I’d like to think that Australians have learned from Adam Goodes, that booing indigenous Australians is disgraceful. Maybe that’s too optimistic.
What appears to be an organised attempt to have people boo the Welcome to Country or acknowledgement of Country at Dawn Services yesterday in capital cities turned out to be feeble when only a tiny number of people booed.
And they were not Anzac heroes.
What is disappointing is that Christians have come out in support of the boo-ers.
Let’s zero in on an example.
“Loud boos rang out at Anzac Day services today, and I’ve never been prouder to be Australian,” Mike Foster, the Managing Director of Answers in Genesis–Australia, posted on Facebook.
“While gutless officials clutched their pearls, ordinary people finally said what millions are thinking: enough of this offensive activist ritual on the day we honour our diggers.”
Yes, the people who booed are ordinary Australians. But many more ordinary Australians at the services did not boo. And in Sydney, they responded by respectfully applauding Uncle Ray Minniecon. (That’s the hopeful difference between the Adam Goodes situation during AFL games and a few Dawn Services yesterday.) The photo shows Minniecon with RSL NSW acting president, retired brigadier Vince Williams, who apologised to him.
There would have been many others in the crowd who didn’t like Welcome to Country, especially given that the crowd may have skewed older. But they did not boo.
Just as any atheist did not boo the parts of the ceremony they did not like, the prayers and hymns.
And what is an ordinary Australian? Look at the faces in the crowd – not uniformly Anglo. Hear the names of the school captains reading patriotic poetry – not unformly Anglo. Look at the marchers, grandfather’s medals being worn by children who are not pale.
Let’s give Foster a fair hearing – he has free speech rights and Answers in Genesis speaks for some Christians. He writes, “The real disrespect to our diggers is hijacking Anzac Day with a divisive activist ceremony that treats the overwhelming majority of those who served as outsiders on their own land.
“Ordinary Australians aren’t buying the guilt trip anymore.
“They’re not ‘far-right extremists.’
“They’re not ‘racist.’
“They’re simply done watching our most sacred day of national unity turned into another lecture on who really belongs here.”
This ignores the fact that a “Welcome to Country” is a welcome. It says “welcome” in the title and most times again in the words. A welcome says you belong here, that we want you present. That is what a welcome is.
It is also slippery rhetoric, suggesting that ‘ordinary Australians’ all would have booed. That is clearly not so.
Our history is uncomfortable. Anzac Day acknowledges a military defeat and the honour of the soldiers at Gallipoli and those who followed them in serving Australia.
A Welcome to Country follows that pattern, facing the sombre facts of settler conquest in our history, but astonishingly finding the indigenous people welcome the rest of us even through pain and anguish at the past.
Here is an Acknowledgement of Country written for the Sydney Anglican Synod by then Archbishop Glenn Davies.
“As we gather in the presence of God, I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet. In his wisdom and love, our heavenly Father gave this estate to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Upon this land, they met for generations until the coming of British settlers. As we continue to learn to live together on these ancestral lands, we acknowledge and pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and pray that God will unite us all in a knowledge of his Son, in whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth, whether visible or invisible – for all things have been created through him and for him.”
Australian Christians should be able to unite around words like this, and many other examples.
One Anzac Day, I attended a Special Olympics cricket event at Bankstown Oval – Bankstown cricket club is extraodinary in nurturing Cricketers living with Intellectual disability. A Turkish Gozleme van fed us. I think I was the only one that noticed.
Whether Welcome to Country or Acknowledgements of Country occur at Dawn Services is up to those far from radical RSL sub branches that organise them. Just as you have prayers for the Turkish people at some but not others, we should treat the organisers with sufficient respect not to turm what is offered on Anzac day into a political or even theological fight.
Image: Uncle Ray Minniecon (L) — himself an ADF veteran — delivered the Acknowledgement of Country in Sydney’s Martin Place, where a small but vocal group booed. RSL NSW acting president, retired brigadier Vince Williams (R), apologised directly to Uncle Minniecon. Image Credit: Supplied / RSL NSW / SBS
Uncle Ray Minniecon is also a Christian pastor at Scarred Tree Ministries. While not the focus of the article, that does play into the dynamics here.
“only a tiny number of people booed”. It didn’t sound like that to me. They should not have booed at all. But it probably reflected frustration that Welcomes to Country seem to often go further and make contested political statements like “Always will be – aboriginal land” [not in Pastor Millican’s WtC]. But he did say it later. “Uncle Ray told the ABC he wanted Australians to understand ‘this always was and always will be Aboriginal land'”.ONE and free!