How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia: Calling cities by their Aboriginal names, treating the didgeridoo like Mozart and extreme trans rights By Terry Barnes Published: 01:11 BST, 23 September 2024 | Updated: 01:14 BST, 23 September 2024 e-mail View comments I had my first glimpse of King Charles back in 1970, when he, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne came to Botany Bay in Sydney to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia. Along with 100,000 onlookers, including me as a child of seven, the Royals watched a re-enactment of Cook’s arrival, which even included a token challenge by a couple of Aboriginal warriors. It was a very happy day, bursting with national pride.
This was the tour during which the tradition of the royal ‘walkabout’ was born when Daily Mail reporter, Vincent Mulchrone, used the word to describe how the Queen and Philip interacted casually with crowds. I revisited Botany Bay earlier this year, and it is now overgrown and neglected. The 250th anniversary passed in 2020 with barely any public acknowledgment.
Any mentions of it were mostly hostile and shame-faced. Cook’s landing place is a sad symbol of how Australia has changed so totally, in not so many years, from a nation proud and comfortable with its history since the British arrived, to one taught to be ashamed of that past and to see only the darkness in it . Australia has changed from the days Paul Hogan was Crocodile Dundee with Linda Kozlowski, writes Terry Barnes In 1970, now King Charles, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne went to Botany Bay in Sydney The royals went to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia.
Although royal walkabouts began on that tour, it is no surprise that, in 2024, Buckingham Palace dropped the term for next month’s royal visit to Australia and replaced it with the anodyne ‘opportunity to meet the public’. Apparently, the King does not want to offend Aboriginal Australians who, we are told, associate the word ‘walkabout’ with personal journeys of grief or self-discovery . The Palace wouldn’t have changed its language nor agreed to the strongly Indigenous-slanted Australian itinerary of King Charles and Queen Camilla, without the approval of our left-wing prime minister Anthony Albanese.
He is the ultra-woke leader of the Australian Labor Party who, last year, held a disastrous referendum over a change to the Australian constitution which would have given a greater political voice to Aboriginal Australians. The proposal was crushingly defeated by voters. You might imagine Down Under as a sunny larrikin paradise of Foster’s, Sheilas and Bruces, a land untouched by the wokery and cancel culture infecting the UK.
Far from it. Since the turn of this century, Australia’s political and social elites have endeavoured to import ‘progressive values’, bound up in all manner of nanny state rules . By far the most pernicious wokery relates to our history and Australia’s indigenous peoples.
I say ‘peoples’ deliberately, as it’s now politically incorrect to talk of Aboriginal Australians as one group. As some consider the term ‘Aboriginal’ to be a label invented by colonisers, we are now instructed to use the appropriated Canadian label, ‘First Nations’. Of course, the struggles of indigenous people deserve recognition and Australia’s treatment of its original inhabitants since settlers first arrived in 1788 has been far from perfect.
And the culture and heritage of Aboriginal people, who make up just 3 per cent of the population, enriches our country. A protester held a placard picturing Captain Cook during the annual Invasion Day protest on Australia Day this year A mother carries her child with a placard during the protest, held on Australia Day Actor Paul Hogan holds a Fosters lager The Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait flags flutter during an Australia Day Citizenship Ceremony in 2021 But increasingly, Australians can no longer speak about their cities without referring to their Aboriginal origins. We are reminded constantly that Australia’s original settlement, Sydney, is on ‘Gadigal’ country, Melbourne on ‘Kulin’ country, and so on.
There’s also a push to give major cities and towns dual names – my city of Melbourne apparently is called Narrm, and Brisbane is Meanjin – and there’s a raging debate over what Aboriginal name Sydney should be given. In an Australian newspaper, an Aboriginal person when named, is also labelled by their ancestral tribal affiliations, such as a ‘proud Gadigal-Wiradjuri-Yorta Yorta person’. (The ‘proud’ is always in there perfunctorily, as the word is taken to symbolise the person’s not being ashamed of their ancestry in an Anglo-centric world.
) The woke obeisance goes further than that, though. There’s now an obsession with making ‘acknowledgements of country’ in just about any public sphere. Fans of cult Aussie comedy series Colin From Accounts –whose second series has just landed in the UK – will have noticed the ludicrous announcement at the start of each episode: ‘Binge [the Australian streaming service] acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this programme was produced .
’ Read More PVO: Big business talked down to Aussies...
now an ugly reality has dawned on them This is standard practice here for corporate meetings, announcements on planes landing in Australia, or even coach drivers picking up tourists. They go like this: ‘We meet on the lands of the (tribal group) people, and acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.’ The more zealous add the lands were ‘never ceded’.
Even government offices and commercial businesses plaster the words prominently on their doors and walls to demonstrate how with-it and woke they are. It’s reached the point of such tokenistic absurdity that an online parent-teacher meeting of my child’s primary school, called to discuss school uniforms and books, was prefaced by the headmistress with a mandatory acknowledgment of country. This homage is now mandatory at school assemblies, often in a mystic recitation, inculcating our youngest Australians into the new received wisdom about oppressed Aboriginal people and the evils of European settlement.
A mini-industry has sprung up in which Aboriginal people perform ‘traditional smoking ceremonies’ before government, sporting and corporate events, to ‘cleanse’ the meeting spaces of evil spirits with smoke, music and chanting. Of course, the acknowledgments and these ‘ceremonies’ merely give the – mainly white – audiences the opportunity to engage in ritual self-flagellation. National pride is disparaged.
Thanks to Prime Minister Albanese’s useful idiots, Australia Day on January 26 is targeted by hardliners, who noisily protest, vandalise Captain Cook’s statues , calling it ‘Invasion Day’. Originally a celebration of the day the Union Flag was first raised in Australia in 1788 , now it is an annual excuse for the media to be convulsed with debate all January over whether we should abolish it. Then there’s our beautiful Australian flag.
It’s no longer acceptable to fly it alone. It always has to be alongside the flags of the Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders – Australia’s other main indigenous group. You’ll never see a Left-wing politician like Albanese without at least those three flags behind him, usually with the Aboriginal flag most prominent.
Far-Left Green leader, Adam Bandt, was once so angry to be seen with the Australian flag at a press conference that he flung it in horror from his podium. And our national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, routinely plays Aboriginal music like the didgeridoo – treating it as equal to the works of Beethoven and Mozart. The didgeridoo has its place, but I fear this ‘celebration’ of Aboriginal culture often looks patronising.
The same is true of our national sporting strips, like the rugby Wallabies and Olympic team kits, which feature obligatory Aboriginal-style patterns in their otherwise traditional designs. Why? Because it’s expected. Australia’s wokeness is demonstrated well beyond Indigenous causes.
Read More The one word white Australians are told NOT to use when talking about First Nations people - even though it used to be acceptable For one, our elites have fully embraced the trans agenda. And thanks to a Federal Court of Australia ruling, the Tickle v Giggle – a name as absurd as its implications are serious – biological sex is now considered in law to be ‘changeable’, whatever you decide it is on any given day. In my state of Victoria, as in most others, if a child wants to transition they can be prescribed puberty blockers by a doctor, and their school will treat them as their preferred gender without the need for Mum or Dad to be alerted.
Even Britain’s sobering Cass report, which showed in devastating detail how ‘gender re-affirming’ treatments can do much more harm than good to young people , has not stopped the march of trans and gender-fluid ideology in Australian schools, institutions and even the media. Drag queens read LGBT stories to children in public libraries. Pre-school children are introduced to woke concepts of gender from age three, and such teaching goes on through their school lives.
To query this is to risk being labelled homophobic, transphobic and bigoted. Parents who do, or question other woke shibboleths, can even be banned from teacher-parent meetings, or supervised in them as if they’re social deviants. Australia is one of the biggest nanny states in the world, utterly tied up in rules and regulations designed to protect us from ourselves.
We’re particularly good at banning things: last week, the government, backed by the conservative Liberal opposition, announced that it will ban underage children’s access to social media. Before that, they put a ban on e-cigarettes and vapes being sold anywhere but in pharmacies. Well-meaning, maybe, but these bans are unenforceable or have worse consequences: the vape ban has led to a thriving criminal black market.
And who can forget the pandemic? Melbourne was, notoriously, the world’s most locked-down city. With varying degrees of willingness, most of us here submitted to curfews, mask and vaccine mandates, and a harrowing loss of liberty. We meekly carried out the orders of political and medical authority figures, even though they rarely had a clue what they were doing.
When protests did occur, they were ruthlessly suppressed by the police – unless for Black Lives Matter. We might largely have kept back Covid, but the legacy of social damage is irreparable. Let’s be honest.
In the past 20 years, particularly since the conservative John Howard lost office as Prime Minister in 2007, Australia has surrendered to the Left’s culture war, more so even than Britain. The easygoing Australia of 1970 I remember fondly has long gone. In 2024 Australia, it’s common sense that has gone walkabout.
- Terry Barnes is an Australian political writer and commentator living in Melbourne. Sydney Melbourne Share or comment on this article: How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia: Calling cities by their Aboriginal names, treating the didgeridoo like Mozart and extreme trans rights e-mail Add comment.
