‘Before Cook’: Indigenous Ceremony at Football Final Reignites Debate

A traditional Welcome to Country ceremony performed before the AFL semi-final between GWS Giants and Brisbane Lions at Sydney’s Engie Stadium on Saturday night has caused debate.
Aboriginal Elder Brendan Kerin deviated from the usual format, leading One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson to renew her call for the practice to be ended.
“A Welcome to Country is not a welcome to Australia. Within Australia, we have many Aboriginal lands, and we refer to our lands as ‘country,’” Kerin said in response to many Australians who questioned why they need to be welcomed to their own country.
“So it’s always a welcome to the lands you’ve gathered on.”
He pointed out it is an ancient custom and is not only aimed at white Australians.
“A Welcome to Country is not a ceremony we’ve invented to cater for white people,” he continued.
“It’s a ceremony we’ve been doing for 250,000 years-plus BC. And the BC stands for Before Cook”—a reference to Captain James Cook, who made the first recorded European contact with Australian land in 1770.
Before European settlement, there were around 250 individual Aboriginal nations, each with at least one unique language, while some had several.
In his forthcoming book on Mount Kosciuszko, author Anthony Sharwood records Ngarigo elder Iris White explaining in 2022: “What we actually do in a Welcome to Country is that we are welcoming people into a relationship with us. It’s not ‘Here’s our country, welcome to it.’ Our culture is based on relationships and reciprocity and that is what we’re actually doing.”
“Prior to colonisation,” he continued, “you could get yourself in a lot of trouble for walking on someone else’s lands without being welcomed onto those lands. So, for me, it’s always an honour to perform this ceremony.”
The crowd applauded the speech, and Kerin then played a short piece on a didgeridoo before Mimi Velevska sang the national anthem.
But the reaction from the media—mainstream and social—wasn’t as positive.
Renowned Collingwood player Tony Shaw said on his social media account that the AFL had become “a weak politically correct organisation … The political decisiveness of welcome to country last night was embarrassing, but any public rebuke?”
Indigenous leader Warren Mundine said Welcome to Country ceremonies have gone “overboard.”
In a long post on X, she claimed the ceremonies are “racially divisive” and said she believed Australians are “sick and tired of them.”
“As I have said in the past, these Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country performances are one of the most racially divisive features of modern discourse in Australia,” she said.
“Australians are sick and tired of them. They are sick of being told Australia is not their country, which is what these things effectively do. Welcomes and acknowledgements deny the citizenship and sovereignty held equally by all Australians, and they need to stop.
“I recall the promise made by leading voice campaigner Marcia Langton, who promised no more ‘welcomes to country’ if The Voice was rejected,” Hanson said. “Sadly, this promise has not been delivered.”
In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Hanson said that if The Voice failed, “the answer is going to be no” if she was asked to perform a Welcome to Country in the future. She did not claim to be speaking for all Indigenous people.
Hanson concluded her post by stating, “Australians should not be forced to participate in or be subjected to these divisive performances. Enough is enough.”
Hanson’s post has received over 8,000 likes and 1,000 reposts, with the majority of the 600-plus comments from her followers agreeing with her stance.