The Federal Court was officially welcomed on the Tiwi Islands in 2023.Credit: Rebecca Parker
In the riverside town of Taree on the NSW north coast, an ancient custom was this month drawn into one of Australia’s most parochial forums for political debate: a local council meeting.
Unlike most other gatherings of the MidCoast Council, the gallery was packed. Emails had bounced between constituents and councillors all week, as word spread that recently elected councillor Mick Graham was coming to February’s meeting with a motion to discontinue “Welcome to Country” ceremonies.
In his speech, Graham described them as “divisive and woke ceremonial practices with no meaning”. Citing Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, he said “their widespread implementation in official settings [had] created division, furthered political correctness and distracted from the real issues facing the nation”.
Graham’s colleague, Mal McKenzie, backed him up. “There is a huge groundswell growing in all areas of Australia to get rid of it,” he declared. “Time will bury the Welcome.”
Sandwiched in the crowd was Jeremy Saunders, a Biripi man, who watched on quietly. “This has been really difficult on us as a people, it puts us down, and makes you feel really bad,” he said in a video uploaded to social media.
“Some of the things that were said about divisiveness, and separation, and one mob being over the other, that’s not what Welcome to Country’s about. It’s about love. It’s about acceptance. It’s about living together and appreciating the beautiful place that we are in. And to hear the sounds of our Country through language, when it’s spoken in Welcome, is awesome and it’s unique and it’s beautiful.”
His father, Pastor Russell Saunders, had given his own Welcome outside the council building hours earlier. He spoke in Gathang language before repeating it in English. “Welcome, my name is Uncle Russ, I am a proud, strong Biripi man,” it went. “This is Biripi Country. It always was, and always will be, Biripi Country. This is Shark Country [our totem]. This is our Country. Now let us go, together. Thank you.”
Welcomes to Country have been established practice for decades now, accepted by governments, sporting codes and corporations as an Australian custom that shows respect to the country’s first people.
But more recently, they’ve been swept into a backlash against “woke” identity politics that is accelerating with the return of US President Donald Trump. The MidCoast’s local council meeting, attended by about 100 people, echoed a culture war broadcast to tens of thousands on social media, Sky News and in the Australian Senate.
Aunty Joy Murphy performs a Welcome to Country in Melbourne before an NRL match between the Melbourne Storm and the Manly Sea Eagles.Credit: Getty Images
That Welcomes became the talk of Taree this month was not mere chance. Days earlier, with a federal election coming, Peter Dutton’s Coalition had pledged to wind back spending on the ceremonies if it formed government. As the Coalition takes aim at what it calls the “multi-million dollar ‘Welcome’ industry”, it is also vowing not to stand in front of the Aboriginal flag at official announcements.
Price, the opposition’s new spokesperson for government efficiency, says taxpayer money is wasted and the ceremonies have become politicised. Data obtained by the opposition under freedom of information revealed 22 federal government agencies spent about $550,000 on Welcomes in the past two years. “Welcomes to Country should be reserved for rare occasions, especially when the taxpayer is being asked to pick up the tab,” Price says.
A Welcome to Country ceremony and performances open the 47th parliament in Canberra in 2022.Credit: James Brickwood
But beyond the cost-cutting rhetoric lies a political play that taps into a more vexed conversation about how Australia acknowledges its Indigenous history. Many Indigenous Australians, already bruised from the defeat of the Voice referendum, fear they are witnessing an escalating assault on their culture. They wonder where it will end.
Price’s prior comments have captured the sentiment sparking the fiery end of debate. “It’s not welcoming, it’s telling non-Indigenous Australians, ‘This isn’t your country’, and that’s wrong. We are all Australians and we share this great land,” she has said.
But Rhoda Roberts, who coined the term “Welcome to Country” in the 1980s, sees something else. “It’s an assimilation policy, once again,” she says.
Rhoda Roberts coined the term “Welcome to Country” in the 1980s.
Where it began
Tens of thousands of years before this month’s MidCoast council debate, Indigenous Australians would trek vast distances to different “tribal” lands – or what they call Country. “Then they’d wait for permission because people couldn’t just wander onto different tribal lands if they didn’t belong to that place,” says Len Waters, a Kamilaroi elder in Tamworth, NSW, who has been performing Welcomes for decades.
“There weren’t gates or fences, but people knew they weren’t on their own Country. There were different customs, languages, people and laws. The local tribe would check them out and make sure they were coming for peaceful purposes, and once they were satisfied everyone was safe, then you would have that welcome.”
Today’s Welcome to Country – which is a welcome to those tribal lands, not to Australia – has its roots in this custom. Roberts likens it to border control. She says it often involved a sweat transference, smoking or water ceremony. “It was to give you the same scent of the clan you were visiting because in the world of the bush, if you have a strange scent, animals would flee. That way, they also knew who was travelling on their land for safety.”
Much of that tradition was erased with colonisation, and expressions of Indigenous culture and language were quashed during a period of assimilation that did not formally end until 1973. That same year, a group of young people holding a festival in the northern NSW hippie town of Nimbin sought permission from Roberts’ uncle, a man called Lyle Roberts Jr, to use the land. He welcomed them in language, in the first known example of a welcome to non-Indigenous Australians.
Entertainers Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley are also credited with developing the modern-day ceremony, after performing one on behalf of Noongar people at a Perth arts festival in 1976, when visiting Maori performers asked to be welcomed as per their own cultural customs.
Dr Richard Walley performs the Welcome to Country at an AFL match in Perth in 2024, almost 40 years after performing the first modern version of the ceremony at a theatre.Credit: Getty Images
Roberts saw an opportunity in what happened in Nimbin that day. “In the ’80s, we went: let’s revitalise that ritual. We wanted to continue that legacy, to honour ancestors and pay respect when we visit your Country. That’s all it was,” she says. “I was working for a theatre company and we decided, at every show we did, there would be a welcome. The arts sector started doing this and, slowly, it did have an imprint.”
The land rights and reconciliation movements of the 1990s gave the practice momentum and on February 12, 2008, the day of the apology to the stolen generations, the Australian Parliament in Canberra opened with an official Welcome to Country for the first time.
Now, most major sporting and cultural events begin with a welcome, while many government departments and councils have developed their own guidelines about the practice.
Then-prime minister Kevin Rudd with dancers at the first Welcome to Country ceremony to open parliament in 2008.Credit: Andrew Taylor
A Welcome to Country, performed by an elder or traditional owner on their ancestral lands, is different to an acknowledgement of Country. Acknowledgements are often given by non-Indigenous Australians to respect traditional landowners. The two are confused in debate but acknowledgements are performed freely and at the discretion of individuals and organisations, such as at the start of meetings or speeches.
Welcomes, on the other hand, can only be performed by a small group of people. “You’ve got to be held in the esteem of your community as an elder or someone who’s contributed greatly to the people and community,” says Waters. “With the diminishing of our elders over the years – there’s not too many of us left – people want it done where it’s meaningful. That’s an art form in itself.”
Some Indigenous Australians have described Welcomes as akin to religious tradition. Others say it is simple manners, like knocking before you enter someone’s home.
Uncle Len Waters says he endeavours to make every Welcome to Country meaningful.
Not all Welcomes are performed with the same gusto or affect. “Some Welcomes are done very well, some could do with a bit of polish,” Waters says. “When I’m doing these things, I like to tell an ancient story about bringing people together for the betterment of all human beings. It’s a case now where language is involved a lot, and we try to give it meaning.
“But at the end of the day, it’s a very ancient tradition, no different to turning up to church and saying the Lord’s Prayer. No matter how good or bad it is, the most important thing is it was done.”
Counting the cost
Often, Welcomes attract a fee. Some Aboriginal land councils and heritage groups have standard fees, while in other cases, government agencies offer a set price.
The Coalition’s analysis puts the average Commonwealth payment for each ceremony at $1266. The latest example it found was a $5500 spend on a Welcome to Country for a visiting Malaysian delegation. The City of Sydney Council says it spent $29,216 across 51 Welcome ceremonies for major events such as New Year’s Eve, Lunar Festival and talks programs last year – an average of $573 each.
The Coalition thinks the money could be better spent. “It’s become a multimillion-dollar industry,” opposition waste spokesman James Stevens claimed earlier this year. Stevens unearthed $550,000 of federal spending over two years, but assumes the nationwide cost is millions. “Welcomes to Country should be genuine and authentic, not a lucrative income stream at taxpayers’ expense.”
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price wants federal money directed towards what she says are practical measures to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Price says federal money should be directed towards practical measures such as funding remote boarding schools and ensuring economic development opportunities are accessible to Indigenous Australians in remote communities. “Encouraging independence over dependence must be our priority,” she says.
Roberts offers another take: she says Welcomes foster an Indigenous cultural economy. “Our culture is our advantage. It is where money should be spent because it’s increasing our independence.”
Many Indigenous Australians disagree with the push to stop spending money on ceremonies. They say payment is fair compensation for people’s time, expertise and travel – just like for any other speaker – and that spending is a drop in the ocean compared with other government expenditure. For this year’s Australia Day, the federal government gave more than $10 million to community events.
Elder Phil Sullivan conducts the smoking ceremony and Welcome to Country at local Australia Day celebrations in the NSW town of Bourke.Credit: Nick Moir
Waters says that, before Europeans, travelling tribes were expected to contribute gifts to the Country they were visiting. He sees payments for Welcomes in that context: a reciprocal gesture tapping into the original tradition.
As with all questions of culture and identity, there is disagreement. In North Queensland, the Juru elders group have put a pause on Welcomes on their lands, concerned that people who weren’t traditional owners had been asked to perform them.
“They seemed to be doing it for large sums of money and elders were upset because they thought they were abusing cultural protocol,” says Randal Ross, chair of the Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation. “If [the government] aren’t consulting with traditional owners, then it can be an act of tokenism. It’s a privilege to be welcoming people on Country; it’s about upholding cultural responsibility. It’s not a business, to be charging.”
Ross also says there is a gifting process that is part of the Welcome. “But you’ve got some [people] performing ceremonies, thinking they can charge thousands of dollars. Governments are willing to pay it, but it creates a precedent [which is] not what this is about.” However, he says the Juru people’s situation should not feed into national conversation or broader messages. “We’re dealing with this on our own Country,” he says.
Detractors don’t just take issue with cost. There are also complaints that Welcomes are overdone. Price’s colleague, Coalition Senator Kerrynne Liddle, shares that assessment.
Coalition senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Kerrynne Liddle both say Welcomes to Country are overdone.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“The reality is there are days when I am welcomed to Country several times and I hear an acknowledgement multiple times. It’s overused,” Liddle says. “Infinite welcomes and acknowledgements have in some cases become meaningless and unwelcome.”
Karen Mundine, the chief executive of Reconciliation Australia, says there’s potential for everything to become rote. “To blame the process, or the Welcome to Country for that, is not the right starting point,” she says. “The starting point has to be about the relationship.”
‘It hurts’
This can also be complicated. A Q&A questioner named Aunty Narelle told the ABC panel show in the thick of the 2023 referendum debate that she hated Welcomes to Country. “As a tribal person, why welcome every other bastard on Country, when I as an Aboriginal person have never felt welcomed on my own ground, on my own dirt?”
Professor Marcia Langton, one of Australia’s most distinguished Indigenous academics, agreed “it would be a terrible burden on a traditional owner to welcome people who hate Aboriginal people, that’s the truth of it”, while Malarndirri McCarthy, now the minister for Indigenous Australians, said she understood Aunty Narelle’s concern.
“But I would say to those out there ... Collectively, for our country, it is a good thing. If First Nations people do not wish to welcome, they have a choice to say no when invited or asked to do so.”
Labor Minister Malarndirri McCarthy and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Then, there are the Australians who don’t want to hear them. “Welcome to Country ceremonies are nothing more than something wealthy city people love to do, to make themselves feel good,” Coalition senator Alex Antic told the Senate in 2023. “Thanks for the virtue theatre but, like most Australians, I am sick and tired of being welcomed to my own country.”
One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson trots out that line too. “I think it’s divisive, I’m offended by it, I’m sick of hearing about it, I think it’s tokenistic ... When they say this is the land of ‘such and such’ a tribe, that’s going back, what, 250 years ago? We’ve got to move on from there.” For Hanson, the only acceptable context for Welcomes is at an “Aboriginal convention”, she has told Sky News.
Mundine, from Reconciliation Australia, is confused by the rancour. She says there is a generosity at the heart of Welcomes that is key to the idea of reconciliation. “Everyone has an opinion, and that’s fine, but I’m always a fan of understanding why we do these things. I think there is something quite special to be gained by the process. I don’t particularly understand the often vitriolic response to Welcomes to Country.”
Prince William was officially welcomed to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in 2014.Credit: Wolter Peeters
But Thomas Mayo, a leading campaigner during the Voice referendum, thinks he knows where it comes from. He wants to emphasise that Welcomes to Country have become an established Australian tradition over decades, without attracting the opposition that exists today.
”There is this movement to regress, and take us backwards, to a time where we were expected to forget who we are. It has certainly become worse since the referendum and since Peter Dutton became opposition leader,” he says.
“I think the strategy behind the opposition, those orchestrating this, is based on getting that emotional response from people. It’s not about cost because that is so small. It’s low-hanging fruit to scapegoat Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and create division for political gain.”
Mayo also wants to see practical measures that improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. But part of the solution, he says, “is to acknowledge that we exist in the first place”.
That’s how Lidia Thorpe, Victoria’s first Indigenous senator, feels as well. “It’s not a lot of money compared to all the other money that gets wasted in this place, so what is this really about? It’s about denying who we are, our religion, our cultural protocols, on their way to winning the election,” she says.
Senator Lidia Thorpe during a smoking ceremony to welcome her to Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country by the Traditional Custodians of the land, at the Aboriginal tent embassy in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Everyone protects other religious freedoms and religious rights. Well, where’s ours? I see it as a really racist, divisive tactic. First it was about the flag, now it’s Welcome to Country, what’s next?”
Thorpe recalls organising for elders to travel to dozens of daycare centres on Gunai Country, where she comes from, and perform Welcomes to three and four-year-olds. “These kids were so proud to hear about the story of the land. They’re teenagers now, and they still know the story from that day. The feedback from the parents was they felt connected, not that they were on the outside.”
Roberts has seen Welcomes contribute to a significant generational shift and she thinks it is “pretty extraordinary”. “You can go around the room and everyone under the age 45 knows what Country they’re living on. That wouldn’t have happened 40 years ago,” she says.
Waters, too, sees how far things have come. His family lived on missions for 150 years. “But it’s like your red mud crabs. Just as you get to the top of the bucket, a sense of freedom, another crab pulls you back down,” he says.
“People are so quick to try and get rid of something that’s enshrined in culture. It’s like saying: let’s get rid of the Last Post, put in something jazzier to lighten the mood. How would people feel about that?”
An Anzac Day service at Angelsea RSL Club begins with a Wadawurrung Welcome to Country and smoke ceremony. Credit: Justin McManus
Uncle Russell Saunders now knows that feeling better than most; he had a front-row seat as councillors voted on whether the Welcomes he’d been performing for 20 years still had a place on his Country.
“When they ask me to do a Welcome, that’s telling me: I acknowledge you, Uncle Russ, you are an Indigenous man of this Country. That makes me feel proud, that makes me feel strong and that I love this country so much,” he says.
The majority of the MidCoast Council wants them to continue. The motion to stop them failed – it was voted down, eight to three.
But for Saunders, something has shifted, particularly after the referendum defeat. “I found it very difficult this year, as an Australian, to stand up on a platform and do Welcome to Country, when people out there aren’t even taking it seriously,” he says.
“So I said I couldn’t do it this year on Australia Day. Who are we, to this country? That’s what I question. It hurts. Australia’s got a lot of healing to do.”
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