You seriously can't make this stuff up, can you? It is beyond farcical.
What were they thinking? That they would look even sillier than they already do? Instead of committing this terrible diplomatic faux pas, why can't they refuse the incessant "Welcome to Country" which has been dividing our country since it began in 1976 and became standard in federal parliament in 2008. To say nothing of the constant "Paying our respects ..." messages preceding every public speech and broadcast.
To set the record straight, I have for some time now been adding "I pay my respects to the British and European elders past and present and emerging, who introduced civil society and prosperity to my adopted country Australia" to my email signature, which has raised eyebrows with some of my "Dark Emu" readers. To them, and anyone else who may be interested, I send links to these August 2026 articles in QUADRANT:
Australian history has been distorted by lies, fabrication, exaggeration and selective evidence. Out of that distortion has emerged one overwhelming story: that the British arrived in 1788 and turned a peaceful continent into a land of violence, massacre and war.
The truth begins in exactly the opposite place.
The British did not enter a peaceful continent. They entered a continent occupied by peoples living in what, in the older anthropological sense, was one of the most materially primitive and socially fragmented forms of human organisation still surviving on earth: thousands of small, mobile, familial groups, without settled agriculture, cities, writing, courts, police or any authority standing above them capable of ending feud and revenge. It is difficult to conceive of a substantially simpler enduring form of human social organisation. Below the small local group lies little more than the immediate or extended family itself. But no human population could remain reproductively isolated at that level for generation after generation: sustained mating within such a narrow circle would inevitably produce repeated close-relative unions and increasing inbreeding. Survival therefore required some network of bestowal, female transfer, and contact between otherwise small and politically separate groups." To continue reading the article, click here.
And there's more:
Cultural lethal violence was institutionalised in Aboriginal societies in a way that sustained warfare was not. Payback and retaliatory punishment could be socially sanctioned or obligatory, but there were no standing armies, permanent commands or institutions for sustained military campaigning. The deep record is therefore one of recurring lethal violence, not continuous war.
The same caution should apply to the frontier. Killing, reprisal and punitive expedition did not automatically become “war” merely because one participant was British. Yet modern revisionism increasingly reverses the categories: raid and reprisal between Aboriginal groups remain “feud” or “payback”, while analogous episodes involving the British are aggregated across decades and vast distances into “Frontier Wars”. In the process, scattered resistance is retrospectively endowed with a military coherence the underlying social organisation did not possess." To continue reading, click here.
And it ends with the words, "Australia was indeed a blood-soaked country. The historical mistake was to imagine that the blood began to flow when the British arrived. That is where the History Wars should end and where a more complete history should begin."
As I always say in my emails, "I pay my respects to the British and European elders past and present and emerging, who introduced civil society and prosperity to my adopted country Australia."
