At the opening of the Australian parliament on 12 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd acknowledged the traditional owners of the land after being Welcomed to Country in a ceremony performed by Aboriginal people from around Australia. Similar welcomes and acknowledgements of country are common at many types of events and gatherings (with State and Territory guidelines devised on their implementation), but they had never been part of the opening of the federal parliament prior to 2008. The landmark welcome ostensibly enacted the idea that the Australian government's authority is somehow granted by—and not imposed upon—Aboriginal people. That this symbolism is conspicuously at odds with historico-political reality has underpinned public debate in Australia over the efficacy of the Welcome to Country and acknowledgement of traditional owners. In March 2010 the suggestion by the then opposition leader Tony Abbott that the discursive acknowledgement of traditional owners is often ‘out-of-place tokenism’ (qtd in Maiden 1) prompted a brief flurry of discussion on the role of symbolic thought and action in organizing human affairs generally, and specifically, on whether Australians should be explicitly reminded of the unceded, unresolved sovereignty of Aboriginal people—in other words, of unfinished business.

Setting aside for a moment debates over intention, efficacy and symbolism, it is undeniable that whatever form of Aboriginal sovereignty the Welcome to Country and acknowledgement of country signify or articulate, its structural difference from executive, legislative and judicial powers—the bulwarks of what Aboriginal scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson terms ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ (87)—is profound in a nation that only recently saw the first Aboriginal person elected to the federal House of Representatives. Moreton- Robinson pinpoints the ambivalence of ceremonial recognition, arguing that it is ‘simultaneously a reminder and a denial of the existence of Indigenous sovereignty.