How welcome to country became Australia’s worst cultural export

Instead of importing pointless embarrassment, we’re proudly and successfully exporting it. Americans are now participating in Australian-style ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies, writes Tim Blair.

Some Aussie exports to the US.

Australian malcontents are always importing terrible ideas from the United States.

Global warming panic, identity politics, electric vehicles, theatrical anti-Trumpism, the notion that blokes can have babies – these all kicked off in the US before landing here.

This trend extends even to online abuse. When local leftists sneer at their social media opponents, they often use US-derived insults, referring for example to people who live in their “mum’s basement”.

By and large, of course, Australian houses don’t have basements. It is worrying that our leftist friends, who grew up in Australian houses, evidently never noticed this.

So they import another Americanism and force it into an Australian circumstance. Sort of like Aboriginal rap music – or that Raygun lady’s kangaroo-hopping, culturally-appropriating attempt at break dancing.

But Australia is taking its revenge. Instead of importing pointless embarrassment, we’re proudly and successfully exporting it.

Taylor Swift has recently taken up the American version of the “welcome to country”, aka the “land acknowledgment”. Picture: ANGELA WEISS/AFP)

Americans are now participating in Australian-style “welcome to country” ceremonies.

Their versions are called “land acknowledgments”, but they otherwise seem just as earnest and procedural as our original presentations – which have been a traditional Indigenous ritual since 1976, when a welcome to country was first performed by TV presenter Ernie Dingo and musician Richard Walley.

For those who doubt the historical depth of this compelling origin story, 1976 was the same year that Abba’s Fernando was Australia top-selling single. Ancient times. The Dreamtime’s dawning. Before most Aussie families even had colour TV.

“Land acknowledgments have become increasingly common nationwide over the past few years,” the US National Public Radio network reported in 2023.

“Many mainstream public events — from soccer games and performing arts productions to city council meetings and corporate conferences — begin with these formal statements recognising Indigenous communities’ rights to territories seized.”

They’re performed at soccer games and arts events. From this we know exactly what types of people are pushing these “land acknowledgments”.

Aboriginal activist and academic Marcia Langton vowed to abandon welcome to country ceremonies if the Yes vote lost in last year’s referendum. Picture: William WEST / AFP)

Interestingly, some senior US Indigenous figures aren’t impressed by imported Australian racial rites or the way they are presented.

“If it becomes routine, or worse yet, is strictly performative, then it has no meaning at all,” Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, told that NPR program. “It goes in one ear and out the other.”

This is also true here. A mate who works for a state government department in the bush is exposed to at least four or five messages every day about “paying our respects to traditional owners” and so on.

Several tribes are mentioned. In one ear, out the other; nobody can remember any of them.

It could be that the US is getting in on land acknowledgments just as Australia is getting out of them. A turning point may have occurred in April 2023, when Aboriginal activist Marcia Langton vowed to abandon welcome to country ceremonies if the Yes vote didn’t deliver an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

“I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,” Marcia Langton told The Weekend Australian.

“How are they going to ever ask an Indigenous person, a traditional owner, for a welcome to country? How are they ever going to be able to ask me to come and speak at their conference?

Welcome to country ceremonies were first performed in Australia in 1976. Picture: Chris Hyde/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)

“If they have the temerity to do it … the answer is going to be no.”

At the time of Langton’s vow, the Yes vote was leading in opinion polls by about 60 per cent to 40 per cent. Within a few weeks polls were level at 50-all. The No vote eventually won by more than 20 percentage points.

Marcia didn’t miss.

Here’s another kiss of doom. US popster Taylor Swift, whose endorsement of Kamala Harris didn’t stop her losing to Donald Trump, last week decorated the stage at a Canadian show with a sign saluting “the Mississaugas … the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat … the First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples”.

Good for them. But here’s the fun part. When left-leaning white shame-spreaders profess their guilt and pity to Native Americans, they do so in the apparent absence of recent crucial information.

They’re showing profound reverence for … Trump voters.

“Nationally, a whopping 65 per cent of Native American voters went for Trump,” New York’s City Journal reported last week. Politico observed: “In the Great Plains, the Mountain states, across the Southwest and even in North Carolina, Trump delivered standout gains.”

It’s time for a new ceremony. Welcome to Trump country.