Welcome by Ziggy Ramo

I’d like to acknowledge
the lack of knowledge.

We renamed the Frontier Wars
the forgotten.

Let us disrespect
the elders with chains on their necks.

Finders keepers –
the land was stolen,
but there is no debt to collect.

Have pride in your genocide.
There is no need to hide.

Fascism is on the rise
and the room starts clapping.

A sigh of relief
to have finally been seen.

Knock, knock – who’s there?

A seat at the table
if I dare.

A choir of boos
welcome me.

I am
the ungrateful Aborigine.

I wrote Welcome after Uncle Ray Minniecon was booed while performing a Welcome to Country at an Anzac Day dawn service.

The timing mattered. It wasn’t just that an Elder was disrespected while offering a gesture of grace. It was that it happened on a day supposedly dedicated to remembrance, sacrifice and honouring those who fought for this country. That contradiction stayed with me.

Australia is comfortable remembering some wars and forgetting others. We speak about Anzac Day as sacred, but rarely speak with the same reverence about the frontier wars. We honour soldiers who travelled overseas, but struggle to honour the First Peoples who resisted invasion here. Aboriginal people have long been fighting and dying for Country.

That is the bitter irony sitting underneath the poem.

Welcome begins with the familiar rhythm of public acknowledgment, then turns it inside out: “I’d like to acknowledge / the lack of knowledge.” I wanted the poem to sound like a ceremony collapsing under the weight of what it refuses to say.

A Welcome to Country is not empty politeness. It is an assertion of continuing sovereignty, memory and custodianship. To boo Uncle Ray’s welcome is to reveal something much deeper than disagreement. It exposes a country that wants the comfort of ceremony without the responsibility of truth.

The poem is blunt because the moment was blunt. The disrespect was blunt. The history being denied is blunt. “Finders keepers” becomes the logic of invasion. A “seat at the table” becomes another conditional invitation. We are welcomed only when we are grateful, quiet and convenient.

Welcome is about being invited in and rejected at the same time. It is about the strange relief of finally seeing the mask slip. And it is about refusing the oldest accusation: that telling the truth makes us ungrateful.

• Australian Poetry Month runs throughout August and includes festivals, events, workshops and a commissioned poem of the day brought to you by Red Room Poetry. Find out more here