Before Australia Tells a Story About Itself

Country, culture and the unfinished work of belonging

 

By WESLEY ENOCH

I want to begin by acknowledging the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation and paying my respects to Elders past and present.

It feels especially right to begin here because I want to begin with celebrating a Bundjalung woman: Rhoda Roberts. Not because this is going to be a catalogue of Rhoda’s achievements, there are too many, and she would almost certainly tell me to cut ten minutes from this speech, but because Rhoda is the doorway into so many ways of thinking and important ideas. Her legacy is one that knits this Country, it’s cultural authority, identity, the ideas of striving and achieving excellence, and creating Blak space, but most of all she demonstrates what one generation leaves for the next.

Rhoda had that rare capacity to make you feel loved and challenged at exactly the same time. I don’t think she saw much distinction between the two. To care about an artist was to expect something from the work. To care about community was to be willing to have difficult conversations. And to care about a people and a place was to believe that the country could be more truthful, more generous and more interesting than it sometimes allows itself to be.

Welcome to Country is one of the clearest examples of the way she thought. And because there is now so much argument about where Welcome to Country came from, it is worth getting the history stated….not to turn ceremony into a history lesson, but because the history tells us something about how culture lives.

The first thing to say is that the phrase Welcome to Country is recent but the cultural underpinning it is not.

Long before Europeans arrived, this continent was made up of Countries – nations, clans, language groups, estates and overlapping systems of authority and responsibility. People travelled, traded, married, fought, negotiated and visited across those boundaries. Entry onto another people’s Country carried protocols. You did not simply arrive as though place had no authority and your presence required no relationship.

In the 1840s, William Thomas, an Assistant Protector in the Port Phillip district, recorded Tanderrum ceremonies among Kulin peoples. He described what was sometimes translated as ‘freedom of the bush’: diplomatic acts through which strangers could be received, gifts exchanged, and visitors given safe access to Country and its resources. The written record is colonial and partial, but it matters because it makes nonsense of the idea that protocols of welcome suddenly appeared in the late twentieth century.

Later, anthropologists such as Norman Tindale tried to map Aboriginal territorial and language boundaries. His maps are rightly contested; no Western map can hold the complexity of Country, and no Aboriginal person needs an anthropologist to authenticate belonging. But this mapping demonstrates the vast array of nations and countries and the idea that traveling through countries would require some form of organized processes.

Then, in 1973, at the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin, another part of the modern story appears. The festival was being held on Bundjalung Country, and questions were raised about whether permission had actually been sought from the people of that place. Uncle Lyle Roberts and songman Uncle Dickee Donnelly conducted a ceremony for the gathering. It was not called a Welcome to Country then. But Rhoda, speaking much later about her uncle’s action, said simply: ‘To me that was the first Welcome.’ I think that matters. It was an old responsibility being exercised in a new public circumstance.

Three years later, in Perth, Richard Walley and Ernie Dingo, with the authority of Elders, drew on Noongar language, song, dance and protocol to create a public welcoming ceremony to welcome performers from the pacific islands as part of Perth festival.

I love that part of the story because the modern public form was sharpened through an encounter between Indigenous peoples. The circumstances were modern. The proposition underneath them was old.

And then Rhoda saw what that proposition could become. Her gift was not invention so much as translation, not translation as simplification, and certainly not as making Aboriginal culture comfortable for non-Aboriginal audiences, but translation as finding contemporary forms through which old principles could keep doing their work. In the 1980s she helped give the practice the language that became part of the national vocabulary: Welcome to Country.

People tried to correct her. Welcome to the Country. Welcome to our Country. Rhoda resisted that possessive language. Her explanation was deceptively simple: ‘It’s not ours. We live with it.’ Underneath that small grammatical decision sits an entire philosophy. Country is not scenery or real estate. It is a living system of relationships between people, ancestors, animals, plants, waters, seasons, story, memory and obligation. We do not stand outside those relationships as owners. We belong within them.

Through festivals, broadcasting, the Festival of the Dreaming, cultural institutions and events of enormous national visibility, Rhoda helped make recognition of Country ordinary public knowledge. By the time Indigenous ceremony occupied the centre of the Sydney Olympics, Aboriginal culture was no longer being asked merely to decorate the national story. It was making a more fundamental claim: before Australia tells a story about itself, it should know where it is.

I have come to think of First Nations life in Australia as an enormous intergenerational project of turning back the effects of colonisation. That sounds grand, but most of the work is not grand at all. It happens in families, schools, community organisations, rehearsal rooms, language classes, courtrooms, boardrooms, kitchens and funerals. It happens when someone learns a word that has been asleep, when a family returns to Country, when an artist tells a story in a way that could not have been told a generation earlier, when an institution gives up some control, or when a young person assumes a right that an older person had to fight to establish.

My grandparents’ generation lived through a struggle for survival: keeping families together, resisting violence and removal, holding onto Country and family. My parents’ generation inherited another set of battles…education, employment, housing, health, land rights, equality, self-determination and the right to imagine an Aboriginal future that was not simply a better-managed form of assimilation. Assimilation offered a future on the condition that we stopped being ourselves. Our people insisted on another proposition: we wanted a future as ourselves.

My generation inherited that insistence and took it into cultural space. We fought for the right not simply to appear in other people’s stories but to be at the centre of our own. To take on the main character energy. We wanted Aboriginal actors, writers, directors, designers, artistic directors and companies. We wanted our work in theatres, on television, in galleries, in books, in universities and in the institutions that had spent so long describing us without us. We wanted cultural authority as well as representation.

There is always a danger in describing history by generations because history does not move in neat stages. The fights overlap. We go forwards, backwards and sideways. Sometimes we discover that a battle we thought had been settled has simply changed costume. But thinking intergenerationally helps me resist the fantasy that any one generation finishes the work. We inherit unfinished business. We move some of it. We leave other things unresolved. Then somebody younger arrives and tells us what we missed.

They should.

The question that matters to me now is what my generation is handing on. Three issues keep returning: identity, the sense of excellence and the need for Blak spaces. I am inspired in these three concepts by Rhoda Roberts and her work to support these three make a significant part of her legacy.

Identity is perhaps the most difficult because it is both deeply personal and necessarily communal. Aboriginal identity is not simply a fact of ancestry. It is lived, relational and full of obligations. The question is not only, Are you Aboriginal? It is also, How are you Aboriginal?

That distinction matters more than ever. Between the 2016 and 2021 censuses there was a substantial increase in the number of Australians identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Close to 20%. There are many reasons for that, including demographic changes, the success of the breeding program, but also there are more people identifying in ways they or their families may not have done previously. The removal of stigma and overt oppression has created more safe spaces for people to publicly acknowledge their Aboriginality. Any serious conversation about this has to begin with historical compassion. Aboriginality disappeared from family stories for reasons produced by colonisation. People were punished for being Aboriginal. Children were removed. Families were separated from Country. Names changed. Stories were hidden. Some parents protected their children by telling them not to say who they were. The violence of assimilation did not only take land; it interrupted the transmission of identity.

For someone to discover an Aboriginal ancestor whose identity was deliberately hidden can therefore be profound. It can reconnect a family to something that was taken from them. We need to make room for that return.

Rhoda asked the question “if you say your great grandmother was Aboriginal it raises questions but what about her daughter and your mother and you. The statement of saying your great grandmother was Aboriginal is a distancing of the obligations to country and hence the distancing of identity.”

Finding the ancestor is not the end of the story. It is the beginning.

For many years we have described Aboriginal identity through descent, self-identification and community recognition. That you are of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander descent, you identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and your community identify you.

Institutions have often translated those ideas into paperwork because paperwork is what institutions understand. A certificate can be filed, audited and turned into policy. Relationship is much harder to administer.

Culture does not live in a folder.

Who are your people? Who knows you? Who claims you? Where do you belong? What relationships are you building? What responsibilities have you taken on? These questions are not bureaucratic tests. At their best, they are invitations into relationship.

For me, being Quandamooka is not simply a line in a biography. It connects me to people and to Minjerribah and Moorgumpin. It comes with expectations. It means there are things I am responsible for, things I know, things I do not know, things I do well and things I still have to learn. It is not only an identity I possess; it is a relationship that makes claims on me.

That is why I become uneasy when political identity begins to replace cultural identity. Our politics emerged to protect culture: land, language, family, ceremony, cultural rights and the ability to make decisions about our own lives. Self-determination was never intended to be an abstract ideological badge. It was about protecting and renewing a living cultural world. If we retain the politics but lose sight of what the politics was protecting, something becomes thin.

This does not mean there is one correct way to be Aboriginal. There never has been. Someone living on Country with an unbroken language tradition has a different experience from someone raised in an Australian city; a member of the Stolen Generations has a different experience again; a person reconnecting after generations of disruption occupies another position. Those experiences are all real, but they are not interchangeable. Equity does not require sameness.

Nor should every question about identity be dismissed as lateral violence. Lateral violence exists and can be cruel. Aboriginal people know the damage caused when trauma turns inward. But there is a difference between humiliation and accountability, between policing and asking someone to explain their relationship. Sometimes “Who are your people?” is not a gate closing. It is a request to come closer.

Identity creates responsibility. The stronger the claim, the greater the obligation to relationship, reciprocity and care.

Tony McAvoy in his 2025 Meanjin Oration talked of layers of identity. He proffered the idea that there are overlapping identities and obligations and authorities in your life. We know this to be true you can be a mother and an executive, a lesbian and ten pin bowler. One identity does not disallow the other but it will depend on context to which identity is the primary identity through which you live your life. For Aboriginal and Torres strait islander peoples our Primary identity will be expressed through the complex web of relationships, obligations and reciprocity. Aunties Mary Graham and Aileen Moreton Robinson talk of these concepts as the cornerstone of our cultural fabric. The commitment to having your Aboriginality as your primary identity, in my case a Nughi man of the Quandamooka people is a commitment to more than naming it. The identity comes with the powerful need demonstrate belonging.

There are so many identities I could use – an academic, a gay man, a theatre maker, or even acknowledge the multiplicity of family connections including the Spanish, irish, Danish, Kanju, Rotumuh island or filopino but it would be a stretch to say any of these are my Primary identity.

The challenge to every person who calls themselves a First Nations person of this country is to work towards the undoing of the barriers that have separated you from Country and build connection.

As more and more people search for and find their connection to this landscape we will find more and more the need to help them see that the western sense of genealogy is not the same as an Aboriginal sense of connection.

I tell the story of knowing where my grandfather was buried not because of a tombstone or any formal marker but because the large gum tree my father would take us to was my grandfather tree. It had grown up and taken in the dna of his body buried beneath it. Now consider how that dna was then transferred to the leaves of that tree and the flowers and how the animals the fed from that tree carried his dna and eventually dropping his dna in the grasslands and waterways and how you can see that my grandfathers dna over the past 60 years has been spread throughout the landscape. Then multiply that by 1000 generations and you can understand the relationship to the land and animals and plants and waterways. The tree is my grandfather and all around me is my grandfather. Country is my relation. When someone says they have been on this land for five generations I like to reinforce this relationship.

To declare your Primary identity as Aboriginal, to step into the spotlight, to receive awards, to step into positions or funding identified because of the need to address the past injustices, because we need to promote cultural ways of knowing and being, we must instill a deeper sense of obligation and authority.

During the Dreaming Festival in 1997 Rhoda famously challenged reviewers that they were being too soft on Indigenous artists, saying we can only grow if we are held accountable to be the best we can be.

I have spent most of my life in the theatre, and theatre is a ruthless teacher. An idea can seem magnificent in your head and die within thirty seconds of being placed on a stage. Actors tell you. The room tells you. Eventually the audience tells you. Some even throw paper planes and tell you it’s bad. The work gets better because somebody is prepared to say that something is not working.

There was a period when simply getting an Aboriginal work onto a major stage was an enormous achievement. Getting a book published, a film made, a dance created. We needed the first actors, the first writers, the first directors, the first companies, the first festivals, the first people inside institutions with enough authority to say yes.

But eventually representation creates another responsibility. We have to be able to ask not only whether the work is Aboriginal, but whether it is good.

I regard that as a loving question. Rhoda talked of this need.

There is a form of racism that announces itself through hostility, exclusion and contempt. There is another, quieter form that disguises itself as kindness: the lowering of expectations. Indigenous work can become “important”, “powerful”, “brave” and “significant” in ways that sometimes avoid the more useful conversation about whether it succeeds as art. I have occasionally wanted a critic to stop telling us that a work is important and simply say that the second half is boring.

An artist can do something with that.

Critique is not the enemy of cultural respect. Good critique is a form of attention. It says the work is worth spending time with, worth understanding, worth arguing about. It takes the artist seriously enough to distinguish between intention and achievement.

Of course, criticism itself carries responsibilities. Aboriginal art should not be judged solely against inherited European definitions of excellence. Our work can arise from different aesthetics, languages, structures of time, cultural protocols, relationships to audience and ideas of authorship. Anyone who wants to critique it needs cultural literacy as well as artistic literacy. You cannot meaningfully evaluate a language you have refused to learn.

This is why I think Australia still needs a much stronger tradition of Blak criticism: not gossip, not social-media pile-ons, not institutional praise, but sustained critical engagement by people who understand the histories and forms they are discussing. What was the artist attempting? Where does the work succeed? Where does it fail? What is its relationship to the work that came before it? What does it make possible for the work that comes after?

Without that ecology of criticism, we risk confusing protection with respect.

I want Aboriginal artists who can survive the weather. I want ambition. I want extraordinary work. I want artists who can stand anywhere in the world and know that they belong there, not because the standard has been lowered, but because they have met it, transformed it or invented a different standard altogether.

Rhoda talked about wanting Aboriginal artists to have the right to fail.

Failure is an ordinary part of artistic life, but scarcity makes failure dangerous. If an institution programs only one Indigenous work, that work is suddenly expected to carry an impossible load. It must represent community, educate audiences, satisfy the institution, sell tickets, prove the value of Indigenous programming and somehow also be a good night in the theatre. That is too much pressure for one little play.

The solution is not to protect the play from criticism. It is to make more plays.

The multiplicity of voices means no one voice must carry the hopes and dreams of a whole people. It also builds a more complex reading and allows us to disagree and explore opposing ideas.

Excuse this segue for a second.

The latest referendum represented to me the inability for the nation to grapple with the complexity of our diversity and an old fashioned notion that we are best served by the united and overly simplistic united front (because white people are always united).

“they can’t agree amongst themselves” “If you don’t know vote no” “I heard they not all of them want it”

This lowering of the barre, this inability for some to grapple with us and our ambitions is why excellence should not be a dirty word.

We become better, we grow from informed debate, from deeply engaged discussion and an expectation that the best of us can achieve.

I have a saying that is perhaps is a little dated now but the saying is “No one asks Cathy Freeman to run slowly, so why should we not ask the same for our artists?”

And that brings me to the third legacy from Rhoda: Blak spaces.

Something changes when there are enough of us in the room. One Aboriginal person on a committee can find themselves expected to speak for entire populations, hundreds of communities and tens of thousands of years of history. But put ten Aboriginal people in the room and suddenly we can disagree and push the ideas further.

That is diversity.

Real diversity is not achieved by inserting one representative into an existing structure. It occurs when there are enough people that nobody has to represent everybody. The individual is released from symbolism and allowed to become particular.

The same is true in art. If there is one Aboriginal writer, every sentence risks being treated as a statement about Aboriginal Australia. If there are fifty, one can write about colonisation, another about love, another about their mother, another about horror, science fiction, sex, grief, suburbia, Country, comedy or absolutely nothing that a funding body would describe as an “Indigenous issue”. Someone can even write a terrible book without anybody concluding that Aboriginal literature has failed.

That is a kind of freedom.

For much of Australian history, Aboriginal people were rendered in broad strokes: the native, the Aborigine, the tribe, the Elder, the victim, the activist, the noble traditional person, the angry urban person. Other people painted us, photographed us, studied us, collected us, classified us and wrote us into the national imagination. Self-determination in storytelling has allowed us to move from category into detail.

Humanity lives in the detail.

The language of identity itself becomes more specific as knowledge deepens. Native. Aborigine. Aboriginal. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Indigenous. First Nations. Blak. These collective terms have political and social uses, but none is more precise than knowing a person’s people, Country, language and family. I am Quandamooka. I am Nughi. I live on Minjerribah. The closer you move towards relationship, the less generic the language becomes.

Blak spaces make that specificity possible because they allow us to spend less time explaining the basics. They create room for argument, experimentation, cultural confidence, failure and complexity. They are not ghettos. They are places to grow.

A rehearsal room is protected for a reason, but nobody builds a rehearsal room in order to remain inside it forever. Eventually the doors open.

That is how I think about the best Indigenous cultural spaces. They are not retreats from Australia. They are places from which we can enter Australia with greater authority. The Festival of the Dreaming in 1997 mattered because it offered scale: many artists, many Countries, many forms and many arguments. The point was not to manufacture a single Indigenous position. It was to demonstrate abundance.

That abundance matters politically as well as artistically. Non-Indigenous Australia can still be surprised by disagreement among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as though authenticity requires unanimity. The 2023 referendum made the diversity of Indigenous political opinion impossible to ignore. The disagreement itself did not surprise Aboriginal people. We are families and communities. Of course we disagree.

What was painful for many was the loss of an opportunity and the national atmosphere that accompanied it. The 1967 referendum has lived in public memory as a moment when Australia seemed capable of saying yes to change. In 2023 the country said something different, and we are still working through what that means.

But our history cannot become a sequence in which Aboriginal existence waits for the approval of the Australian electorate. We survived before referendums. We made law before constitutions. We had diplomacy before Australian governments and culture before Australian arts institutions. Political, legal and constitutional recognition matter enormously, but our existence does not depend upon a vote.

The work continues.

For me, hope begins there. I do not mean optimism, the idea that everything will somehow work out. Chelsea Watego famously wrote in her book Another Day in the Colony – Fuck Hope. Aboriginal history gives us very little reason for that kind of complacency. Hope should be more active. A fuel for action. It is the decision to keep imagining and building despite the evidence that progress is never secure.

After 2023, people repeatedly asked: what now?

We keep going.

We educate our children. We care for Country. We rebuild languages. We make art. We strengthen organisations. We challenge bad policy and support good policy. We enter institutions and change them where we can. We create institutions of our own when we must. We love our families. We argue. We laugh. We bury people. We remember our elders. We welcome babies. We return to Country. We keep making Australia deal with the fact that we are still here.

This is not a consolation prize. Survival is not the limit of our ambition. But continuity itself is an extraordinary achievement in a nation founded on the expectation of our disappearance.

The next question is what happens when cultural authority meets artistic freedom. Who can tell what story? Who can play whom? What does self-determination require of imagination?

I do not want Aboriginal actors confined to Aboriginal characters. I have spent too much of my career arguing for more possibilities to accept a new set of restrictions. I want Aboriginal performers playing Shakespeare, kings, fools, lovers, doctors, villains, prime ministers and people whose Aboriginality is entirely incidental to the plot. Representation should expand the imagination, not build another cage.

At the same time, history and historical power cannot be wished away.

There is no simple rule that resolves this tension, and I am suspicious of simple rules in art. Art needs risk. It needs experiment. It sometimes needs people to get things wrong. But freedom without responsibility is simply another form of entitlement.

So I prefer questions to prohibitions. Who has historically had the opportunity? Who has controlled the story? Who has authority? Who benefits? Who is being heard? Who has agency? What relationships have been built around the work? What happens after the production closes and everybody goes home?

These are harder questions than “allowed” and “not allowed”, but they produce better art and more durable relationships.

There is another argument sitting underneath all of this, and it may be the hardest one: how do we disagree without abandoning relationship?

Public life increasingly rewards the opposite. Outrage is fast. Certainty is easy to perform. Social media can turn disagreement into a test of moral purity in which the object is not to persuade, understand or improve but to expel. Aboriginal communities are not immune to this. Neither are arts communities, universities, governments or cultural institutions.

But culture is built through relationships strong enough to hold disagreement.

This is something I have learned from family and from Country as much as from the theatre. You can be furious with someone and still have obligations to them. You can think they are wrong and still have to see them at the next funeral, meeting, birthday or community gathering. Relationship does not erase conflict. It gives conflict somewhere to go.

That may be one of the most useful things Aboriginal ways of thinking can offer contemporary Australia: not an idealised vision of harmony, but an understanding that belonging produces obligations that survive disagreement.

The intergenerational project works in the same way. My grandparents did not solve everything for my parents. My parents did not solve everything for me. My generation will not solve everything for those coming after us. We move something, protect something, create something and leave something behind. Someone else picks it up, sometimes without even knowing who first carried it.

A young Aboriginal performer can walk onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House today and take that possibility for granted because Rhoda Roberts enabled that to occur. I do not resent that. I think it is success. The purpose of opening a door is not to require everyone who walks through it to spend the rest of their life thanking the person who found the key.

I want the next generation to say “of course I can be here”. Of course my story matters. Of course my Country matters. Of course I can make work. Of course I can expect excellence.

And then I want them to turn around and tell us that what we built is not enough, we didn’t do enough and to step aside and let them do it now.

That is how inheritance should work.

The danger with legacy is that we turn people into statues. Statues are very poor company. They cannot laugh, contradict themselves, change their minds, annoy you, feed you or tell you that your second act is too long. The people who shape us are more useful when we remember them as human beings rather than polishing them into symbols.

That is why, having begun with Rhoda, I do not want to end by making her the answer to every question. Her importance lies partly in the fact that she helped create conditions in which other people could speak, make, argue and lead. The most generous form of cultural leadership is not to make yourself indispensable. It is to make more space than you can personally occupy.

Every generation suspects the next one has lost the plot. I am old enough now to recognise the temptation. But culture is alive, and living things change.

Australians often experience a Welcome tom Country as the ceremony before the event. We listen, applaud, and then move on to what we imagine is the real business. But perhaps the Welcome is the beginning of the real business because it asks everyone present to locate themselves.

Where are you?

Whose Country are you on?

What history is underneath your feet?

What relationships made your presence here possible?

And what responsibility follows from being welcomed?

That final question matters. Welcome is not simply hospitality. It establishes relationship, and relationship carries obligations.

That is not an argument for guilt. I have never found guilt especially productive. Guilt can become another way of making the story about yourself. Relationship asks something more difficult: that we look at one another.

Nor is it an invitation into pity or the endless language of deficit. Aboriginal Australia is not valuable because it needs saving. There is knowledge here worth knowing, culture worth experiencing, Country worth caring for, history worth understanding and ways of imagining the future that belong at the centre of the national conversation.

The task is not simply to welcome people onto Country. It is to welcome Australia into a deeper understanding of itself.

It also requires patience with the unfinished nature of the work.

My grandparents’ generation gave me survival. My parents’ generation gave me possibility. The generations around me have tried to build cultural space and cultural authority. What I hope we give those coming next is something both sturdy and unfinished: strong relationships, high expectations and enough room to move.

Identity not as a box to tick once every 5 years, but as obligation.

Excellence not as assimilation, but as ambition.

Blak space not as retreat, but as a place from which to grow.

And Country not as property, but as relationship.

We inherit these things for a time. We care for them, argue about them, add something of ourselves and eventually hand them on.