Booing at the Footy and the Stories We Tell Ourselves About Belonging

There was a Welcome to Country at the Australia Cup final on the weekend, and a chunk of the crowd booed it. Then, a day or so later, a well known Greek-Australian advocate said he felt ashamed to be Greek after Greek fans were among those doing the booing. Both threads blew up on r/australia, and I’ve been turning the whole thing over since, mostly because the easy explanations don’t quite hold.

The easy explanation is “racists gonna racist,” and sure, for some of the people in that crowd that’s probably the whole story. But a few comments in the discussion stopped me, because they weren’t excusing the booing, they were trying to explain it, and those are different things. One person pointed out the obvious irony: Greek migrants spent decades copping exactly the kind of exclusion and contempt that a Welcome to Country is meant to counter. You’d think that experience would build empathy by default. Instead, for a chunk of people, it seems to curdle into something else: I earned my place here the hard way, nobody gave me a ceremony, so why does this other group get one. It’s not a good argument. But it’s a real one, and pretending it isn’t out there doesn’t make it go away.

Another comment, from someone who described themselves as a migrant, made a point I hadn’t properly considered: that part of the resentment comes from people hearing “Welcome to Country” and parsing it, rightly or wrongly, as “you are a guest here,” when they’ve got grandchildren and great-grandchildren who’ve never known anywhere else. I don’t think that’s a reason to boo a 30-second acknowledgement at a football match. But I get why, filtered through resentment and a fair bit of talkback radio, it lands as an accusation instead of an invitation. The ceremony is trying to do something quite subtle, acknowledge a 60,000-year relationship with this land without erasing everyone who’s arrived since, and subtlety doesn’t survive contact with a crowd that’s already primed to be angry about something.

What actually got under my skin, though, wasn’t the booing itself. It was watching the conversation instantly sort itself into tribes: soccer versus AFL, migrants versus “true blue Aussies,” left versus right, as if this is a contest to find the most embarrassing demographic. Someone in the thread made the point better than I can: fighting among ourselves is exactly what lets the people actually running the show off the hook. News Corp doesn’t need you to agree with it, it just needs you arguing with your neighbour about a welcome ceremony instead of asking why rent’s gone up 40 percent and wages haven’t moved.

I grew up Anglo in Melbourne’s outer suburbs in the eighties, which meant I watched my own extended family go through a slower, quieter version of this. My grandfather had opinions about “the Italians moving in” that would mortify him if he were still around to hear his great-granddaughter talk about her friends at school. People don’t inherit wisdom automatically just because they’ve suffered something similar; sometimes they inherit the grievance and skip the lesson. That’s not a dig at any one community, it’s just how humans seem to work. Pain doesn’t automatically teach generosity. Sometimes it just curdles and gets passed down like a family recipe nobody asked for.

Here’s the bit I keep landing on, and it’s not tidy: I think Welcome to Country ceremonies matter, and I think a stadium full of people booing one is a bad look and worse than a bad look. I also think you don’t fix forty years of accumulated resentment and economic anxiety by being more insistent about the ceremony, or more contemptuous of the people booing it. Shaming someone rarely makes them more reflective, it mostly makes them dig in. My daughter, who’s a teenager and somehow more patient about this stuff than I was at her age, reckons most of her cohort don’t even register the ceremonies as political one way or the other, they’re just part of the furniture of a school assembly. Maybe that’s the actual long game: not winning an argument with a stadium full of angry blokes in their forties, but just letting the next generation grow up with it as normal, unremarkable, the way my kid finds it.

In the meantime, somebody’s going to boo something on a Saturday, somebody else is going to write an op-ed about it, and the actual landlords of this country, the ones setting the rent and the headlines, will keep cashing in while we argue about who’s allowed to feel aggrieved. I don’t have a neat way to close that loop. I just think it’s worth noticing it’s there.