enormously proactive in driving reparation politics.  Just look at the bottom of department email signatures, more and more are signing off by acknowledging elders past and present.

No doubt some of the more progressive government ministers match the enthusiasm of their departmental heads in forcing this norm onto their bewildered bureaucracies and the community at large. But are they doing indigenous Australians a disservice? Is the welcome wearing out its welcome because if pushed too hard the community will tune out.