AUSTRALIA
WELCOME TO COUNTRY - NO CULTURAL BASIS AND IRRELEVANT
Acknowledgement and Welcome to Country are not part of Aboriginal Culture. They are an invention of Aboriginal activists to bring about a culturally irrelevant statement, an acknowledgement of something that no longer exists and a statement of respect that must be seriously examined as to its appropriateness.
A statement of respect is earnt. There is NO basis for this statement culturally, historically or factually..
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
There is NO proof that a Welcome to Country ever existed in the 50,000 years of pre contact Aboriginal culture. And yet as some form of self-flagellating or self-deprecating appeasement by white people normally to white people we hear it now at nearly every event.
A member of an aboriginal clan on another clan’s land was more likely to end in death than an exchange of pleasantries of respect. It is true that an aboriginal would always be aware when they were on another person’s lands as the consequences would be a brutal death.
The ceremony was created ad hoc in 1976 at the Perth International Arts Festival by Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley of the Middar Aboriginal Theatre. Four dancers from NZ and Cook Islands requested a reciprocal “welcome” before they would perform and Dingo and Whalley created one for them on the spot. Other Aborigines, such as opera administrator Rhoda Roberts, have laid claim to inventing the “welcome” in the 1980s.
In reality, in the era of early contact, ceremonies between the local and visiting group could involve thigh spearings to avenge deaths from sorcery, visitor hordes offering their women in friendship or penis-holding among male groups.
Both the Welcome and Acknowledgement has been marketed very successfully as a means of reconciliation and has been inculcated in almost all institutions. The repetitive nature of the Acknowledgement is bizarre.
Reconciliation Australia states a Welcome to Country is designed to: “welcoming visitors and offering safe passage.” The traditional owners do not offer me safe passage in Australia. I have safe passage in Australia as a result of the rule of law and enforcement of those laws by the Australian Police forces. The statement serves no purpose in a land that no longer belongs or is subjugated by people who refer may otherwise refer to themselves as Traditional Owners.
Anthropologists and early settlers failed to record anything much resembling “welcome to country” ceremonies.
Bess Price, CLP Aboriginal member of the Northern Territory Parliament and Minister for Community Services, has described “welcomes” as “not particularly meaningful to traditional people anyway. We don’t do that in communities. It’s just a recent thing. It’s just people who are trying to grapple at something that they believe should be traditional.”
Adelaide archival researcher and geologist Alistair Crooks says:
“During years of geological site inspections, I have never seen or heard of a welcome ceremony being performed when entering tribal land (invited), nor have I seen the ceremony performed when transporting Aborigines into or across various tribal boundaries. Nor is any such ceremony described by any of the early explorers or anthropologists that I am aware of.”
Except, of course, the rather simple penis-touching ceremony around Oodnadatta described by Berndt and Berndt and Roheim.
The Berndts recorded:
“When a man with a subincised penis enters a strange camp, he takes up the hand of each local man in turn, pressing his penis flatly on the palm. This gesture, of offering and acceptance in close physical contact, signifies the establishment of friendly relations, and is associated with the settling of grievances.”
There are other more bizarre rituals such as the drinking of blood in Northern territory tribes to settle differences before entering another persons country.
A Welcome to Country occurs at the beginning of a formal event and can take many forms. Today’s Welcome ceremonies are not a remanence of tradition but very often a paid, ludicrous and often mocked and ridiculed performance by people who, in all likelihood, do not carry on life as a traditional Aboriginal in almost any respects.
Perhaps as a reverence to the cultural life only circumcised men should be permitted to attend events.
WORDS ARE IMPORTANT
It is not part of Aboriginal culture. It should not be part of Australian culture and, more importantly, we should carefully consider what is actually being said instead of ignoring the words as they are spoken.
A Welcome to Country is stated by a person of Aboriginal descent from the area allegedly with the consent of the Elders of the area. An Acknowledgement to Country is statement by any person (Aboriginal or not) to acknowledge the Traditional Owners.
A standard Acknowledgement to Country spoken by a White person:
“I Would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet and pay my respect to Elders past, present and future. I extend that respect to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders gathered here today.”
Words are very important and we need to breakdown this Acknowledgement into its key phrases.
“acknowledging the traditional custodians” except where exclusive native title exists, custodianship is no longer vested with the Aboriginal hordes of any particular area.
“we meet to pay respect elders past, present and future.”
Respect is defined “as a feeling of deep admiration for someone elicited by their abilities, qualities and achievements.”
RESPECT TO ELDERS PAST
I do not pay my respects to Elders past nor would I expect the Australian population to do so. I do not have deep admiration for their abilities, qualities or achievements. The Elders held the people of their hordes locked in immutable laws that prevented them from progressing from the Neolithic stone age.
Each aboriginal horde was ordered and controlled by a gerontocracy of initiated men or Elders who acted simultaneously as its political executive, judiciary, clergy, police and, when need be, it's executioner.
The Elders were involved in and directed brutal revenge killings for acts attributable to supernatural and spiritual outcomes. They allowed and prevailed over an unchanging and unchangeable culture of superstition, curses, black magic and witch doctors. They had the clear intelligence to make change but they did not.
The Elders were bestowed, young barely pubescent girls as their property in form of what would be described nowadays as paedophiliac enslavement. Female “initiation” often involved brutal pack rape. The failure to obey the Elder would mean the brutal punishment or death of any bestowal, even of a girl possibly as young as 10.
The Elders were involved in the abduction of women from other tribes for the purpose of sexual servitude and enslavement.
The Elders presided over the Australia-wide practice of Infanticide. Infanticide was practised as a means of controlling the population as the Aboriginal being a hunter-gatherer society could expand as it needed to ensure adequate food resources for its people which required the necessary control and murder of its own peoples to manageable levels.
The British came and settled the lands of this continent and the Elders did little or nothing to organise resistance. They did nothing to seek out treaties and secure lands for their people. They simply failed to achieve what could have made the transition to civilisation possible on significantly better terms. They failed to achieve a treaty with respect to lands or other agreements which was achieved by many other primitive peoples in other countries.
The Elders upon settlement created a trade in the one commodity they possessed, women in the form of wide-scale prostitution to the early settlers to gain in exchange, food and alcohol. The Aboriginal peoples, under the failed guidance of the Elders, became mendicants living on the edge of white society as their culture was eroded. The Elders watched on and participated in the destruction of their people by alcohol and opium.
It is beyond comprehension that a modern egalitarian society would constantly see a statement that has no cultural basis in Aboriginal culture to pay respect to a brutal misogynistic, paedophilic and patriarchal leadership of a primitive race of people as a statement that should proceed or is worthy of recognition in the modern world where human rights and equality of the sexes is paramount.
RESPECT TO ELDERS PRESENT
We have a situation in Australia where the Aboriginal Elders fail to lead, secure and keep their people safe. Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence than other women. Indigenous adults are 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous adults. Aboriginal adults make up around 2% of the national population, they constitute 27% of the national prison population. Indigenous children are 24 times more likely to be in detention than their non-Indigenous peers, and family violence is one of the key issues that leads to contact with the justice system.
We have a situation in Australia where domestic violence in Aboriginal communities is 10X higher than in non-Aboriginal society – where in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory domestic violence in 30 X higher – where a shroud of secrecy exists around community violence which allows for the violence to continue at grotesque rates. Where are the Elders?
We could pay respect for their ability to guide, nurture, mentor and direct their “people” but they appear to have completely failed in this regard.
The continued stating of such an acknowledgement will remain an offence to those who make it and those who listen to such a statement without stating their objection to it.
The Acknowledgement continues with an inappropriate racial assertion :
“I extend that respect to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders gathered here today.”
I am not sure why this statement of respect is limited to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. Would it not be far more appropriate to show respect for all Australians regardless of race? I am completely unaware why a person’s admiration for the abilities, qualities and achievements is only limited to Aboriginals and TSI people – after all they are Australians just like the rest of us. And more importantly, since the Acknowledgement puts all Aboriginals in one descriptor, despite a spectacularly diverse range of people, it would be interesting to know exactly what qualities and achievements they admire of the collective of the race.