Sorry Not Sorry, Welcome Not Welcome

“I’m bringing Columbus Day back”, Donald Trump gleefully announced on Truth Social, reinforcing the ancient tradition (that began in 1971) of the American nation officially celebrating one of history’s most successful genocidaires.

The depopulation of the Caribbean islands triggered by Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, a model closely followed throughout the continent, translated easily to our own land when the English colonists arrived here. On a conservative estimate, the Indigenous population of Australia in 1938 was less than 10% of the 1788 total.

It’s funny, in that context, to be talking about a “welcome” to country; but the dissonance is, in fact, the point.

Rather beautifully, Wiradjuri woman and academic Jessa Rogers wrote in the Age/SMH that “a Welcome to Country connects all Australians to a heritage that stretches across countless generations. It is a living tradition that should be embraced as a powerful and unifying part of our culture today.”

As Rogers says, the Welcome is older and deeper than Australia; it is not an invitation to be in this nation state, but a reminder of unceded sovereignty rooted in the waters and soil. As was the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the Welcome is an act of generosity from people honouring connection to something not quite lost and well worth preserving.

Yeah, but…”We don’t need to be welcomed to our own country” shout the Clive Palmer banner ads at the bottom of every paper, flaring our next culture war “debate” with devastating disingenuity. Cue Nazis at the ANZAC Day ceremony, booing the Welcome. Cue Peter Dutton, Mr Divisive unable to resist the opportunity, as ever, to stoke a little bit of comfortable racism – “I think other Australians think it is overdone”.

Despite being initially critical of the Nazis for their inappropriate timing, Dutton sniffed the wind a bit more strongly the morning after and declared that the Welcome shouldn’t be included in ANZAC Day services at all.

It’s no use pretending. The arc of the moral universe may have been bending for a long time towards, not a voice for Indigenous Australians, god no, but at least the small grace of recognising their continued existence and prior custodianship of this amazing land. That trend is now, pretty obviously, stalling and at risk of going into reverse.

The noisy racists of Australia’s “right” – the Nazis, One Nation, the National Party, half the Liberal Party, the US-originated Atlas/Alliance/Whatever polemicists, the Murdoch press – are still in reality a fringe in their incessant desire to punch down on those not like them, but their reach is outsized and they sure can confect an argument.

However, if we zoom out from the issue and place it in the context of the world, 2025-style, it’s obvious that an assault on the Welcome to Country was inevitable.

We are in a time of powerful cultural regression, in Australia and throughout the Western world. The political forces of reactionism, those who would misdescribe themselves as conservative, are atop the bulldozer and searching out every indicium of equality, earmarking them for destruction.

First they came for etc etc, you know the Martin Neimöller poem (or you should), but it’s too simplistic to ascribe all this to recrudescent fascism. Racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are not causes but symptoms of deeper human processes; they’re all on full display, speaking of something bubbling underneath.

Of course, Indigenous Australians were going to cop the pressure of this regressive time, as inevitably as trans people are being monstered out of their fragile existence. The Welcome is as visceral an affront to the scared weird little guys in charge as is the terrifying notion that gay people use bathrooms too. Wait till they work out that women vote.

Privilege – the privilege of being white, binary male, hetero, “Christian” – is making a stand, grabbing this historic moment to fight for what it has always owned: everything. Wokeness, literally the sensation of being awake to the reality that the world includes people not like you and that structural disadvantage is actually a thing, must be thrown into reverse.

The practical result is bigotry in all its glorious forms, blossoming back into public consumption, after so long being forced to fester away from the editorial and letters pages of the press. We can give social media a lot of credit, with a special shout-out to Zuckerberg and Musk, but there’s still more to it.

In the end, it’s fear. The world has turned to shit, no matter how you look at it, and the one thing we can all agree on now is that it’s sensible to be scared. When people are scared, generosity of spirit quickly turns to meanness. Mean people dominate our consciousness, and Donald Trump outliving the people’s pope (then wearing a blue fucking suit to his funeral!) just nails down the coffin of a kinder world.

So sure, resuscitate Columbus, hell, let’s commemorate Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia while we’re at it, spit the Welcome back in its deliverer’s face. In a world of fear and dread, all things small loom large again.