In 1968 the anthropologist Bill Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures on ABC Radio and coined the phrase ‘the great Australian silence’ to describe the ‘cult of disremembering’ what we now term Aboriginal dispossession. According to Stanner, shamefully, the Aborigines were no more than a ‘melancholy footnote’ to the story of the development of Australia. Stanner’s Boyer lectures were probably the most influential radio broadcasts ever made in Australia and their impact, 60 years later, is still profound.

At the time he delivered the lectures, there were no more than a handful of uncontacted Aborigines living in the Great Sandy and Western Deserts. The majority either had assimilated or moved into government-controlled settlements where their adherence to traditional cultural practices soon collapsed under the fatal impact of their encounter with the modern world. The Pintupi Nine were possibly the last group of nomadic Aborigines to leave the desert and their arrival at the remote settlement of Kiwirrkurra marked the end of a way of life that had survived for more than 50,000 years.

Over the past 60 years, Stanner’s cult of disremembering has been replaced by a cult of self-deception which affects both the Aboriginal community and several branches of the non-Aboriginal population of Australia. His melancholy footnote has evolved into a grotesque farce involving absurd claims about Aboriginal spirituality. Contemporary Aboriginal activists have created a whole edifice of cultural markers justifying their claims to possession of a deep connection to traditional Aboriginal spirituality. Thus we are told that cultural beliefs surrounding the Dreamtime provide rules for living and a unifying sense of the oneness of all things in the world, in the past and present. Aboriginal ceremonies are a re-creation of events which occurred during the ‘Dreaming’. The ceremonies are an affirmation of the life force associated with the specific event being commemorated and it has been argued that this is not too different from symbolic ceremonies in most religions.

At Holy Communion ceremonies, the bread and the wine symbolise the body and blood of Christ. Islam, Judaism, and every other major religion have similar symbolic rituals. But there is a huge difference between established religions and the Aboriginal spirituality mantra. The traditional religions survive because they are embedded in, and supported by, the culture which gave them birth, and the strength of any religion is determined by its ability to provide its adherents with a meaningful account of their daily lives. Traditional religions also have priests, mullahs and sacred texts such as the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and Upanishads, etc, which give guidance to believers. The Aboriginal belief system had nothing like this, and when their way of life collapsed, or was destroyed by the arrival of the Europeans, their ‘religion’ was incapable of giving them support or of making sense of the new world in which they found themselves.

What has emerged over the past six decades is a pseudo spirituality manifested in the absurd smoking ceremonies at which men in loin cloths blow smoke in your face. The Welcomes to Country and smoking ceremonies have almost nothing to do with traditional Aboriginal culture. These pointless rituals are closer to men robed in white sheets, and coated in woad, marching around Stonehenge claiming to be druids. But at least they have the advantage of earning the performers a bit of money. The going rate for a smoking ceremony varies between $700 and $1,270.

According to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the federal Coalition ‘puts the average Commonwealth payment for each ceremony at $1,266’ while ‘a $5,500 spent on a Welcome to Country ceremony’ was required for a visiting Malaysian delegation. ‘The Coalition thinks the money could be better spent. It’s become a multimillion-dollar industry,’ opposition waste spokesman James Stevens claimed earlier this year. Stevens unearthed $550,000 of federal spending over two years, but assumes the nationwide cost is millions. He argues that, ‘Welcomes to Country should be genuine and authentic, not a lucrative income stream at taxpayers’ expense.’ (SMH ‘Feeling Unwelcome’).

In the same week, Jessa Rogers, an Associate Professor of Indigenous Education at Melbourne University published a long article in the SMH defending the Welcome to Country ceremonies.  She claims that, ‘A Welcome to Country does not take anything away from Australia or Australians. It does nothing to divide us; in fact, I would argue it unites us.’ Professor Rogers identifies as a Wiradjuri woman but photographs of her on the internet show her to have a substantial non-Aboriginal component to her racial heritage. Professor Rogers has every right to describe herself in any way she chooses and I fully accept that her identification as a Wiradjuri woman is sincere and based upon the racial heritage of some of her ancestors. But not all of them.

In another recent article in the SMH, Brooke Boney, who describes herself as a ‘Gamilaroi woman, journalist and presenter’, drew parallels between the Nazi treatment of Jews in Auschwitz and the treatment of Aborigines in Australia today (‘Welcome to Country is not an election issue, so why are we talking about it?’).

Almost every prominent ‘Aboriginal’ academic or journalist is of mixed-race descent and yet they almost always describe themselves as Yolngu, Wemba Wemba, Gamilaroi, etc. The cynic might argue that this is because, when complaining about past injustices experienced by their Aboriginal ancestors, they have to address the fact that it was their Caucasian ancestors who perpetrated the injustices.

But a more serious consequence is that people of mixed-race descent who identify as first nations people, choose to present primarily as part of an oppressed minority rather than as Australians of Aboriginal background. They thereby emphasise their separateness from the rest of us. The mixed-race Aboriginal academics in our universities are not so much part of an oppressed minority but rather part of an educational elite who are less concerned with educating students and more interested in indoctrinating them with a separatist ideology.

Stanner would be saddened by today’s ‘gaping chasm between the promise and the reality’ of higher education.