There has been quite some controversy in mainstream media recently surrounding the ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies that have been held around Australia for the last half century. The ceremony has been reputed to have started in 1973, when it was claimed that the first of these welcoming ceremonies were held at the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin.
First and foremost, it needs to be pointed out that the ceremony was offered for the first time, only after the organisers of the Aquarius Festival went out of their way as part of preparing for the festival, to contact the local custodians and to actually ask them for their permission to put on the event on the local tribes’ traditional country around the town of Nimbin.
This impressed the custodians enough for them to see the good intention in the hippies to do the right thing.
That good intention was something that the original people of what is now called ‘Australia’ had not experienced much at all for the more than two hundred years since the foreign invasion of their lands. So they gave the Aquarius organisers the ceremony that the tribes gave to other friendly tribes when they collectively stepped onto other mobs’ countries.
After the Aquarius event, it was gradually adopted by groups, communities, and governments all over the country.
Now, it has apparently come to the time that ‘Welcome to Country’ has reached its ‘use by date’. The truth is; why ‘welcome’ invaders with bad intention onto the country to actually trash and destroy the land? After 50 years of actual abuse of this so-called ‘ceremony’, is it possible to re-brand the event and to show actual sincerity about an attempt at reconciliation? An event that we must be reminded of was originally instigated by the victims!
In a discussion, a number of years ago now, about this issue, it was suggested by local Elder, Auntie Lizbeth Johnson, that rather than using the term ‘welcome’, which could never really fit, it would be more realistic to name it an ‘Acknowledgment and Acceptance’ ceremony. Finally, it is suggested that there is one big hurdle to proper healing for the future for this great continent.
Without a more truthful ‘coming clean’ about Australia’s past history, and after what turns out to be a messy (Welcome to Country) attempt at reconciliation, everything that follows may continue to have a hollow and disingenuous ring about it.
That is a continuing concern and is something that particularly the majority of racists in our society cannot and will not accept. Though for the whole of Australia’s future benefit and to clear our continuing bad karma, accept they must.
The sentiment needs to be genuine for a ceremony such as this to have effect, and to do the healing it has the potential to do, daily, when uttered. The words must have a particular and specific meaning first.
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