The first time I sat through a Welcome to Country, I cried—and I had no idea why.
I’d wanted to live in a country town for years. When the role in Northam came up, I took it—thinking the life I imagined might come with it. It didn’t. But something else did.
It was 2013. I’d just landed a role with a regional health organisation in Northam, deep in the Western Australian wheatbelt. As part of my induction—the standard here’s-where-the-toilets-are, here’s-what-we-stand-for orientation—there was a truth-telling. An elder sharing the story of the country I was about to work in and walk on.
Nobody had ever told me this story before. Not at school. Not anywhere.
Part of what I learned that day was this: for many Indigenous people, hospitals are places of profound and historic fear—places people went and didn’t always come home from. The places where children were taken—disappeared into a system that called it policy. To work in that building, on that country, and not know that story was to be blind to the very people I was there to work with.
I cried because I realised how much I didn’t know. And I made a quiet decision to keep listening.
Every new site after that, I showed up for the induction. Not because I was told to. Because I understood, finally, that being welcomed somewhere is a gift—and you don’t refuse a gift.
Here’s the thing about inductions. People roll their eyes at them too. We’ve all shuffled into a room, half-present, waiting for the part where we can actually start work. But we stay. We’re quiet. We respect the context—because something in us understands that arriving somewhere new requires acknowledgment.
A few years later I met Helen on the AvonLink, both of us commuting to Perth for work—I was by then living the country life in Toodyay. She was in the corporate sector too, and volunteered with a Noongar community group in her own time. It was Helen who gave me the simplest, most clarifying explanation of Welcome to Country I’ve ever heard.
She said: think about what we do as Australians. Someone comes to your farmgate—welcome, come in, I’ll pop the kettle on. Someone arrives at your door—welcome. You walk into a community event—someone greets you, makes you feel safe and at home. We do it without thinking, because it’s who we are.
But Helen also helped me understand that while that farmgate welcome feels familiar, for Aboriginal people it carries something far deeper. It speaks to moort and boodja—family and ancestral lands—and a connection to place held across tens of thousands of years. That welcome comes from a relationship tying people, story and Country together across generations. It speaks to cultural safety too—an assurance that you are recognised, respected and able to move safely on that Country. I hadn’t understood that. Helen helped me see it.
A Welcome to Country is, at its heart, that. The traditional custodians extending the oldest, most generous hospitality imaginable—you are welcome here.
That’s not politics. That’s the kettle going on—and knowing you are safe in that place.
The ceremony as we know it today has more recent roots. In 1976, when Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley helped shape it for visiting Māori performers who were uncomfortable performing on Country without first being welcomed by its traditional custodians. It wasn’t invented by bureaucrats or imposed by policy. It was born from one group of Indigenous people honouring another—and from the understanding that land carries meaning and meaning deserves respect.
To stand in that moment and boo is to refuse the gift. It is, simply, unkind.
And here’s what I know about unkindness: it’s almost always born from not knowing. From a story never told, a question never asked, a seat never taken at an induction nobody thought to make compulsory.
I didn’t know either—until I chose to listen. Until someone took the time to explain it to me in a language I already understood.
You already know how to welcome someone. You’ve done it your whole life. But as Helen helped me understand, this asks something more—to respect that we are being welcomed onto a place that holds deep meaning for others, a meaning most of us are only beginning to learn.
The kettle’s already on.
Related reflection
If this resonated, you might also like:
→ The Boo and the Applause