With The Australian newspaper and a good proportion of the Liberal/National Opposition raising questions about the prevalence of Welcome to Country ceremonies and speeches it took a courageous (and outgoing) Artistic Director of the Sydney Festival to program the show As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement. For, far from being an evening of Shakespeare, it was actually a distinctly challenging 90 minute monologue by one Clifford Cardinal about the need for both white guilt and Indigenous land rights.

My friend Christopher Allen wouldn’t have enjoyed it! For, sticking to the editorial line in The Oz, his art commentary this weekend began: “In the past decade or two but especially since COVID, when too much isolation lead to a national spike in collective neurosis, Australia has been in a state of anxiety about its own history, identity and future. Suddenly everyone began repeating formulaic acknowledgements of country (sic) at every opportunity; gallery and museum websites forced visitors to pass through a veil of contrition to find the information they were looking for; we started to refer to Indigenous people as First Nations, a peculiar misnomer apparently imported from Canada. Sentimentality and hypocrisy overwhelmed what we used to think of as dry laconic Australian common sense”.

Get used to it Mr Allen – First Nations is here to stay (until First Peoples replaces it), just as you prefer to be thought of as a settler rather than a colonist. And so are Welcomes to Country – which the Canadian Cliff Cardinal attempted to align exactly with his peoples’ Land Acknowledgments. For he is Lakota and Cree, with a past that included the Massacre at Wounded Knee. And he “fucking hates Land Acknowledgements” on the grounds that they seem largely to be there to make non-Indigenous feel better about their murderous pasts, to make him feel like a victim, but to lack any notion of returning land, or indeed, allowing Native Americans to exploit that land unenvironmentally if they want to.
Now that’s an argument going on in Cape York right now.

But what Cardinal fails to note is that Welcomes to Country in Australia have a valid, purely Indigenous history by which the 250 odd tribes of this country needed to be welcomed to travel peacefully into foreign territory. That doesn’t seem to have any resonance in Canada – though it might be quite popular in WA and Queensland when NS Welshmen and Victorians travel!

And the Aboriginal members of the Sydney Festival audience (were there any?) might like to note that a 90 minute Welcome to Country would be no more popular than a 90 minute Land Acknowledgement – though Cardinal does seem to have won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his patently unliterary address. It eventually lost its Aussie comparisons and settled into an all-Canadian attack on the awful residential school system there, the guilt of the Catholic Church, and the super strength of the women in his Lakota community.

Where he did come home to the Australia that rejected the Referendum (and justify quite a few standing ovations) was in his regretful sign-off, “We’re supposed to be family……but we’re not”.

Sadly, your only chance of making up your own mind about Land Acknowledgements is to rush to the SOH Drama Theatre for tonight’s 6.30 performance.