Joe , appears we have a bit more in common !
On the " Invasion " ....it sure was and thanks to the Sydney Council for accepting it - we are growing up .
I think we are inching towards a Treaty .
However down here in Victoria the Baillieu led Liberal - National Parties in Power have now found that having to always welcome their bunch of Political Dinosaurs, old fuddy duddies and rednecks to meetings by reminding them of the "Invaded" Nation's name, too hard to stomach and have stopped necessarily opening Meetings with Native Title Recognition .
This is a step backward for Reconciliation -too stupid for words !

kartiya jim

I too live in the state of Victorian attitudes. Perhaps the Baillieu government could dispense with greetings altogether - saving much time and 'fair' to all.

Thanks Ammonite, the feeling's mutual. By the way, is an ammonite some form of marine life, or is an Ammonite a person from ammon ? Which is/was where, I wonder ?

Kartiya Jim, thanks too. But I've been puzzling about welcomes to country ever since they came into vogue - country belonged to family groups, local descent groups, clans, whatever you like to call them, and not to entire, over-arching groups, 'tribes'. For example, amongst the Narrindjeri in the Lower Murray and Lakes, there were eight or nine dialect groups within the Ngarrindjeri, each group being recognised because it spoke the common language with different accents and/or used different words (for instance, 'ngori' or 'mangaraiperi' for 'pelican'); in turn, each dialect group comprised many family groups, clans if you like, and it was these clans who were the land-holders. So a welcome to country necessarily had to come from the smaller land-holding groups, the families or clans. Nowadays, in southern Australia, much of ther knowledge about clans has withered away as people abandoned, or were displaced from, their lands and hence, from their land-holding pracgtices and all of the cultural activities which went with them. The great majority of people would not be aware nowadays that they could, if they tracked back in history, trace their family land, their clan land, at least partly through their use of English surnames.

For example, hypothetically, suppose a family surname was Clinton - going way back into the early days, one could find that the first 'Clinton' was from, let's say, an area around Coburg and Preston, with clearly-defined boundaries from the 'Nixons' whose country extended east and south through Northcote, and from the lands of the 'Fords' to the west - i.e. the people who first took the names 'Clinton', 'Nixon', and 'Ford', perhaps from early European employers. So, to an extent, surnames are a very good clue for Aboriginal people as to who their ancestors of 150-170 years ago were, but also to where their land was/is.

[TBC]

[contd.]

So 'welcome to country' should actually be, and could be, far more nuanced than it is, if the people of the actual land, the very spot if you like, could trace their ancestry more diligently.

As to the appropriateness of entire groups claiming ownership of country - imagine if you owned your house in Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide: this would not mean that you had some form of ownership over every house, al the property, in Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide. In this sense, IN THIS SENSE, there was no such thing as Ngarrindjeri land, or Kamileroi land, or Wailbri land - the land-holding group - and the group for which it would be appropriate to offer a welcome to country - would be far more specific and localised.

Sorry for nit-picking, Kartiya Jim :)

Joe

Yep,don't think we have moved actual Clan ownership along that far down South Joe .
I guess we have to be partially satisfied at this point that there is a recognition of the Language Group that most of the Traditional [Clans] People belong to.

Thanks Jim, yes, I think it certainly was, pretty much everywhere: the land-holding group was what might be called the extended family, the clan, and people would have had claims as well on lands that their mother, and father's mother, and mother's mother, came from, depending on where they lived - on their father's country or their mother's. The point is, at least down this way, that even if people don't know it now, their family land can easily be traced back, ironically through their English-surname ancestors.

Yes, some families, even down the Murray, came from somewhere else, or their ancestors arrived in country from God-knows-where-else, so they might have to track back through their maternal family side. In many parts of south-eastern Australia and up into the Flinders, and elsewhere, ancestry was taken from the maternal as well as the paternal side, so this doesn't present any problems: people can track back through their mother's ancestors just as they can through paternal ancestry.

At least amongst the Ngarrindjeri, thanks to the Berndts' book 'A World That Was', pretty much everybody can trace their Aboriginal family back to country, specific country. My wife Maria for example, was a Sumner, and could trace her family back to her great-grandfather John, who was born on his country in about 1845-1848. He adopted the name Sumner when he was about fourteen from an employer at Goolwa. Sumner country ran from Lake Albert across the lower Narrung Peninsula to the Coorong, and its boundaries are very well-defined, a block of about ten km by fifteen. That is Sumner country. Sumners could also claim some weaker links to other country, through mothers and mother's mothers, and so on.

[TBC]