Someone who has ancestors stretching back 30,000 years in this county is no more an Aussie than someone like me who’s ancestry dates back to the early 1800s, or someone who became an Aussie four days ago on Australia Day. We are all Aussies and on THAT we should be all equally proud.
Well said, Keg. The problem with so many of these things is that they are inherently divisive. Take something like a ‘welcome to a country’. Essentially a nice thing, welcoming someone. Except that it automatically places that person in the position of an outsider, unless you’re welcoming them back home, which is not at all how I see a welcome to country. (Would be a great idea though, if that’s what it could become.) I was born here, as were my parents, their parents, their grandparents and so on. A few of them died in its service. It’s the only home any of us have ever known. Why should I be ‘welcomed’ here as an outsider? I’m not, and nor is someone who became a citizen just the other day. The last Anzac Day ceremony I was at, we were welcomed - to our own homeland - by a lovely young lady who was born here about 30 years after I was. She did a genuinely great job, but something about it didn’t sit quite right. Then we have the inevitable acknowledgments of traditional owners, for which there’s a time and a place, but which just gets done to death. At my kid’s school graduation, there were - I kid you not - no fewer than FOUR acknowledgments of the traditional owners before they got around to even mentioning the kids. The ‘is, was and always will be’ part is meaningless and insincere - after all, the land was taken, concreted over, had a school built on it, and isn’t getting handed back any time soon. All the lip service and platitudes do nothing in improving the plight of indigenous people.
I think there’s plenty in indigenous culture for us to learn about and respect, but can’t see that divisive, empty gestures, and the elevation of any one group over the rest, are really helping in the long run.