Abstract
Important public occasions in contemporary Australia—from the opening of Parliamentary sessions to the installation of new a new university chancellor—routinely include a performance of Indigenous ceremony, often including music, dance, and body decoration, known as “Welcome to Country.” This chapter analyses such ceremonies as ritual from a performance studies perspective, arguing for the importance of sound and movement to their success in producing positive affective results. It also describes and evaluates objections to the use of these events in the public sphere—from white and Indigenous perspectives—in relation to the history of Indigenous cultural survival and the colonial enterprise in Australia. Ultimately, I argue that the ceremony is most significant for the ways its performative quality and the controversies surrounding it offer lessons for Indigenous and non-Indigenous interaction in increasingly multicultural music education in Australia and around the world.
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- 1.
It has become common in recent years for scholars of Indigenous Australian culture to clarify their identities in relation to the Indigenous–Settler dynamic. I am not Australian, but rather an American from a Settler background. As such, I am indebted to my Indigenous interlocutors in Australia for their generous help in developing my understanding of contemporary Australian life as well as the cultural history of the Australian continent.
- 2.
For more on Indigenous sovereignty claims, please see Simpson 2017.
- 3.
The commonly accepted population estimate for the continent, including the Torres Strait Islands, immediately before Captain Cook’s arrival in 1792 is 315,000, a number derived from anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s work; however, there are credible estimates that range as high as 500,000 or even 750,000 (Hugo 2011, p. 2; Butlin 1983).
- 4.
The identification of the appropriate community and the proper individual from that community to perform a Welcome to Country ceremony is fraught, due to the history of colonial dispossession and removal of Indigenous people from their lands in Australia. Institutional guidelines for Welcome to Country ceremonies reflect this, as does Everett (2009).
- 5.
A recording of this performance can be found online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1JwyxNh3Ak, however it has been edited to make it appear that the speech and performance were simultaneous, rather than sequential.
- 6.
A similar selection of styles can be seen in this video, which depicts the welcome to country ceremony performed for a G20 (Group of Twenty) economic summit held in Brisbane in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGXOYDGoLhY
- 7.
A video of this performance can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WloCdKPBh_Y
- 8.
A video of members of this group and community elders performing a Welcome to Country ceremony for the installation of the new Vice Chancellor at University of South Australia in 2013 can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDH4__qL0Nc
- 9.
A number of institutions use this white paper as a guideline for welcome to country ceremonies. For instance, it can be found on the University of South Australia’s website: https://www.unisa.edu.au/Documents/QA-welcome-to-country.pdf
- 10.
Corroboree is a general term for Indigenous ceremonial performance in common use in Australia.
- 11.
Roberts’s statement can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0McQllZCA0
- 12.
For a discussion of the significance of treaty relations to decolonization, see Moreton-Robinson 2015.
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Solis, G. (2018). Welcome to Country and the Role of Traditional Music in Modern Indigenous Culture in Australia. In: Leung, BW. (eds) Traditional Musics in the Modern World: Transmission, Evolution, and Challenges. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91599-9_12
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