Has Welcome to Country become a compliance market?
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Dear Editor,
Welcome to Country on Anzac Day has become a sharper issue than many institutions seem willing to admit.
My concern is not with recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service. Quite the opposite. Indigenous veterans should be honoured fully inside the Anzac story, but as veterans. Their service belongs at the centre of remembrance, not in a separate identity frame placed before the ceremony begins.
A Dawn Service is not a conference, council meeting, school assembly or corporate function. It has its own discipline: silence, service, sacrifice, the Ode, the Last Post and shared remembrance. Every added element either strengthens that purpose or shifts it.
Booing or heckling at an Anzac service is wrong. The day asks more of us than that. But dismissing every objection as racism is also wrong. Many Australians who would never disrupt a service are uneasy about Welcome to Country being inserted into Anzac Day, and they stay silent because they know the label that comes next.
Welcome to Country may have a place in some ceremonial settings. Routine institutional use is different. On Anzac Day, the organising principle should be service, not ancestry, land politics or institutional signalling.
My fuller argument can be read here – Mark Croxford on Substack.
Mark Croxford
Lieutenant (retd), RAN
Former media and political adviser to a Minister for Veterans’ Affairs
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WW1 Australian enlisted men were all as one and at today’s Anzac Services there should be no distinction for any one of the several heritages who participated in WW1.
Many had mixed ancestry of one kind or another and all who enlisted in WW1 had to have one European parent, they were not designated as one or the other.
My father was severely wounded on the Somme and grandfather was awarded an MM – neither got special treatment on return home. They were proud to serve King and Country.
Ancestry in 2026 should not be judged on facts of enlistment during WW1
Lest We Forget
Telling an audience of law abiding, tax paying, mostly conservative, and most likely homeowners, that they are on Aboriginal land, always has been, always will be, is a very provocative call in any forum. Perhaps the people who sell WTC (we don’t get it for free) to Event’s organizers should find another way to express their annoyance at having to be honored by those same people they are criticizing for being on “their” land.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for inserting Mark’s Letter to the Editor.
Lets not muck around Mark, the booing and heckling of these cowards during the ANZAC Dawn Service was disrespectful, unAustralian, disgraceful, racist and dishonours the sacrifice of all Defence service personnel and in particular our Indigenous Defence mates who served our country but were slurred during the ANZAC Day service.
Thank goodness these disrespectful cowards are the small minority.
I suggest these cowards and those who silently support them look back on history and remember what leads to war, who profits from war and who pays the price of war.
Did you notice the Chaplin who gave the Dawn Service benediction was a woman? Traditions?!! Did they sing our current National Anthem, (which I’m sure you stood to attention for), in 1918. Do your homework, the ANZAC Day Dawn Service has been evolving from the very day it was first conceived and has changed and commemorated slightly different even in the different country towns, regional towns and even in the suburbs and abroad over generations.
I might not have been an Officer like you Mark, just a lowly Pte then Cpl. But when I went through you looked after your mates. You didn’t find occasions, solemn occasions to spit on them.
Why can’t we acknowledge that the land we call home and fight for has a deep connection to our Indigenous mates with heritage and traditions just as we often sing the British National Anthem acknowledging that connection, that tradition that heritage to our Defence History. We are a lucky country to have this opportunity to acknowledge both.
There are more things to worry about like ex-service members living homeless on the streets, those dealing with PTSD who have no support and commit suicide, remembering maybe also our Vietnam Veterans some of whom were booed and heckled by some members of the public and later committed suicide, not feeling welcome in our own country.
Wake up this is 2026. We have evolved from this type of racist hatred.
Lest we forget
I have also heard that the WTC itself is a form of racism……
I understand that some were driven to express their feelings in the manner chosen. Personally I would not have expressed my feelings in that manner however, this whole WTC is in and of itself divisive and in my view anyway should not be aired at an Anzac Day ceremony.
I read somewhere a saying that “there are no atheists in foxholes” which is a pretty apt descriptor and to me is a reminder that all servicemen who were there on those days were Australians to whom skin colour was irrelevant.
Enough of this divisive waffle, it is time we pulled together, accept that there is a wide range of backgrounds that go to make up our country and simply get on with life.
Here is a comment, he started by saying it was welcome to my father’s country Duh.
May have been some semblance of being correct had he said welcome to my family’s country if that was indeed true.
Botton line as others have said it is all Bu****it and has nothing to do with ANZAC day.
The so-called Aboriginals AKA box tickers are forgetting our Kiwi cousins, and how irrelevant welcome/smoking rubbish is.
The RSL and the acting Chief of Army need to stop being politicians and stand up for the ANZACS on their one day.
LEST WE FORGET.
Jack