Andrew Bolt: Brendan Kerin wants us to believe the Welcome to Country is “250,000 years old”

Brendan Kerin claimed in his Welcome to Country that the ceremony is one Aboriginals have been doing for “250,000 years” – 50,000 years before our human subspecies actually evolved?

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.”

What? Kerin wants us to believe Aboriginals were here at least 50,000 years before our human subspecies – homo sapiens sapiens – actually evolved.

Brendan Kerin performs the Welcome to Country at Saturday’s AFL semi-final. Picture: Fox Sports

Kerin wants us to believe Aboriginals did this Welcome to Country in all that time when it was actually invented in this form in 1976 by television presenter Ernie Dingo and musician Richard Walley.

Or course, there were once other ways tribes welcomed strangers, but describing them is unwelcome today.

Dingo, himself with Aboriginal ancestors, said one involved elders taking “the sweat from under their arms and [rubbing] down the side of your shoulders so any spirits around can smell the perspiration or the odour of the local, and say, ‘He’s right, leave him alone’”.

Another was more horrific. Adolphus Peter Elkin, a professor of anthropology, detailed it in his classic The Australian Aborigines (sic): How to Understand Them, the final edition of which was published in 1964. He said tribes made peace or welcomed each other by sending over their women for sex.

Robert Hughes in his best-selling history The Fatal Shore, recorded the same: “As a mark of hospitality, wives were lent to visitors ... If a woman showed the least reluctance ... she would be furiously beaten or even speared.”

Players and coaches line up during the pre-match ceremony during the first semi-final match of the AFL finals between the GWS Giants and the Brisbane Lions. Picture: Dylan Burns

But such facts now seem unkind. We prefer sweet lies.

It’s why Melbourne University hired a fake Aboriginal, Bruce Pascoe, as an Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture, after Pascoe claimed in his fake history, Dark Emu, Aboriginals had actually been farmers in “towns” of 1000 people.

Who dares tell the truth? Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promotes “the stolen generations”, when our courts still haven’t identified a single child stolen from their parents just because they were Aboriginal.

He also claims Aboriginals were here for “65,000 years”, based on just one outlier study – debunked by two more – which claimed to have found a 65,000-year-old hearth.

But who cares? The science actually says 40,000 years. Albanese says 65,000. Pascoe says 100,000. Now Kerin says 250,000. The bigger the untruth, the bigger your heart in a country where truth is dead and sentiment is all.