Robert Hill, in the article below, shows how much falsehood, fakery, distortion, and political crawling have seized the minds of Qantas’s management. Note that Qantas has a female CEO, Vanessa Hudson. Females at this executive level are always feminist activists who see their primary duty as using their position to advance the wokist agenda. Hudson plays the role with great flair.
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Flying Woora Nungina into Naarm
Robert Hill, QUADRANT, July 2025
Warning: This article contains elements of satire, a word meaning a form of expression that uses wit, irony, sarcasm, and parody to expose hypocrisy or absurdity in individuals, institutions, or cultural trends.
If this article offends you, consider broadening your education, ideally with a dictionary and a history book. This is not racism. It is ridicule, directed not at race, but at the modern cult of performative virtue, bureaucratised identity, and corporate theatre. If you can’t tell the difference, that’s precisely the problem.
I was at the main entrance of the Qantas lounge in Sydney when the very first thing I saw, front and centre, impossible to miss was the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) map, proudly displayed for all travellers to behold. Across it, in bold type, were the words: “Know where you’re going.” I thought: Melbourne. That’s what my ticket said.
I looked at the map and discovered I was going to Woiwurrung.
Something felt off. With time to burn, I started to dig. I wish I hadn’t. Like everything dressed in the costume of Aboriginal culture, something so simple as the AIATSIS map quickly became a rabbit hole, one that leads not to knowledge, but to propaganda: plagiarised from white men, sold as black truth, and protected by a system that punishes anyone who dares name the fraud.
Please come down the rabbit hole with me.
I was going to Woiwurrung — or so the Qantas signage told me — a name now plastered across Welcome to Country scripts, corporate acknowledgements, and airport lounges. But Woiwurrung was never a nation, never a sovereign people, and never a name known to those it now supposedly honours. It is a linguistic label, stitched together by anthropologists who noted that one group used woi for “no” and wurrung for “mouth” or “speech.” From this slender etymology has grown a sprawling political fiction, one that now lays moral claim to cities, infrastructure, and the national conscience.
As an English speaker, in a land where English is the official language, I translated what I was being told: I wasn’t flying to Melbourne, I was flying to “no mouth” or “no speech.” Somehow, this cryptic fragment of dialectal trivia has been rebranded as a proud and ancient nation, complete with borders, elders, and ceremonies carefully refurbished for modern consumption.
But the truth is far less poetic. Woiwurrung was a loose patchwork of clans, not a people united under one law or one name. There was no central authority, no enduring legal code, no shared flag, only scattered groups defending their ground in a world of shifting alliances and inter-tribal violence. The unity now claimed is a modern invention, projected backwards to serve political ends.
To suggest that Woiwurrung encompasses Melbourne, or that its “nation” has endured in unbroken lineage, is not history. It is myth, repackaged as moral leverage and it deserves to be called what it is: fiction masquerading as fact.