In recent years, Welcome to Country ceremonies have become a flashpoint in Australia’s culture wars. Critics routinely dismiss them as a “modern invention,” arguing they are not a legitimate or traditional Aboriginal practice and therefore have no place in civic life. Yet many of these same voices fiercely oppose any suggestion that Australia Day be moved from January 26, framing that date as an untouchable tradition. The contradiction is striking and revealing.

Welcome to Country ceremonies, while adapted for contemporary settings, are grounded in ancient principles of Aboriginal law and culture. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal nations required visitors to be welcomed onto Country to ensure safe passage, mutual respect, and proper conduct. The form may look different today, spoken at public events rather than enacted through extended ceremony, but adaptation does not negate authenticity. Cultures evolve. They always have.

Do you think ANZAC Day has been around forever? Or Christmas? Or Easter? or, Halloween? The truth is, these are all younger traditions, by a fairly substantial margin.

In reality, the insistence that January 26 must remain Australia Day rests on a remarkably flimsy historical foundation. Australia Day has only been fixed to January 26 since the 1990s. Prior to that, states marked the occasion on different days. If longevity is the measure of legitimacy, the argument collapses almost immediately. The date’s national uniformity is newer than most people realise, far more recent than the cultural protocols underpinning Welcome to Country.

More confronting still is the claim that objections to January 26 are a recent development. They are not. As early as the 1930s, Aboriginal leaders were explicitly calling out the injustice of celebrating this date. William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta man and one of Australia’s most significant Aboriginal activists, was instrumental in organising the 1938 Day of Mourning; held on the 150th anniversary of British colonisation. Cooper and his contemporaries made it clear that January 26 was not a day of unity or celebration for First Nations people, but a day that marked dispossession, violence, and exclusion.

This historical record matters. It exposes how often “tradition” is invoked selectively, not as a neutral concept, but as a political shield. When Aboriginal practices adapt to survive in modern Australia, they are dismissed as illegitimate. When a colonial commemoration shifts dates and meanings over time, it is defended as sacred and immutable. One is scrutinised to the point of erasure; the other is protected from even modest reconsideration.

The debate, then, is not really about history or tradition at all. It is about whose traditions are afforded respect, and whose histories are allowed to evolve.

Welcome to Country asks Australians to acknowledge the reality that this nation was built on Aboriginal land, and that sovereignty was never ceded. That truth is uncomfortable for some; far more uncomfortable, perhaps, than admitting that January 26 is neither ancient nor universally celebrated.

And truthfully, if you disagree with such a custom, you can still listen to it without being harmed, or losing any of your identity, or belonging. 

If Australia is serious about honesty, unity, and maturity as a nation, it must stop weaponising “tradition” when it suits and discarding it when it doesn’t.

Respecting Welcome to Country while being open to rethinking January 26 is not radical. It is consistent. And consistency, in this debate, is long overdue.