What are land acknowledgements without land back? When you pay your respects to the dead whose descendants remain dispossessed, or recognise the “traditional owners” of the land that you now possess and reap as a gift of your modernity; when you commemorate the scarring in the trees that carry the spirits of their ancestors, and acknowledge those unmarked graves on which you walk, whose voice is it that you hear?

According to the Whadjuk Noongar people, the original custodians of the land, Wadjemup/Rottnest Island is a place where spirits lie. A place of transition between the physical and spiritual world. The island is also the single largest site of Indigenous deaths in custody. Here, knotted trees entwine their way down into hundreds of unmarked graves of Aboriginal prisoners who were transported in chains between 1838 and 1931 and contained to be “out of sight, and out of mind” of European settlers in the mainland — much as the mass incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders remains out of sight and out of mind in Australia today. This is the highest rate of Indigenous incarceration in the world.

In the decades since the closure of the prison in 1931, the dark history of the island has been shrouded through its makeover as a holiday destination, with the prison’s Quod cells operating as holiday accommodation until 2018. When Aboriginal poet Graeme Dixon visited the island on a holiday and discovered a display on the island’s penal past, he felt overcome with sickness at the revelation. He later captured this in his book the Holocaust Island (1990)

Nestled in the Indian Ocean
Like a jewel in her crown
The worshippers of Babel come
To relax and turn to brown […]
But what they refuse to realise
Is that in this little Isle
Are skeletons in their cupboards
Of deeds most foul and vile

While past managements have actively concealed the past, recently the Island’s authority has sought to formally acknowledge the island’s Aboriginal prison history through Reconciliation Action Plans, ceremonies to facilitate healing, and memorialisation of the former prison sites. Today, the official website of the Island’s authority describes Wadjemup/Rottnest as a “place of reciprocity and respect.” Before launching into “everything you need to know” and “things you need to do” on the Island, the website invites visitors to pay respects to the traditional custodians, the Whadjuk elders and

all Aboriginal affected by the historical use of Wadjemup as a place of unjust incarceration, especially the men and boys whose bodies remain there, and to the families and descendants who lost them.

My own visit is perhaps naively propelled by these piecemeal acts of acknowledging land and historical wrongs. Curious to see the commemoration of the island, I arrive on the crystal shores, wading past the crowds of holiday makers, boat racers in neon shirts, couples basking on the clear sands and toddlers playing in beachfront cabins, to find a small grain house converted into the Wadjemup museum.  This walks you through the evolutionary stages of the Island. From Exploration (by Dutch ships) to Internment (of WWI prisoners, with Aboriginal prison labour). From Imprisonment (of Aboriginal peoples) to Apology and a Journey of Reconciliation.

But there is also another story that the museum conveys in conversation with its immediate surroundings, tucked behind cafes, bakeries, and the hustle bustle of holiday life — either ignored or occasioned as a space for settler atonement as one item in a series of other itineraries. Like a dystopian future of Gaza, where settlers pay tribute to the bodies they razed as bedrock for their buildings and beachfronts.

In the courtyard of the Wadjemup Museum, stands a lone tree, bordered by a wooden fence with an attached speaker playing a melancholic song. But in the museum, it is disembodied from the people who carry it. In a tourist island commemorating the single largest site of Indigenous deaths in custody, it captures a paradox that is thoroughly routinised and normalised in post-Apology Australia: respects to the dead whose descendants remain dispossessed; land acknowledgements without land back.

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Six years ago, as a transient settler on these stolen lands — neither Indigenous and nor (fully) a migrant — I was struck by repetitive acknowledgements of Aboriginal traditional custodianship, past and present, in every institution, school ceremony, university lecture, and policy meeting. Back in the country that I called home, families of Baloch, Pashtuns and other “missing persons” from the peripheries screamed into an abyss, carrying a wound with no closure, not knowing whether their fathers, brothers, and sons disappeared by the state were dead or alive — let alone publicly acknowledged or named.

For the most part, the military’s genocide in Bangladesh was also publicly unspeakable — doing so came with a threat of further extra-judicial abduction. From that vantage, acknowledgements stood out to me as powerful speech acts that could centre Indigenous relationality and justice to redefine a sense of belonging to a place.

In the years since, however, my movements and participation in the settler-scapes of Australia have left me increasingly discomforted with the echoes of my own and other settler acknowledgements, as rituals in rooms structurally devoid of Indigenous presence.

Within policy, academic, and semi-governmental settings, these echoes of settler voices — white and migrant — often follow a carefully curated and standardized script. A script that does not only pay respects to the traditional custodians and their elders, past and present; but layers this recognition with our appreciation for how they have cared for the land and the waterways; a care they have bestowed to Country that we reap from. A script acknowledging their countless contributions that we cite; layering their dispossession as our gratitude; their tragedy as resilience that keeps our spirit of reconciliation, peace, and positivity alive.

Occasionally, such heartfelt sentiments, periodising time and wrapped in a script, are disrupted with sovereignty was never ceded; always was and always will be [Aboriginal land]. Some people fidget at the protest chant in a policy room, but the settler-scape absorbs the disruption and the ritual continues.

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In a policy boardroom meeting, a white CEO expresses his heartfelt acknowledgement. He means it in earnest — his gratitude for Country, for the cultures of the oldest continuing civilisation on earth, for their practices of giving and sharing, is not feigned. He pays respects to the traditional custodians in the land in which he works and, he adds meaningfully: his respects to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander in this room today. I look around the room in strange wonder. In the audience of twelve, there are none. Surely, we all know that! But his earnestness is the ritual that counts. His acknowledgement invokes an absent presence — like the disembodied song outside the museum — with no space for contradiction.

So where are the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders acknowledged in that room? They are found in policy manuals and milestones to mark the organisation’s growth through Reconciliation Action Plans, carefully dotted and capitalised with an ‘I’ on the Indigenous wherever appropriate. They are, sometimes, not to be referred as the Indigenous or the Aboriginal unless they prefer, some guides advise. Their plurality — peoples versus people — is a novelty in induction trainings for staff who have lived generationally on stolen lands, and others who have only just arrived.

Their cultural protocols are elaborated in the same practice guides respectfully: who is an elder, who is a custodian, how to address them; how to invite and engage them. The distance of generational violence and institutions built out of violence is to be bridged with the right respectful protocols: the correct names of their titles, the rituals of Acknowledgement, the Smoking and Welcome Ceremonies.

On many occasions, their role ends here: to Welcome, drawing on traditional customs that gave safe passage to “visitors”, and then to depart, after which the settlers claim space. On other occasions, they are sought for consultations on  “closing the gap” that separates them and their decision-making from the institutions constructed out of their dispossession.  Their dead and dying are not to be depicted or named in line with culture, the manuals caution, to which settlers respond respectfully by eliding even the conditions for death. Their deficits are not to be corrected, patronisingly. Rather, their strengths are to be celebrated, positively. But between the two, it is the singularity of their rage at an ongoing dispossession that is left behind.

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In another conference of academics, policy makers and ministers, a traditional custodian opens with a Welcome to Country. It is the same song with the hollow notes of didgeridoo invoking an ancient call for stewardship and care, disrupting settler supremacist entitlements to land in protest rallies, connecting warriors in Aboriginal land with those in Aotearoa, in Palestine, in Kashmir. But here, in the conference of academics and ministers, it is a one opening item in the agenda, carefully slotted for time.

As the custodian departs with his consent for the proceedings on his land, other voices take over.  A minister appears for his key-note speech and acknowledges the traditional custodians.

The First Nations culture is the foundation of Australia. This was followed by colonisation which … gave us … our democratic institutions, and then migration and multiculturalism which has given us our diversity.

Another expert expresses her heartfelt acknowledgement and introduces her “tribe” — her cultural location following Indigenous protocols of introduction: her Irish ancestry on one side, her convict history on the other. Is her settler ancestry a recognition of what constituted whiteness in Australia, or an endorsement of diversity? The line remains muddled.

Around me, the audience of academics and experts seem unfazed. While multicultural democracy rewrites settler colonisation; while white settlers refashion themselves (and their possessive histories) into migrant ones; while claims of honouring a pervasive cultural diversity dilute sovereign demands of Indigenous land back.

Or perhaps, the audience is also paying respects to decorum, as the minister continues his metaphor of sedimentation. Traditional custodianship with colonisation, with democracy. Light with darkness, with light. Tragedy with evolution, with reconciliation. Violence with necessity, with progress. All stacked in the same single itinerary that was Wadjemup, and that is Australia.

In a final gala of multicultural settlers, a song lady Welcomes. She is a descendant of a few that survived the extermination of her tribe in 1831, singing in the language of a people rendered extinct, teaching them the name of her land and its pronunciation in the native tongue. “Extinct through the impact of colonisation,” she tells the crowd, eager to belong, to be included in the colony. “I speak my truth here, but not to guilt anyone present in the room today,” and from here the mood shifts from a fleeting moment of tension to peace, unity, and positivity — speaking to a settler impulse to feel good. Other voices join the chorus with First Nations Cultural Recognition and Reconciliation speak.

Unity, positivity against divisiveness speak. Against extreme polarisation in our current times speak. Echoes of the same unity, positivity, and peace as the government’s call for social cohesion, for assimilation, for imperial amnesia in a settler colony, for normalisation of the present of a settler colonial genocide in Gaza speak.

As refugees in the tents of Gaza burn alive in another enactment of Aboriginal history elsewhere, we — an audience of multicultural settlers — remind ourselves that we do care. We honour an Aboriginal song as an opening ceremony, a ritualised skit, a cultural entertainment in a dystopian future of a settler colonial genocide.

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Today, from Australia to Canada and now the US, land acknowledgements are being woven into a progressive national culture of liberal settler colonies. They are also under increasing attack from the right wing for being ‘racially divisive,’ wasteful or redundant. But what is often missed in the liberal defense of the ritual against white supremacist erasure is this: what happens when land acknowledgements are routinely sounded without giving land back?

Acknowledgements to Country and Welcome Ceremonies in Australia, prior to the 1990s, existed as organic political acts that either identified settlers as ‘foreign guests’ on Indigenous lands through the ‘Welcome’; or honoured survivors of extermination and colonisation and their ancestral connections to land. These grass-roots practices were linked to mobilisations for land rights, gaining momentum with the landmark Mabo court decision in 1992 that recognised the native title claims of a Torres Strait Islander group (Meriam people) to their ancestral land (in Murray Islands). Over time, they became gradually formalised as part of a state-endorsed movement for Reconciliation, and incorporated within gatherings that were corporatist as well as unionist, educational as well as parliamentary in nature.

To critique their ritualisation as it exists today — without land back — is not to negate their performative power, even if only as speech act in a context where the lie of Terra Nullius is still pervasive. Rather, it is to turn our attention to when and how these speech acts fold back and sustain settler colonial complicities, rather than disrupt its possessive entitlements. And ask why repetitive affirmations of First Nations’ custodianship — and even sovereignty — have not translated into radical positions of justice for Indigenous peoples here or elsewhere.

The “white possessive,” as Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, recognises white people as primary property-owning subjects, and operates through a paternalistic logic to accumulate capital and social appreciation. It is a logic that can also be culturalist in enjoying aesthetic interaction with otherness and difference, whilst limiting materialistic functionality and Indigenous sovereignty through law and government. Moreton writes that

patriarchal white nation-states and universities insist on producing cultural difference in order to manage the existence and claims of Indigenous people. In this way the production of knowledge about cultural specificity is complicit with state requirements for manageable forms of difference that are racially configured through whiteness.

Extending this critique, Aboriginal writer, Chelsea Watego also cautions against a dispossessing function of culture in the colony:

much like identity, in which we can no longer see ourselves in this place, both here and now, because of how they have defined it for us …

She continues, “it is via culture that Indigenous rights to land are determined and, too, diminished.” Rather than making Indigenous difference culturally knowable, the answer — for both Watego and Moreton-Robinson — is to foreground Indigeneity as critique, as resistance of settler colonial societies, and a means of making white possession wrought of Indigenous racialisation more visible.

Through their critique, it becomes possible to see how white possessive logics can co-opt acknowledgements, sustaining settler entitlement by reducing Indigenous custodianship to culture. An appropriated culture that invokes an absent presence, situating the Indigenous, as Watego might put it, in a double consciousness, “between existing and non-existing, human and non-human, real and unreal, traditional and modern.” A culture that tames Indigenous rage through feel-good grammars of celebration and commemoration in which the settlers partake and erase their complicity.

Depending on how they are performed, scripted and standardised, land acknowledgements also maintain the traditional-modern divide, where Indigenous people are acknowledged as “traditional” custodians of “traditional lands”, thereby transporting ownership into a mythical past — now overtaken by a modern present of white benevolent and “multicultural” settlers. In such instances, the discourse of traditionalism also becomes consistent with a temporal (and civilising) logic of capital accumulation and (white possessive) property, allowing settlers to emerge as reformed benefactors seeking “close the gap” and “fix” the Aboriginal problem ex post facto.

Much as the white possessive ensures that it controls the reins to manage and govern multicultural work in the colony, with inclusion as a mask for ongoing colonial violence, it can also reduce Indigenous sovereignty to another cultural tributary for migrant-settlers to acknowledge, recognise and celebrate within its confines. Not so much to enable their migrant belongings in a home away from home, which is never fully realised. But to mediate their relation to Indigeneity through white benevolence, white apology, white reconciliation and civilisational progress.

The paradox of acknowledgements without land back is also visible in various facets of the Reconciliation movement in Australia, which is insists we should uphold and respect First Nations custodianship and take a constitutional (rights-based) approach to securing Indigenous self-determination. And yet, since its inception in the 1990s, the movement has also been critiqued for sidelining activist demands for land justice, and Indigenous control of resources.

More recently, colonial genocide in Gaza has exposed further contradictions in the Reconciliation industry as well as the “Yes” campaign to give constitutional (albeit advisory) “Voice” to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Here, claims to reconcile Australia and recognise First Nations sovereignty have not only existed incongruently with silence on the genocide in Gaza but, in some instances, have also received Zionist patronage from those who construe Judaism as a territorially bounded national culture and violently establish settler facts in Palestine. In each of these instances to honour Indigeneity in Australia, as sovereign First Nations critics have asked, the question remains: who reserves the right to bestow, to arbitrate, and to “give voice” in the first place?

In this context, and three months into the genocide in Gaza, a statement issued by the Editors of the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies should not come as a surprise. In it, critics of settler colonialism — all of whom were white scholars who reflexively acknowledged their settler positionalities in Australia, Canada, and the US — intervened in the “conflict” with a supposedly decolonial rendition of both-sidesim:

We do not dispute any nation’s right to defend itself, just as we support the rights of Indigenous groups globally to pursue their sovereignty.

While they condemned violence on all sides, and encouraged Palestinian leaders to collaborate, compromise and pursue sovereignty in a peaceful manner, they also hoped

that Israel’s leaders grasp their situation as a settler colonial state, recognize the rights of those whose lands were unlawfully ceded, and work to find a two-state compromise accepting historical and current realities of settlement.

Here, a both-sideist discourse accompanies acknowledgements of unceded Indigenous sovereignty — as if the latter can conjure “peaceful settlement” out of ongoing genocidal violence. Here, settler reflexivity and acknowledgement of unceded Indigenous lands, like those rampant in many academic institutions, operate as a reinforcement — rather than a negation — of settler entitlement. An act of washing one’s slate clean, rather than sitting with one’s complicity, leading to an entitlement towards critique itself — at times, over and above the voices they seek to represent.

Despite a shift in focus away from the “other” and towards the “self”, such reflexivity also signals an acceptance of settlement that folds decolonisation into the rubric of liberal recognition politics, leaving the coloniser with the right to represent, and the colonised as the represented; the coloniser with the right to dictate the terms of settlement, and the colonised to accept the compromise; the coloniser with the privilege to grant concessions (as rights) and the colonised with (the onus of) peaceful patience in the face of genocidal dispossession.

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As sovereign Blak folks and their advocates remind us: the land and the waterways that we call Australia need not be identified as the civilisational “West,” or the “Global North.” It is and it remains a fundamentally Blak continent incarcerated, where ten-year-old Aboriginal kids in the Northern Territory can be held criminally responsible and jailed ostensibly “for their own good”. Reckoning with this truth requires us — migrant-settlers from the colonised and the formerly colonised worlds — to not only expunge the colonial dispositions we bring forth from our own lands. But to also pull apart the sedimentations of white possession that mediate our relationship with Indigeneity here.

Here, as Aboriginal scholar Chelsea Watego writes,

the ‘problem of the Aborigine’ in the colony is our very presence: Always was, always will be. Despite the colonisers’ best efforts to disperse ‘the Aborigine’ geographically or absorb us statistically, we remain and continue to claim a being via a proximity to them. It is in our presence that we remind them that we are ‘still here, ‘despite their daily insistence that we exist in a land far, far away, in a faraway time.

In the insistence that sovereignty never ceded, that it always was, always will be, indeed there are performances of acknowledgement that assert this presence in powerful ways, in unison with Blak voices and with the rage they require for allies in Invasion Day rallies, in solidarity with Palestine, and in Christchurch vigils.

But when settler colonisation thrives on an infinite capacity of theft and appropriation; when it is routinely reinforced by the gratification of granting concessions; and effortlessly deflected through a possessive performance of critique, we must ask. How do we rescue rituals of land acknowledgements – not merely from white supremacist erasure — but also, from their co-optation and dispersion in settler agendas, from the narcissistic echoes of our own settler voices?

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Back at Wadjemup, there is more to see but I am unable to continue my itinerary. Indigenous sovereignties are omnipresent here — in the sanctity of the trees that wind down and shade the unmarked graves, in the crystal waters that brush and nurture the shores, in the native marsupials that symbolise their connection to earth in Dreamtime stories, in the testimonies of the Noongar people that are still present, still steadfast.

But these sovereignties, as far as the eye can see, are disavowed by material settler significations in the island — save for an artifact, a plaque, a disembodied song, a museum.

Visitors of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island rave about its beauty. Others add a caveat on its poignant history. But there is also a lore of sickness associated with the island, experienced by some who unwittingly tread its shores.

Despite my acknowledgement of its history, I am still present as a curious traveller, still partaking in its settler scape. My sickness communicates a violation, a need for expression. Overcome, I abort all other items in the itinerary and return.

Image: Wadjemup Museum