Welcome to (your own) country: Anglo Nullius revisited

What if everything we were told about Australia was a lie?

It was.[1]

An overcast sky brooded over Perth on October 19, 2025, as a crowd gathered for the second national March for Australia rally. The rain, tangible yet restrained, mirrored the inner turmoil of the attending patriots. Nationwide, there was a tension brewing, a “storing up of powers”.[2] Our feeling, our nature, as we embodied it, had become overcast. Then, on that rainy stage, one of the organisers performed something long overdue: Australia’s first official “Anglo-Celtic European welcome to country”, honouring our founding ethnos, Christian tradition, and Crown sovereignty.[3] The voice of the people resounded once more. Much to the dismay of the grief merchants; the Grinch types who push an antiheroic narrative, which has been clouding our polity and culture for generations.

Like its counter ceremony, the indigenous welcome to country (WTC) originated in Perth. What began as an extemporaneous placation by Ernie Dingo and Richard Walle to Maori and Pacific Islander performers – who demanded an official welcome at the International Arts Festival in 1976 – was seized upon and tokenized by the Northern Territory Department of Tourism. As the ritual continued, additional stakeholders emerged. The Keating government, in the wake of Mabo v Queensland (No 2),[4] and facing pressure from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, came up with the acknowledgement of country (AOC) – a new political appeasement ceremony, capable of being performed by anyone eager to sprinkle sympathy over public affairs. Perhaps a void was left by the Lord’s Prayer, and its “forgive us our trespasses” dictum; Protestant shame resurrected as White saviourism writ large.

Fast forward to 2026 and the WTC/AOC has marauded into all areas of public life, from the pointless staff meeting to the grand sporting event and to every last civil servant’s email signature. Expressing an earnest “boo” can lead to an arrest, as happened at the 2025 Anzac memorial service in Melbourne, where patriots booed an unknown man, later discovered to have been paid $10,000 to perform the ceremony.

Such is public life in Australia. Any expression of collective identity – even the most sacred – is met with suspicion, state sponsored disruption, and ultimately, handcuffs.

III

Contrarian thinkers have decoded our political zeitgeist. English philosopher Nick Land (perhaps the more controversial Land acknowledgement) and western critic Alexander Dugin categorise our moral framework as paleo-liberalism: an Anglo-Dutch family structure which has evolved into a universalising “monster” imposed globally.[5] Historian David Starkey noted the fatal flaw in exporting English liberalism; that without its accompanying moral intuitions anchored in ethnic homogeneity, it collapses.[6] He was right.

The aetiology of paleo-liberalism is unclear. Some suggest that it arose in the ice age, which selected for small family units in sparse, harsh climates, where trust of outsiders became a survival instinct. Germanic resistance to Roman hierarchy favoured broad, flexible alliances over centralised authority. The Witan consultations in Anglo-Saxon England, where councils of nobles advised Kings prevented absolute monarchy, after Rome’s withdrawal. Additionally, the Catholic Church prohibited first cousin marriage and disincentivised clannish practices in pre-medieval history, leading to high trust, and analytical thinking over instinct.[7] This led to historical outliers: WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic).[8]

According to Land, Protestantism, liberalism, and the Anglo-Saxons form a natural triad in which radical individualism is balanced with divine providence: that which wills evil produces prosperity, aided by the “invisible hands”.[9] Capitalism is tempered by secular guard rails and the “empty summit” – a Taoist metaphor for decentralised power. High trust is balanced with practical cynicism, through instruments such as the separation of powers doctrine. Yet this very openness also left the system vulnerable to alien ideas.

Multiculturalism – a top-down political doctrine – was first imposed by French Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It originated from cultural pluralism, coined by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen in 1924 to preserve ethnic identities in democracy. Multiculturalism, which migrated into Australia after the Second World War, latched onto our legal system via the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) (RDA), and replaced the White Australia Policy after its gradual abolition – done without public consent.

The RDA – enacted by the Whitlam government – came amid lobbying from Asia and domestic advocates like Walter Lippmann and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who saw assimilation as an outdated, homogenising policy which threatened ethnic group identities and cohesion.[10] Big business capitalised on mass immigration, which flooded labour markets with cheap workers. Australians now compete with an infinite labour pool, which accepts lower wages, and worse conditions.

“Wokism”, paleo-liberalism’s mutation, acts as a pseudo-Christianity: the oppressed as divine, precolonial history as Eden, and 1788 as original sin. Slurs like “bigot” and “nazi” are used to denounce the morally impure – analogous to being called a “papist” during the Reformation. Self-denigrating elites act as a priestly class, with HR departments as enforcers. The WTC/AOC acts as a compulsory repentance ritual, raising questions over section 116 of the Constitution’s prohibition on mandated religious practices. Yet more than a mere ceremony, it is the elite’s tool to leverage out-group sympathy and keep the in-group in perpetual shame.

However, the victimhood narratives falter under the slightest scrutiny. Prior to settlement, tribal territory was in a constant flux. Warfare was frequent, and revenge killings were customary.[11] The precolonial lifespan is unknown, but is estimated to have doubled after European contact, partly due to the eradication of infanticide. Early anthropologists recorded one in two infants, mostly female, being killed for population and resource control, particularly during times of drought and famine.[12] Yet none of this is mentioned. None of it fits the script.

Medicine, agriculture, and education have without doubt extended lives and provide continuous opportunities. Today, the Australian government spends more than thirty-three billion dollars a year on indigenous affairs,[13] administered by over three thousand indigenous bodies at local, state, and federal levels. “Closing the gap”, we are told, is a matter of national urgency (and for their own good). Yet closing the gap assumes the superiority of European standards.

Perhaps not all cultures are interested in adopting our KPIs? An eighty-year lifespan, a forty-hour work week, crushing mortgage debt, 1.4 children and self-denigration as a religion are held up as the measure of civilisation (albeit a declining one). Perhaps indigenous Australians are not held back by “institutional racism” and prevented from adopting European standards, so much as they are reluctant to abandon their own customs entirely. Our government policy assumes uniformity of aspiration, as though justice and “Joie de vivre” can be found in data sets; that the answer, as bureaucrats insist, is more spending. Equality becomes the “globalising monster”; a tool for homogenisation, as closing the gap, ultimately means abandoning traditional life and customs – or at least the ones that upset our bourgeois sensitivities. Contrary to popular assumptions, the early colonial judiciary described indigenous life as one of “freedom” and ruled in favour of Aboriginal legal sovereignty.[14]

In R v Ballard (1829), an Aboriginal male was charged for an intra-racial murder, which was held to be a customary revenge homicide. Upon acquitting the defendant, Chief Justice Forbes remarked that the state ought “not to enter into or interfere with any cause of dispute or quarrel between the aboriginal natives”,[15] thus conferring legal sovereignty prior to Mabo (No 2). Ambiguity continued in 1832, where in R v Boatman, an Aboriginal defendant was acquitted of sheep theft for not understanding the illegality of his act.[16]

In 1835, Governor Bourke’s proclamation affirmed British ownership of NSW, formalising settlement through the executive branch. Then in 1836, the NSW Supreme Court overturned the decision of R v Ballard in R v Murrell where, in a similar intra-racial murder, the Court held that aboriginals were British subjects, and that a violent offence committed in the colony was an offence against the King’s peace.[17] Thus equal status was granted, and White men were also charged (and hanged) for murdering aboriginals.[18] Crown sovereignty was robust, and legal contradictions were ostensibly matters of judicial expedience, such as R v Wombarty, where an aboriginal defendant was discharged because no interpreter could be found.[19]

In 1835 John Batman attempted a treaty with Wurundjeri elders, in which 500,000 acres were exchanged for a few blankets and trinkets. He then petitioned the Governor to ratify his deed. Bourke struck down the treaty as invalid; only the Crown could sell unalienated land via an official grant. Attorney-General v Brown (1847) addressed the full scope of the Crown’s sovereignty.[20] During the restoration era, the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (UK) ended feudal obligations (Military and Religious). Brown argued that this extinguished Crown mining reservations over the colony’s wastelands, granting full mining rights underneath his 60-acre grant. The NSW Supreme Court rejected this, holding that the wastelands “are, and ever have been, from the time of its first settlement in 1788, in the Crown”,[21] and emphatically, that “at the moment of its settlement the colonists brought the common law of England with them”.[22]

Following the Anglo-Saxons’ defeat at the hands of King William in 1066, a tiny elite of Normans, aided by a clique of managerial “new men”, reshaped Britain. Land ownership shifted from the dual folkland/bookland structure.[23] The latter being all land held by royal diploma, capable of being sold at will, and the former being all land other than bookland, including family-owned land held under customary folk-right, normally inalienable outside the kin group without permission.[24] William claimed radical title by right of conquest, which imposed the feudal model and turned land owners into tenants, subjecting them to land tax and services. Later under King John, the Norman judiciary (who had flattened all distinct customs into one “common law”) and taxes (ratcheted up to fund foreign wars) became so rapacious, that Barons seized London in 1215AD and coerced the King into signing the Magna Carta – an ironic birth of the rule of law.

VII

So, who really is sovereign in Australia? The law is clear. The Crown holds radical title. Purchasing land confers rights: exclusive possession, the right to alienate (sell), and constitutional protection against unjust repossession. Ultimate ownership remains with the Crown. Hence land tax. Native title is not an independent sovereignty; it exists because traditional customs are given recognition by common law,[25] as a burden (dependency) upon Crown authority and not rivalling it. The Crown retains the right to permanently extinguish native title via acts that create inconsistent third-party rights – including mineral reservations and exclusive grants – if it can prove clear and plain intention. Justice Dawson’s dissent in Mabo (No 2) went further, holding that upon settlement, the Crown gained absolute beneficial ownership of the colonies, rather than radical title encumbered by native title; that the latter was extinguished entirely upon settlement.

Natural law theorist Sir William Blackstone influenced Britain’s procurement of Australia via settlement, one of three doctrines available for sovereignty acquisition (alongside conquest and cession/treaty). Settlement was a more favourable formula because it permitted the immediate superimposition of English law onto the land, unlike conquest or cession, under which “any existing local laws would continue to prevail unless and until they were changed by the British Crown as incoming sovereign”.[26]

A finding of terra nullius, required for settlement, did not simply mean “land without owners”; it encompassed the “enlarged notion of terra nullius” permitting settlement of lands inhabited by “backward peoples”, as crudely termed.[27] Blackstone, and even his political antithesis, John Locke (the founder of liberalism), held broad notions of terra nullius, and regarded “absence of agriculture, not mere lack of human habitation, as the prime criterion of a settled colony”.[28] So, although “sovereignty was never ceded” as it is often argued, cession, naturally, was not a requirement. Terra nullius was no accident of history, but a deliberate application of contemporaneous international law, jurisprudence and liberal ideology. And although the majority held terra nullius to be “legal fiction” in Mabo (No 2), it was nevertheless one granted status by the High Court. Dawson’s dissent was “ratioed” by a 6:1 majority, yet his ratio decidendi (decision) laid persuasive groundwork for a future overturn.

XIII

Other nations have seen similar subversive shifts. In Bolivia under Evo Morales – who weaponised resentment to gain power – indigenous Andean rituals became state ceremony, replacing Catholic liturgy. Short term gains, following Morales’ incumbency, including a commodity boom, were followed by economic collapse. Bolivia is now the poorest country in South America. Gas production has collapsed from underinvestment, with inflation over 20%.

Similarly, New Zealand’s federal parliament was suspended in November 2024, when Maori MPs exploded into a haka, undermining parliamentary customs of decorum and debate. Likewise, the widespread corruption and collapse in South Africa and Rhodesia provides a warning of what could follow in Australia. The WTC/AOC is therefore more than a mere spectacle or sentimental guff; it’s the precursor to chaos, and a hostile counterclaim of sovereignty, expanding government power by gradually absorbing custom into common law. Yet the solution is not merely a retreat into the past.

The abuse of history is twofold: the left-wing fallacy of oppressor-oppressed binaries, and the right-wing romanticisation of the past; elevating the Anzac legacy as infallible heroism – a form of self-denigration. What’s required is a degree of blindness to the past and quelling of sentimentality. What ought to follow is a culture that says yes to life: to our complicated colonial history, reframed as a civilisational triumph of the will; yes, to rhetorically repudiating subversive politicians; to an intellectual sacking of Rome. Yes, to Hobbesian realism about human nature and natural inequality; and to revisiting Anglo Nullius, echoing the 1215AD Baronial revolt’s defiance against corruption and overreach.

So, who is the Crown? According to custom, and in its highest manifestation, it is the apex between God and the people. Embodied by Henry V at Agincourt, whose bravery was reflected in Anzac descendants. Our Crown representatives – the Governors – have included men of superior intellect and will, like Bourke and Macquarie, the latter who forged Sydney out of nothing, named the continent Australia, and emancipated the convicts into citizens.[29]

Who is Australia? It’s you. It’s me. Not the dark cloud of endless grovelling, but the everlasting light of who we could become. It’s our founding geniuses – Parkes, Barton, Fisher – who are an expression of our collective will and character. It’s the crowd of patriots, braving the weather on that rainy Sunday afternoon in Perth and in cities around the country, willing to take a stand and march for Australia. Willing to assert our natural right to free speech, no matter what absurd laws or lies are thrown at us.

We are Australia. And we will never apologise for it. Because a nation cannot be built on an apology, nor must it become a vassal for another group’s collective trauma or paranoia.

We stand at a crossroads.

The question is a demographic and civilisational “to be or not to be”: surrender to the perpetual apology of paleo-liberalism’s mutations and become South Africa 2.0? Or climb the mountain and reclaim the empty summit. No more rituals of repentance. Instead, we must become political players and rewrite our history with a bold Welcome to (Our Own) Country, where history is triumph, not tragedy, and where the eternal Crown shines like crepuscular rays, piercing the overcast sky.

Footnotes:

1. The opinions expressed in this essay are fair comment on matters of public interest, made in good faith. They aim to contextualise historical and political issues for educational purposes, without intent to incite hatred, vilification, or discrimination against any group.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (Dover Publications, 2018) s 1, see ‘but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate — it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation”… There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast — for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal….’.
3. Alex77717Q (@Alex77717Q), ‘March for Australia in Perth Was this a “Welcome to Country” the non woke way? ’ (X, 21 October 2025) https://x.com/Alex77717Q/status/1980581595913548069.
4. (1992) 175 CLR 1.
5. Auron MacIntyre, ‘Nick Land vs. Aleksandr Dugin Debate’ (YouTube, 10 June 2025) 15:15 – 23:25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J86C4IJTaFw&t=721s.
6. David Starkey, ‘Liberalism was an attempt to export Englishness’ (David Starkey Talks, YouTube, 12 February 2026) 10:30 – 17:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tUvZV85YQY.
7. Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ (2010) 33(2–3) Behavioral and Brain Sciences 61.
8. Ibid.
9. MacIntyre (n 5) 15:15 – 23:25.
10. Andrew Markus, ‘Lippmann, Walter Max (1919–1993)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol 19 (ANU Press, 2021) https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lippmann-walter-max-18257 (published online 2017).
11. R v Ballard [1829] NSWSupC 26, per Forbes CJ.
12. Géza Róheim, The Children of the Desert: The Western Tribes of Central Australia, ed Werner Muensterberger (Basic Books, 1974) 70-3 https://archive.org/details/childrenofdesert00rohe/page/n295/mode/2up.
13. Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, 2017 Indigenous Expenditure Report, Productivity Commission (October 2017) https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-research/indigenous-expenditure-report/2017/.
14. R v Ballard (n 9) per Forbes CJ.
15. Ibid.
16. [1832] NSWSupC 4.
17. [1836] NSWSupC 35.
18. R v Kilmeister (No 2) [1838] NSWSupC 110 (5 December 1838)
19. [1837] NSWSupC 84.
20. Attorney-General v Brown (1847) 1 Legge 312 at 317-18.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Stephen Baxter and John Blair, ‘Land Tenure and Royal Patronage in the Early English Kingdom: A Model and a Case Study’ in C P Lewis (ed), Anglo-Norman Studies XXVIII (Boydell Press, 2006) 20 https://dokumen.pub/anglo-norman-studies-xxviii-proceedings-of-the-battle-conference-2005-28-1843832178-9781843832171-9781846152078.html.
24. Ibid.
25. Native Title Act (1993) Cth, s 223(1)(c)).
26. Wilfrid Prest, ‘Law for Historians: William Blackstone on Wives, Colonies and Slaves’ (2007) 11(1) Legal History 105 https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/journals/AULegHist/2007/12.html#fnB19.
27. Mabo (No 2) v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23, [33]-[36] (Brennan J).
28. Prest (n 25).
29. Ernest Scott, ‘Macquarie, who adopted the name Australia’ (Web Page, 3 June 1939) https://www.australianculture.org/macquarie-ernest-scott-1939/ Macquarie did not coin ‘Australia’ but facilitated its adoption in official dispatches, see ‘Australia … which, I hope, will be the name given to this country in the future, instead of the very erroneous and misapplied name hitherto given it, of New Holland’.