There is quite a violence in forgetting.
It bleeds through our history textbooks, stains the real estate signs planted over sacred sites, and hangs in silence after a name is butchered, or worse, deliberately erased. We inherit a country that pretends it began at colonisation and punishes those who remember otherwise. And now, as Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies become politicised battlegrounds, we must ask ourselves: What are we really resisting?
In 2022, Senator Pauline Hanson staged her now-infamous protest in the Senate, refusing to remain for the Acknowledgement of Country and declaring, “No, I won’t and never will,” before storming out of the chamber. She later labelled the practice as divisive and unnecessary. For many, it was a symbolic gesture, clear in its intent: to reject the very idea that this land was never truly ceded. Fast forward to April 2025. At the Anzac Day dawn service in Melbourne, a Welcome to Country was disrupted by a group of hecklers. As Wurundjeri Elder Uncle Andrew Gardiner stood to deliver the Welcome, he was met with boos and jeers. Some were identified as known far-right agitators. Among them were neo-Nazis with Australian flags draped over their shoulders, using the National Day of Remembrance to stage an act of desecration. Police later confirmed the group was under surveillance and that their actions were being investigated.
Then came the opposition leader’s remarks. Peter Dutton recently claimed that Welcome to Country ceremonies are “overdone,” suggesting their frequent use diminishes their significance. He argued that incorporating these acknowledgments at various events, such as meetings and sports games, cheapens their intended respect and divides the nation. But what’s being missed in these critiques is this: the ceremony isn’t the problem.
What’s overdone, Mr. Dutton, were the killings and the massacres. The sanctioned violence that carved this nation into its very existence. Entire clans were wiped from the map so settlers could sketch new borders. Children were robbed. Languages silenced. Ceremonial grounds are paved over by highways and high-rises. If repetition is your concern, know that the cycle of dispossession has echoed across centuries, louder and longer than any Welcome to Country ever could.
These don’t present as isolated tantrums but symptoms of a deeper national disease: an identity built on omission that is now cracking under the pressure of privilege.
In 2008, following Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s National Apology to the Stolen Generations, formal acknowledgements gained traction across government events. By 2011, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had issued protocols recommending Acknowledgements of Country at all major public functions. It was about beginning conversations the Country had spent too long avoiding and had nothing to do with the optics.
These acknowledgements were never meant to be compulsory but were intended to be consistent. A reminder that no matter where you are in this Country, on a sports field, in a boardroom, or at a university graduation, you are on Aboriginal land. And that truth remains no matter how many buildings have been built or borders drawn.
Opposing the Welcome to the Country comes with a fear of facing the truth. Fear that the myth of Australia as a fair and equal land will fracture when faced with the bones beneath its foundations. Fear that acknowledgement might lead to accountability.
If we can’t even stomach acknowledging the land we stand on, how will we ever be ready to reckon with everything that was taken to make it ours?
