"Give me land - lots of land - under starry skies above..."

Almost every speaker in every conference session I went to in Melbourne (see previous posting) began by a ‘welcome to country’ message, paying respect to the original owners of the land, in this case the Wurundjeri people. This made me feel quite uncomfortable (incidentally, my discomfort rating went off the scale at this exhibition - as doubtless it was meant to); it was one thing to hear it said once or twice, but when it’s said by everyone, it begins to lose meaning and to become a bit ritualistic. And maybe a substitute for giving back the land, which clearly isn't going to happen anytime soon . I asked an Australian friend about the 'paying respect' thing– she explained that they did it because representatives of the Wurundjeri people had asked them to. So I suppose that makes it OK. I got away without doing it because I’d have felt a fraud – instead I apologised for not doing it, explaining, truthfully, that as an overseas visitor I felt I needed to understand more. But it set me thinking about the social justice issue in relation to land in the UK. We have no aboriginal people – Robert Winder’s excellent book, Bloody Foreigners (not recommended for reading on trains near Daily Mail readers as they may not appreciate the irony) shows how few of us Brits are anything other than foreigners, depending on how far back you go (not very, in my case, I’m proud to say). The Land Registry is currently trying to identify who owns our land – and 40% of it is unregistered. Clearly, quite a lot of it is owned by various dukes and churches, who came by it in questionable ways. But I don't hear much from social justice advocates in the UK about land ownership. Perhaps if we all owned a fairer share of the land, we’d be happier people, or perhaps not. One of my fellow speakers would have a view – he was Karma Tshiteem, Secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission of Bhutan. Bhutan, much of whose population lives at World Bank poverty level, measures GNH on seven 'wellness' criteria - Economic; Environmental; Physical; Mental; Workplace; Social; and Political. It’s also the only country in the world to have banned the sale of tobacco, so it’s not the place to go looking for Ken Clarke or David Hockney. Karma seemed a very happy fellow himself, and it made me happy that the local media were only interested in him so he had to do the early morning news programmes – so I sat in bed at 7.30 drinking my morning tea and watching him ‘live’ (on all previous visits to Aus I've been asked, in their phrase, to ‘do media’ which has usually meant a visit to an otherwise deserted radio station early in the morning or long after my cocoa and slippers time.). It (Bhutan, in case I’ve lost you) is a democracy whose monarch set an age limit for monarchs, and abdicated in favour of his much younger son. I can’t remember the age, but I think it would probably mean that we would have neither Betty nor Chuck enthroned. And that would make me happy too.