PERTH – Yamatji man and national treasure Ernie Dingo has gently reminded the country that the modern Welcome to Country ceremony – currently the subject of national outrage – was invented in 1976 because a group of Pacific Island dancers refused to perform until Country was acknowledged.
“Eya that’s how it started” Dingo confirmed. “Pacific Islander mob said they couldn’t dance without a welcome. Me and Uncle Richard Walley said righto we’ll sort that out. Now fifty years later Sky News reckons it’s a globalist plot.”
The protocol – which has existed in various forms for tens of thousands of years – was formalised by Dingo and Walley as a contemporary act of intercultural respect. A concept many Australians now consider to be either “performative” or “an attack on freedom” depending on which podcast they listened to that morning.
Dingo – who has spent five decades travelling the country in a Land Cruiser introducing Australians to Australia – said he was bemused that something he started “to be polite to some Polynesian dancers” had become a national emergency.
“In 1976 we did it because Pacific Island culture demands respect,” Dingo explained. “In 2026 the same gesture is now apparently destroying Anzac Day. The thing didn’t change. The audience changed.”
Asked whether the Pacific Islander mob would receive royalties for inventing the cultural protocol that ended up in every government meeting board room and Reconciliation Action Plan in the country Dingo laughed: “Mate we’d settle for half of what Snowy 2.0 spent on lunch.”
He has since been booked to do an additional 14 episodes of Going Places where he will explain things to the country that the country should already know.
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