The NFL’s decision to have two teams travel 16 hours to Australia for a key divisional game during the first week of the season was pretty off-putting. But what really rubbed some people the wrong way was the league allowing Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, a prominent Indigenous Australian elder, to take center stage during the pregame ceremony.
Aunty Joy, as she’s known, holds the title of Senior Wurundjeri elder of the Kulin Alliance in Victoria. This role typically involves giving traditional Welcome to Country greetings at various events in Melbourne.
Her address, however, felt more like a lecture about the land being stolen rather than a warm welcome. She pointed out that the land doesn’t belong to White Australians, but rather to the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples who first inhabited it thousands of years ago—specifically, around 60,000 years ago, according to Aunty Joy’s remarks before the game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
One has to wonder: why would the NFL include this narrative at a solemn event commemorating 9/11 that involved both American and Australian attendees? Surely, it wasn’t the right moment to inject such contentious rhetoric, especially when teams were on the sidelines, waiting to play.
Throughout her somewhat meandering history lesson, Aunty Joy acknowledged the NFL, as well as the teams. Notably, she mixed up the San Francisco 49ers with the Los Angeles Chargers instead of the Rams—an unusual flub considering the Chargers have moved on from their original market.
She went on to discuss the Kulin Nation and thanked the NFL for bringing the “Char-Rams” to “Naarm,” the Indigenous name for Melbourne—though it’s interesting to note that she didn’t often use that term throughout her speech.
As Aunty Joy continued, she hoped everyone enjoyed the event and thanked the community members involved. Then, in an odd moment, she plucked a leaf from a plant she was holding and symbolically offered it like a ritualistic gesture, saying it represented a welcome to all aspects of the land.
It’s clear that acknowledging the land in such a way has become common in Australia, driven by a sense of guilt among current landowners over the historical injustices faced by Indigenous peoples. But it’s arguable whether this acknowledgment truly comes from a place of sincerity, given that there’s a lack of actual restitution.
What complicates matters further is the NFL’s involvement. While it might be acceptable to engage in cultural events leading up to an international game, on the day itself, many viewers probably aren’t tuning in to hear critiques aimed at White Australians as land usurpers.
If the NFL is interested in such discussions, perhaps those conversations should happen elsewhere—maybe at their headquarters in Manhattan, where the land was historically purchased from native peoples without any returns made.
