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Was this the week that the whole ‘Welcome to Country’ scam finally blew itself up? Australians have endured the relentless onslaught of ‘reconciliation’ this, and ‘traditional’ that, with more and more tightly-gritted teeth over recent years. We put up with it mostly out of politeness, and a sincere wish to better the lot of Aboriginal Australians, but many of us are increasingly noticing three things.
Firstly, that this pseudo-ritualistic palaver is smothering everything, from a simple plane flight, to sports matches, to a regular school assembly, even to Zoom meetings. Given that even its creators, Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley, warned that its use should be restricted to suitably solemn occasions lest it become mere tokenism, it seems well past time to knock it off.
Secondly, the whole ‘reconciliation’ bandwagon only ever seems to roll one way. Non-Aboriginal Australians are forced to fork out tens of billions every year, for the dubious privilege of having our very existence denigrated. While we’re expected to fawn over a Stone Age culture, our own culture is useful only as a target of insult.
Well, normal people are only going to put up with the hairshirts for so long.
Finally, and this came into particularly sharp focus this week, a whole lot of people, who are making a whole of money out of the whole scam, are spouting more and more obvious bullshit, and expecting the rest of us to pay for the privilege of calling it ice cream.
If the hairshirts are irritating enough, being force-fed, and expected to parrot, obvious lies is even worse.
Brendan Kerin’s Welcome to Country at Saturday’s AFL semi-final showed the “reconciliation” movement is turning us into a nation of liars. Kerin, from Sydney’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, declared “a Welcome to Country is not a ceremony we’ve invented to cater for white people – it’s a ceremony we’ve been doing for 250,000 years.”
250,000 years? I know we’re living with high inflation, but the alleged tenure of Aboriginal Australia is stuck in a spiral of hyper-inflation. Not long ago, it was fairly solidly scientifically recognised as around 40,000 years. A single, unreliable study, since debunked by several more reliable reviews, claimed 65,000 years. Which, despite its inherent implausibility (modern humans had barely reached south-east Asia by that time, with the formidable Wallace Line still to cross), has become as de rigeur as the nonsensical ‘First Nations’. The serial bullshit-artist Bruce Pascoe claims an even more ludicrous 100,000 years.
But 250,000 years? That would place Aborigines in Australia 50,000 years before modern humans had even evolved. If Kerin wants to claim that Aborigines are pre-human, like Neanderthals or H Erectus, then good luck with that. Although he’d find congenial company with a feted ‘indigenous academic’ who claimed Aborigines have lived in Australia for millions of years.
I guess, when you come from a culture which couldn’t count above 10 without looking at their feet, everything is ‘many’. That Kerin is employed by Sydney’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council leads to some interesting discoveries.
Firstly, an organisation which apparently has a staff of 12, and 10 board members, listed $232,515 in wages and salaries, and $840,356 in employee expenses (a more than 160 per cent increase over 2022), in its 2023 annual report.
Secondly, ‘Welcome to Country’ is a very, very nice little earner. The Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council trousered over a quarter of a million in ‘Welcome to Country Services’ in 2023 ($268,341 –a more than 150 per cent increase over 2022).
When Kerin says these phoney-baloney ‘ceremonies’ are ‘not for white people’, he might want to mention that white people are the ones paying a fortune for them.
The cavalcade of bullshit didn’t end there.
A Welcome to Country is not a ceremony we’ve invented to cater for white people.
Well, no – it was invented to cater to Māori.
Quite literally. Dingo and Walley invented the whole, nonsensical charade at a ‘cultural festival’ in 1976, to pander to a troupe of visiting Māori who refused to perform without a ‘traditional welcome’. The only problem was that there wasn’t one. So, they made it up.
And we’ve been paying through the nose for it, ever since.
