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A Welcome to Country ceremony at Melbourne’s Anzac Day service drew jeers — and media outrage. But beyond the headlines lies a growing national debate about the rituals that are dividing us. Artwork by Brian Doyle.

This morning, thousands of Australians attended Anzac Day dawn services across the country to honour the diggers who fought and sacrificed for our nation.

But one incident got the lion’s share of media interest, when attendees heckled a Welcome to Country ritual at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.

Prominent neo-Nazi Jacob Hersant is being questioned by police after he was caught on camera booing the ritual. However, video footage indicates that discontent in the crowd extended beyond a few outspoken agitators.

To be sure, there are better ways to register opposition than jeering during a solemn ceremony. And you’ll never find me defending a perverse ideology like Hersant’s.

But it’s highly disingenuous — if hardly surprising — for the legacy media to pretend that only extremists take issue with land and country acknowledgments.

No less than Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, along with prominent Coalition Senators Jacinta Price and Alex Antic, have variously questioned the value of the rote rite and promised to cut funding for it if their team is elected on the 3rd of May.

Meanwhile, local councils are debating curbs on the practice — an indicator, if the defeat of the Voice referendum weren’t enough — that the Australian public is growing tired of all the virtue signalling.

Since the media will no doubt spend most of today interrogating this morning’s events in Melbourne, why don’t we go there: is Anzac Day the time and place for a Welcome to Country?

Today’s was brought to you by Uncle Mark Brown, a Senior Cultural Heritage Officer at the Bunurong Land Council, whose invocation began as follows:

I’m a Bundarang man on my father’s side, and this morning I’m here to welcome everybody to my father’s country, beautiful Bundarang country. But before we do that, we pay our acknowledgements and we pay our respects to all of my ancestors.

At a surface level, there’s nothing wrong with being welcomed. But context is everything — it all depends on who is being welcomed and who is doing the welcoming.

Welcomes to Country are, by and large, performed by Indigenous Australians and offered to non-Indigenous people. The subtext is that the latter are somehow foreigners to this continent. Indeed, that is the explicit message of activists who habitually frame non-Aboriginals as invaders.

But the diggers (thousands of whom, by the way, were Indigenous) didn’t fight and sacrifice to be welcomed to their own country. Nor did they return from battlefields abroad to “stolen land”. They were welcomed home.

Anzac Day is a chance to commemorate their indispensable role in carving a nation out of nothing with their blood, sweat and sacrifice. As one commentator has put it, “They tamed the land, they built the cities and they defended its shores. We don’t need to be ‘welcomed’ to a country our ancestors forged with their bare hands.”

We hardly honour the Anzacs’ memory by indulging in divisive rituals and insisting Australia be perpetually partitioned by race.

Here’s the rub: these land and country acknowledgements — formalised and popularised in the 1980s — were introduced on the national stage in an effort to make Indigenous Australians feel more included. But the message they inevitably communicate is that everyone else is less included.

As political veteran Mark Latham asked today, “Has anyone ever experienced a Welcome To Country that actually made you feel welcome?”

I can’t say I have.

By way of illustration, “I forgive you” is a powerful phrase. But if the person you’re saying it to did nothing wrong, it becomes an insinuation of false guilt. And repeated ad infinitum, it becomes manipulative and toxic.

“But white people are guilty,” some will no doubt object.

Yes, early waves of European settlers were guilty of terrible deeds. But those people are long dead — so what sense does it make saddling non-Indigenous Australians, living centuries later, with their sins? Many didn’t even descend from them.

What the media will scramble to lose sight of today is that the heckling wasn’t directed at the Anzacs. It was directed at the activists who used a sacred day to grandstand for a cause that doesn’t belong.

The best way to honour the Anzacs?

Stop dividing the country they fought for. And I’m not just talking about the hecklers.