Abstract

This article investigates the entangled phenomena of Indigenous identity fraud, settler conspirituality, and epistemic simulation in contemporary Australia. Drawing on over one hundred scholarly, community, and policy sources, it explores how settler magical thinking and performative Indigeneity displace genuine Aboriginal governance.

Case studies including the GuriNgai group (granted recognition by local councils), Jake Cassar (who leveraged faux-environmental activism to oppose Aboriginal land councils), and Bronwyn Carlson (whose academic status shapes discourse on Indigeneity) illustrate how individuals without genealogical or community legitimacy gain institutional authority through aestheticised simulations of Aboriginality.

This paper traces the psychological, cultural, and political mechanisms that enable simulation and calls for the restoration of epistemic sovereignty through Aboriginal-led verification, community governance, and institutional reform. International comparisons to the Pretendian phenomenon in Canada and the United States highlight global settler patterns of cultural appropriation.

By distinguishing Blak Knowing from settler mimicry, the article calls for enforceable identity verification standards, institutional accountability, and the prioritisation of Aboriginal community governance in all cultural, academic, and policy engagements. We propose structural pathways toward accountability, cultural integrity, and the protection of Indigenous knowledge systems from epistemic violence and exploitation.

Chapter 1: Simulation as Epistemic Violence

The Crisis of Epistemic Authority in Settler Australia

Across Australia, a troubling convergence has emerged at the intersection of identity, belief, and cultural legitimacy. Non-Indigenous individuals are increasingly claiming Aboriginal identity, authority, and sacred knowledge through narratives of personal revelation, DNA speculation, and spiritual awakening. These acts, often justified through settler conspirituality or intuitive knowing, are not isolated anomalies. They reflect a broader crisis in settler-colonial societies: a collapse in epistemic integrity and a reassertion of colonial dominance through the aesthetics of inclusion and mimicry (Watson, 2014; Watego, 2021; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). This article identifies and critically examines a web of false narratives, settler desires, and institutional complicities that sustain what can be called an “epistemology of simulation.” This term draws upon Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality (1994) and is supported by decolonial and Indigenous scholars who expose how settler societies displace real Aboriginal presence with aestheticised simulations (Kolopenuk, 2021; Carlson & Day, 2023; Leroux, 2019).

This practice has been documented extensively by community researchers, especially via guringai.org and bungaree.org, which have exposed not only the GuriNgai group’s false genealogical claims, but also their entrenchment in heritage consultancy, Welcome to Country protocols, and council-endorsed cultural representation (Cooke, 2025). These investigations also trace how individuals such as Tracey Howie, Neil Evers, and Warren Whitfield have leveraged institutional complicity to insert themselves into planning processes, media discourse, and Aboriginal affairs at the local and state levels.

The epistemological core of this crisis lies in a profound tension between Blak Knowing, a sovereign, kin-governed, place-based form of truth-telling, and what this article terms settler magical thinking. While the former is accountable, embodied, and intergenerational, the latter is individualistic, aestheticised, and often appropriative (Graham, 2008; Martin, 2003; Barton, 2004). As articulated in the National Indigenous Identity Forum (2022) and supported by AIATSIS (2023), legitimate Aboriginal identity rests on a threefold foundation: descent, community recognition, and cultural participation. Yet many claimants today bypass this entirely, invoking family lore or spiritual intuition as proof of cultural belonging (Andrews et al., 2022).

Such simulation is not benign. It results in epistemic violence: the silencing, distortion, and displacement of Aboriginal voices and protocols. As demonstrated in Taplin (2023) and ASPI (2023), the ideological infrastructure of simulation is increasingly shared between settler New Age movements and anti-government sovereign citizen ideologies.

The increasing visibility of Pretendians, both in Australia and internationally (Leroux, 2021; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.), has led to direct material and cultural harm. Grieve-Williams (2021) and Carlson and Frazer (2021) detail how this includes the theft of scholarships, academic positions, grants, ceremonial roles, and public influence from genuine Aboriginal people, further entrenching colonial dispossession under the guise of reconciliation and decolonial performance.

This article argues that Indigenous identity fraud is not merely about false claims: it is about the settler state’s refusal to cede epistemic authority. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from anthropology (Watson, 2014), cultural studies (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Forberg, 2022), legal theory (Spivak, 1988), psychology (Langone et al., 2021), and community testimony (guringai.org, bungaree.org), this work offers a comprehensive interrogation of simulation, settler spirituality, and the colonial politics of recognition. It situates these dynamics within a transnational context of Indigenous resistance, from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and Darkinjung LALC campaigns to the Idle No More, Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, and Stop Pretendians movements in Canada and the United States (Leroux, 2021; Kolopenuk, 2023).

What emerges is a picture of Australia caught in a recursive fantasy: desiring Aboriginality while denying Aboriginal sovereignty. The coloniser seeks to indigenise themselves symbolically in order to erase their structural unbelonging (Deloria, 1998; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Whether in the guise of the “white custodian,” the “urban Elder,” or the ecofascist activist opposing Aboriginal land rights, the settler reasserts dominance through performance, appropriation, and institutional complicity.

The task ahead is not merely exposure. As Watego (2021) argues, the enduring denial of Aboriginal sovereignty is replicated in every institutional process that rewards identity performance over community accountability. The restoration of epistemic sovereignty, the right of Aboriginal people to govern their own knowledge systems and identity protocols, must involve structural reform, including mandatory verification, genealogical audits, defunding of fraud, and cultural governance by recognised Aboriginal authorities (AIATSIS, 2023; DLALC, 2022; National Indigenous Identity Forum, 2022). It is the reclamation of epistemic sovereignty. To do this, Blak communities must be recognised as the authorities on Aboriginal cultural knowledge, identity verification, and governance. This article seeks to contribute to that process by drawing a clear boundary between the sacred and the simulacrum.

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Chapter 2: Settler Magical Thinking and the Crisis of Meaning
From Superstition to Simulation: Settler Psychology in the Colonial Present

Settler magical thinking is not a fringe phenomenon, but a dominant epistemic mode in the context of colonisation. It operates across multiple registers: psychological, political, and spiritual, and manifests through a mimetic engagement with Indigeneity that bypasses its relational obligations. This chapter expands the analysis by integrating case studies and comparative literature that expose the affective structures, cultic dynamics, and institutional complicities enabling this phenomenon. Settler magical thinking arises from a cultural and psychological rupture produced by the colonial encounter. It is a belief system that seeks to resolve existential unbelonging through appropriation, fantasy, and affective substitution (Deloria, 1998; Watego, 2021).

In settler Australia, this manifests in a range of behaviours that mimic spiritual authority, aestheticise Indigeneity, and substitute intuition for truth. These practices are not simply misguided; they are products of what scholars have termed a “colonial wound”, a deep ontological insecurity that compels settlers to author false belonging through performance (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Forberg, 2022).

Magical thinking, in this context, is not limited to superstition. It is the attempt to resolve a contradiction: living on stolen land while disavowing its theft. Settler magical thinking uses belief, fantasy, and symbolic inversion to fill the void left by historical denial. It manifests through pseudohistories (e.g. Gosford Glyphs, Lemurian theory), conspiracy beliefs (QAnon, sovereign citizenism), ecofascist rituals, and the romanticisation of Aboriginal spirituality (Walker, 2023; Taplin, 2023; Crockford, 2021; guringai.org, 2023–2025).

This belief system is also aligned with what Kalpokas (2018) describes as the post-truth condition, where conviction is elevated above evidence, and affective resonance replaces epistemic rigour. In many cases, this magical thinking becomes conspirituality: a fusion of New Age beliefs with reactionary political worldviews, often including anti-vaccination sentiment, sovereign citizen ideology, and white spiritual supremacy (Halafoff et al., 2022; Day & Carlson, 2023; ASPI, 2023).

As explored by guringai.org and bungaree.org, individuals and groups such as the non-Aboriginal GuriNgai, Jake Cassar, Coast Environmental Alliance, and Save Kariong Sacred Lands exemplify this mode of magical thinking. These actors position themselves as spiritual custodians of Country while opposing legitimate Aboriginal governance, such as that of the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council. Their rhetoric often combines faux reverence with settler resistance to land rights, echoing colonial tropes of the “white protector” or “earth healer”.

This phenomenon is not isolated to fringe groups. Settler magical thinking is institutionalised through councils, schools, arts organisations, and planning panels that validate simulated custodianship without requiring genealogical or cultural legitimacy (Cooke, 2025; DLALC, 2022). In some cases, such as with Hornsby Shire Council and My Place Central Coast, individuals with no Aboriginal ancestry are granted decision-making power over cultural heritage assessments and Welcome to Country ceremonies. These practices displace Aboriginal sovereignty and reward simulation as spiritual truth (Carlson & Frazer, 2021).

Psychologically, this mode of belief can be understood through the work of Brzezinski et al. (2021), who link conspiracy thinking to stress, trauma, and a desire for meaning-making. In the Australian context, settler magical thinking serves to relieve cognitive dissonance: the uncomfortable awareness that one’s privileges are rooted in dispossession.

Rather than confront this, some settlers resolve it through fantasies of ancient ancestry, Dreaming visions, or imagined custodianship. These affective investments override empirical truth and generate intense emotional attachment to false identity claims. As Langone et al. (2021) explain, these dynamics mirror cultic lifecycle patterns of conversion, entrenchment, and disillusionment.

The cultic appeal of simulated Aboriginality lies in its ability to promise transcendence and belonging without accountability, mirroring what Lalich (2004) describes as “bounded choice”, where followers are emotionally bound to their belief system and its leaders despite external contradictions. Langone et al. (2021) and ICSA (2021) describe how spiritual narcissism and cultic mechanisms reinforce these beliefs through social isolation, love-bombing, and the vilification of critics.

These patterns are visible in settler conspiritualist groups like My Place and CEA, which promote mythopoetic narratives of spiritual awakening, divine ancestry, and secret knowledge, often tied to Aboriginal sites (e.g. Kariong, Bambara). Taplin (2023), Cohen (2025), and Hardy (2023) document how these groups appropriate Aboriginal iconography to bolster sovereign citizen rhetoric, blending apocalyptic worldviews, self-sovereignty claims, and esoteric pseudohistory into a belief structure impervious to verification.

This has material consequences when settler magical thinking rationalizes the erosion of Aboriginal-led verification processes and replaces law-based governance with vibes-based inclusion. It reorients cultural authority from Elders to influencers, from kinship to charisma. The performative embrace of Indigeneity becomes a spectacle, a spiritualised commodity circulated through social media platforms, activist groups, and festival circuits, often monetised via crowdfunding, speaking engagements, and merchandise (Crabtree et al., 2020; guringai.org, 2023).

Kolopenuk (2021) notes that this aestheticisation detaches Aboriginal identity from its governance protocols and recasts it as an individual affective style, available to those who claim mystical ancestry, intuitive knowing, or spiritual trauma.

Internationally, similar patterns can be seen in the Pretendian phenomenon across Canada and the U.S., where non-Indigenous individuals adopt Indigeneity for social capital, artistic acclaim, or political legitimacy (Leroux, 2021; TallBear, 2013; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.). These cases reflect a broader settler pattern of claiming authenticity through trauma narratives, spiritual awakenings, or genetic speculation. In both Australia and North America, false claimants often construct personal myths that blend historic injustice with metaphysical purpose, bypassing Indigenous verification in favour of white redemption narratives (Leroux, 2021; TallBear, 2021; Carlson & Day, 2023; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.). The epistemological crisis here is not simply about belief: it is about the erasure of Indigenous governance, authority, and law.

Settler magical thinking ultimately functions to displace Indigenous sovereignty under the guise of spiritual solidarity. The affective and aesthetic strategies involved in this process reflect what Halafoff et al. (2022) term “gendered conspirituality”, where white women’s performances of sacred custodianship serve to soften and spiritualise settler dominance. This is often done through matriarchal archetypes and rituals that aestheticise Aboriginality while bypassing kinship and Law (Crabtree et al., 2020; Carlson & Frazer, 2021). It presents itself as post-racial, inclusive, and reconciliatory, yet it reproduces white possession in a new form: not through denial of Aboriginal presence, but through the settler’s claim to represent it. This is the sacred made simulacrum.

To challenge this, institutions must reject belief-based identity claims and re-centre genealogical, cultural, and community-based verification. As Watego (2021) and AIATSIS (2023) argue, protecting Indigenous knowledge systems means refusing to grant equivalency to settler fantasy. The truth is not somewhere in between. The truth is grounded in kin, in Country, and in Law. Institutions must become literate in distinguishing cultural authority from performative Indigeneity by adopting training models informed by Aboriginal-led organisations, similar to those proposed in the First Nations Governance Framework (Kolopenuk, 2023) and endorsed in the Local Aboriginal Land Council Powershift report (Norman et al., 2025).

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Chapter 3: Simulation and the Settler Gaze
Colonial Spectacle and the Visual Economy of Belief

The settler gaze constructs Indigeneity not as a lived and sovereign condition, but as a visual, spiritual, and consumable artefact. It is a gaze of entitlement and projection: it fixes the Aboriginal person in the settler imagination, then reproduces that figure in a distorted mirror. Simulation is the method by which this gaze becomes material. This operates in tandem with what Kalpokas (2018) describes as the post-truth condition, wherein belief becomes its own evidence. The settler does not need verification, only resonance. Through simulation, the settler performs Aboriginality not to connect with Aboriginal people, but to resolve their own estrangement from land, belonging, and history (Deloria, 1998; Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

The performance of Indigeneity, through dress, gesture, language, or spirituality, becomes a settler means of authoring moral legitimacy. It is no coincidence that so many false claimants invoke ancestors, spirits, or sacred knowings that cannot be verified. These signifiers function as aesthetic currency. In Baudrillard’s terms, they are simulacra: copies of something that never existed, imbued with heightened symbolic value (Baudrillard, 1994; Kolopenuk, 2021). In settler Australia, this hyperreality becomes a form of cultural camouflage, allowing non-Indigenous individuals to inhabit symbolic Indigeneity while rejecting its relational burdens.

In contemporary Australia, the simulation of Aboriginality manifests in multiple domains: arts, heritage, education, local governance, and land use planning. The case of the GuriNgai group exemplifies how settler simulation becomes institutionalised. Individuals with no genealogical or community ties to Aboriginal people or community are legitimised as “cultural consultants” or “Elders” through visual performance and public narrative alone. Hornsby Shire Council’s acceptance of GuriNgai as a cultural authority, despite overwhelming community and Land Council opposition, demonstrates how the settler gaze privileges appearance over relational law (Cooke, 2025; Aboriginal Heritage Office, 2015).

This is reinforced through media outlets such as Coast Community News, which elevate unverified claims to Indigeneity while ignoring or excluding Aboriginal Land Councils. The simulated Aboriginal subject becomes a more convenient partner for settler institutions: less politically assertive, more spiritually malleable, and more ideologically aligned with white environmentalism or heritage romanticism (Walker, 2023; Carlson & Day, 2023). As explored by guringai.org, this alignment often leads to the active erasure of LALC-endorsed custodianship in favour of simulated “grassroots” custodians, particularly in contested developments such as Westleigh Park, Kariong, and Kincumber Wetlands.

Simulation functions as a settler strategy to bypass the discomfort of engagement with real Aboriginal people, who carry intergenerational trauma, political demands, and legal rights. Simulated Aboriginality, by contrast, offers “feel-good” reconciliation without consequence. It produces the illusion of decolonisation while maintaining white control over knowledge, Country, and narrative. These dynamics are not only cultural; they have economic consequences. As Cooke (2025) and DLALC (2022) note, simulated figures have blocked development approvals, redirected funding, and appropriated paid roles and consultation fees at the expense of legitimate Aboriginal representatives.

This is not a new phenomenon. From the nineteenth-century trope of the “last of the tribe” to the 1980s trend of literary hoaxes (e.g. Mudrooroo, B. Wongar), settlers have long constructed Aboriginal people as disappearing figures to be mourned, mythologised, or replaced (Leroux, 2019; Grieve-Williams, 2021). Today’s simulation is enacted through policy, education, and digital space. Social media platforms reward charismatic self-declared “Elders” or “custodians”, and institutions follow suit, prioritising performance over verification (Kolopenuk, 2021; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.; bungaree.org, 2024).

The settler gaze depends on recognition without responsibility. It sees Aboriginality as a set of traits to be affirmed, not a network of laws to be obeyed. It resists the discomfort of being told no: no, you cannot speak for this Country; no, you are not entitled to this story; no, your belief is not enough. To confront the settler gaze, Aboriginal people have called for the reassertion of cultural authority, the restoration of genealogical governance, and the removal of simulated identities from decision-making bodies (AIATSIS, 2023; DLALC, 2022; National Indigenous Identity Forum, 2022). These demands are echoed in calls for the defunding of simulated custodianship, institutional audits, and legal consequences for fraudulent identity claims (Norman et al., 2025; guringai.org, 2023–2025).

What is needed is not more inclusion of simulated voices, but a radical exclusion of epistemic imposture. This means institutions must become literate in the politics of simulation and develop protocols to prevent the settler gaze from authoring Indigeneity in its own image. In its place, they must yield to the unrecognisable, non-transferable, sovereign knowledge of real Aboriginal communities. Simulation must be replaced by accountability. The gaze must be returned.

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Chapter 4: Conspirituality, Cults, and Settler Spiritual Narcissism
From Magical Thinking to Militant Faith: The Conspiritual Infrastructure of Settler Resistance

Conspirituality as a Settler Phenomenon
Conspirituality, the hybridisation of conspiracy beliefs with New Age spirituality, has become a dominant ideological force within settler movements that oppose Aboriginal sovereignty while claiming spiritual affinity with Aboriginal cultures (Ward & Voas, 2011; Halafoff et al., 2022). These movements often operate through cult-like structures, charismatic leadership, spiritual exceptionalism, and affective claims to ancient knowledge. They combine the esoteric intensity of New Age thinking with the anti-institutional rage of sovereign citizenship and prepper ideology, producing what Rondini (2019) calls an “apocalyptic epistemology”. As Gillespie (2025) and the eSafety Commissioner (2023) outline, these belief systems gain traction through social media amplification, meme culture, and emotional narratives of divine warfare, particularly among white Australians seeking spiritual absolution through imagined Aboriginality. In Australia, conspirituality has merged with settler identity fantasies and spiritual narcissism to form a potent threat to Indigenous authority.

Cultic Dynamics and Settler Belief Systems
These movements mirror what Lalich (2004) and Langone et al. (2021) describe as bounded choice dynamics. The psychological terrain is fertile for epistemic mimicry: settler participants often report personal awakenings, visions, or inherited trauma that validate their adopted Indigeneity. As shown in ICSA (2021) and Crabtree et al. (2020), these cultic dynamics include social isolation, cognitive closure, sacred rhetoric, and the substitution of belief for verifiable history. Participants are conditioned to distrust institutions, Elders, and even family in favour of a charismatic authority who “reveals” their Indigenous truth. Members are drawn into alternative truth systems through charisma, emotional intensity, and spiritual promises. The settler cultic imagination reframes Indigeneity not as a governance structure, but as an affective mode that can be inhabited and performed. This is especially prominent in groups such as My Place, the Original Sovereign Tribal Nation Federation, and communities orbiting figures like Jake Cassar, Tracey Howie, and Lisa Bellamy.

Settler cults are underpinned by esoteric appropriation, charismatic manipulation, and collective delusion. Crabtree et al. (2020) describe these as cults of personality, driven by figures who claim exclusive access to sacred knowledge and demand loyalty from followers. The dynamic replicates colonial paternalism: the white leader frames themselves as both protector and conduit of ancient wisdom. This structure displaces Aboriginal custodianship and replaces it with spiritualised settler control.

Pseudolaw and Spiritual Appropriation
During the COVID-19 pandemic, sovereign citizen ideology in Australia increasingly borrowed the language of Aboriginal sovereignty to justify rejection of public health orders, the courts, and the Constitution (Taplin, 2023; Hardy, 2023). Movements such as the Muckadda Camp, the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation, and other conspiratorial camps in Canberra and Alice Springs invoked Aboriginal identity while simultaneously undermining Aboriginal political and legal institutions. These pseudolegal fusions align with what Cohen (2025) terms prefigurative neoliberalism: belief systems that reject liberal state institutions while rehearsing dominator logics through faux-sovereignty.

The logic is circular: because the state is illegitimate, so is any identity verification process it authorises. This creates a vacuum in which belief alone becomes the marker of Aboriginality. DNA, dreams, or trauma replace genealogy, kinship, and community recognition. This epistemic collapse produces a situation in which non-Indigenous individuals assert sovereign status through fantasy, bypassing Aboriginal Law.

Gendered Fantasies and the “Divine Feminine”
Many settler conspiritualists are white women who adopt Indigenous-sounding names and maternalist archetypes, often calling themselves “Grandmother”, “Earth Mother”, or “Custodian” (Halafoff et al., 2022). These gendered performances are framed as healing or spiritually restorative, but reinscribe white power under the guise of nurturing authority. Carlson and Frazer (2021) refer to this as white spiritual supremacy: where the aesthetics of care mask the violence of usurpation.

Figures such as “Grandmother Mulara” and self-declared “GuriNgai matriarchs” exemplify this trend. They perform Aboriginality through ritual, costume, and storytelling while bypassing all mechanisms of Aboriginal verification. These identities are amplified through online platforms, conferences, and community partnerships. Their legitimacy is performative, aesthetic, and emotionally persuasive, but entirely divorced from Country, Law, or kin-based authority.

The symbolic power of the Divine Feminine is strategically mobilised to mask settler dominance as cultural stewardship. Halafoff et al. (2022) term this spiritual maternalism: a strategy in which white women claim moral authority through affective rituals while undermining kin-based Aboriginal governance. Figures like Walkaloa Wunyunah, Goolabeen, and “Grandmother Mulara” exemplify this mode of appropriation. Their roles are manufactured through ceremony-as-performance, social media narrative, and alliances with anti-government protest culture (e.g. My Place, Reignite Democracy Australia, Community Voice Central Coast). This provides what da Silva (2020) calls an aesthetic alibi for settler domination. As Crabtree et al. (2020) and Kolopenuk (2023) note, this often garners institutional and philanthropic support, reinforcing the idea that emotional resonance or spiritual narrative is equivalent to cultural truth. These dynamics reproduce what Moreton-Robinson (2015) has called white possessiveness: the desire not only to own land, but to own narrative, law, and belonging.

Case Study: Jake Cassar and the Coast Environmental Alliance
Jake Cassar is emblematic of the spiritualised settler performance that defines contemporary conspirituality in Australia. Cassar presents himself as a bushcraft survivalist, environmental protector, and spiritual advocate for Country. Yet his actions consistently oppose the governance and sovereignty of real Aboriginal communities, especially the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council.

Cassar’s Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) and associated campaigns, such as Save Kariong Sacred Lands, have mobilised spiritual and environmental language to contest Aboriginal-led development projects (Cooke, 2025; guringai.org, 2023–2025). His rhetoric blends sovereign citizen themes, settler Yowie mythology, and Aboriginal aesthetics to justify the obstruction of DLALC initiatives. As detailed in his videos and public statements, Cassar claims to have spiritual connections to Aboriginal land, but has never provided proof of Aboriginal ancestry nor sought recognition from any community.

Cassar’s mythopoetic narratives about the Kariong glyphs, Yowie ceremonies, and sacred land align with Crockford’s (2021) analysis of ecofascist millennialism, in which end-times scenarios are used to claim spiritual authority over land. In this logic, Cassar becomes the “chosen one”: a white messianic figure whose spiritual awakening grants him legitimacy to speak over Aboriginal voices. This is further amplified by his cult-like social media presence, charismatic rhetoric, and alliances with figures such as Lisa Bellamy, Kate Mason, and Tracey Howie.

CEA’s activities, including lobbying councils, platforming pseudohistorical narratives (e.g. Egyptian glyphs at Kariong), and forming strategic alliances with Save Kincumber Wetlands and Community Voice Central Coast, reveal a networked approach to cultural obstructionism. These campaigns are not isolated; they are coordinated performances of settler nativism and institutional manipulation (guringai.org, 2023–2025; bungaree.org, 2024). Cassar’s proximity to sovereign citizen-aligned figures and settler-spiritual influencers positions him not merely as a misguided activist, but as a central actor in a wider conspiracist ecology. As Taplin (2023) and the AFP (2022) have reported, such actors increasingly exploit Indigenous symbolism to advance white anti-state agendas. By promoting unverified cultural heritage and opposing Aboriginal land councils, they demonstrate how conspirituality becomes a political weapon. The group blends climate concern, sovereign citizen pseudolaw, and identity appropriation into a potent oppositional movement against Aboriginal sovereignty. This case illustrates how simulation, cultism, and conspirituality coalesce into a new modality of settler resistance: one cloaked in spirituality, but driven by white authority.

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Chapter 5: Epistemic Violence, Identity Fraud, and Institutional Complicity

The Anatomy of Epistemic Violence
Epistemic violence occurs when dominant institutions erase, distort, or silence Indigenous knowledge systems, often while claiming to validate or represent them (Spivak, 1988; Watson, 2014). In settler-colonial Australia, this violence is enacted through two converging strategies: denial and simulation. Denial ignores Aboriginal authority altogether. Simulation performs a hollow mimicry of Indigeneity, strategically authorised by settlers and their institutions. Both displace Aboriginal governance and recast white institutions as arbiters of cultural legitimacy.

This epistemic violence is not abstract. It manifests materially through land use decisions, arts funding, university hiring, policy frameworks, and cultural heritage determinations. False claims to Aboriginal identity, when validated by state or institutional actors, not only silence Aboriginal voices but structurally embed simulation into the machinery of governance (Carlson & Day, 2023; AIATSIS, 2023).

The Mechanics of Identity Fraud
Indigenous identity fraud is one of the clearest vehicles of this violence. The fraud operates through a familiar script: invocation of a distant Aboriginal ancestor, reliance on family lore, rejection of verification, and appeal to trauma or intuition as proof of cultural identity (Watt & Kowal, 2019; Leroux, 2021). This pattern has been mapped extensively across Australia, Canada, and the United States, where settler actors exploit gaps in policy and identity protocols to assume Indigenous roles and resources (Kolopenuk, 2023).

Cases such as Professor Bronwyn Carlson, Dr Dennis Foley, and Tracey Howie exemplify this pattern. All have asserted Aboriginal identity in academic, governmental, or cultural spaces despite widespread genealogical disputes and lack of recognition from any Aboriginal community (Dark Emu Exposed, 2023; guringai.org, 2023–2025). Their unverified claims have enabled access to grants, governance roles, and symbolic authority that would otherwise belong to Aboriginal people.

Grieve-Williams (2021) and Moreton-Robinson (2015) both argue that these acts are not individual anomalies, but symptoms of a wider colonial logic. The state and its institutions continue to reward those who simulate Indigeneity in digestible, aestheticised, or bureaucratically convenient forms, while punishing or sidelining those who assert sovereignty.

Institutional Complicity and Cultural Authority
Universities, councils, government departments, heritage consultants, and media outlets all play a role in reinforcing simulation. As Cooke (2025) shows, Hornsby Shire Council, for instance, granted cultural advisory roles to figures like Tracey Howie and Laurie Bimson, despite their lack of recognised Aboriginal descent. In another case, the NSW Planning Panels entertained objections to Aboriginal-led development projects from groups like the Coast Environmental Alliance and Save Kariong Sacred Lands, movements led by individuals with no Aboriginal lineage or authority, such as Jake Cassar and Lisa Bellamy.

These patterns mirror global dynamics. In Canada, fraudulent actors like Michelle Latimer, Carrie Bourassa, and Gina Adams gained influence in media, academia, and policy by performing affective Indigeneity while bypassing verification processes (TallBear, 2021; Leroux, 2019; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.). The institutions that empowered them ignored dissent from actual Indigenous communities, instead framing critique as divisive.

The same occurs in Australia. Coast Community News has consistently platformed unverified custodians from the GuriNgai group, silencing voices from Darkinjung LALC and other legitimate Aboriginal authorities (guringai.org, 2024). Institutions choose simulation because it is politically safer, spiritually romantic, and ideologically aligned with white environmentalism or bureaucratic tokenism.

Impacts on Governance, Heritage, and Funding
The harm extends beyond misrepresentation. False Aboriginal identity claims distort heritage assessments, delay or block land developments, and siphon resources from Aboriginal organisations. In the Kariong Sacred Lands case, settler-led campaigns invoking spiritual protection of land explicitly opposed Darkinjung LALC’s housing plans, even while claiming to honour Aboriginal spirituality (bungaree.org, 2024). These groups substitute mythologised heritage—such as Egyptian glyphs or Dreamtime portals—for documented Aboriginal history, thereby reshaping public understandings of Country through fantasy.

Warren Whitfield, for instance, has been treated as a cultural expert by multiple councils, despite his claims lacking any credible Aboriginal ancestry. His interviews and reports replace law-based heritage processes with vibes-based interpretation, echoing pseudohistorical practices detailed in Walker (2023) and Crockford (2021).

The result is institutionalised simulation: when non-Indigenous individuals determine which stories are told, which sites are sacred, and who qualifies as an Elder. This constitutes what Maddison (2019) describes as post-recognition settler colonialism, where gestures of reconciliation are used to obscure the continued suppression of Aboriginal authority.

Toward Structural Reform and Epistemic Redress
To address these systemic failures, structural reform is needed. AIATSIS (2023) and multiple Aboriginal Land Councils advocate for the implementation of the three-part identity test—descent, self-identification, and community recognition—across all sectors. These must be enforced in funding, hiring, heritage, and governance.

Institutions must develop and apply culturally governed verification mechanisms. This includes requiring genealogical documentation, consulting with relevant Aboriginal Land Councils, and deferring to Elders recognised by community, not charisma. Cooke (2025) suggests developing independent Aboriginal cultural governance panels to oversee all claims made in public policy, heritage, and education.

Public awareness campaigns are also essential. As the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (2024) and Indigenous Watchdog (2023) recommend, media institutions must be educated about identity fraud and held accountable for amplifying false claimants. Cultural safety training should include recognition of Pretendian red flags and pathways for whistleblower reporting.

Finally, truth-telling processes must be expanded to include epistemic repair. This means not only documenting false claims, but acknowledging the individuals and institutions that enabled them. Real consequences must follow: the revocation of awards, withdrawal of funding, public apologies, and restitution to affected communities.

As Watson (2014) and Watego (2021) assert, Blak sovereignty is not granted by the settler: it is lived, lawful, and unceded. When institutions deny this, they do not remain neutral; they become co-authors of simulation. To undo this, we must enforce the truth, not merely tell it. The work of verification is not punitive; it is protective.

Real Aboriginal authority cannot coexist with false custodianship. The future of cultural governance depends on our collective capacity to distinguish between the sacred and the simulated, and to honour the voices that speak from Country, not over it.

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Chapter 6: Cultural Governance and the Crisis of Belonging

Indigenous Governance in the Shadow of Simulation
Cultural governance, the right of Aboriginal people to determine their own identity, culture, Law, and future, is one of the most contested and manipulated spaces in the settler-colonial state. In contemporary Australia, it is routinely undermined by both institutional neglect and active co-option. What is increasingly evident is that the simulation of Aboriginal identity is not an isolated act of fraud, but a broader assault on Aboriginal jurisdiction: the ability to speak for Country, to govern culture, and to uphold Law without settler mediation (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watson, 2014).

Settler institutions, often motivated by a desire for symbolic reconciliation or spiritual romanticism, have elevated simulated custodianship as a viable substitute for Aboriginal authority. This is particularly clear in the Northern Sydney and Central Coast regions, where the discredited GuriNgai group continues to be endorsed by councils such as Hornsby Shire, despite objections from the Darug and Darkinjung peoples (Cooke, 2025; Aboriginal Heritage Office, 2015; DLALC, 2022). The GuriNgai group, made up entirely of non-Aboriginal individuals, has been appointed to oversee heritage assessments and public ceremonies, displacing legitimate Aboriginal representation and authority.

The Performance of Cultural Authority
This crisis of governance has been compounded by a wider settler desire to resolve historical guilt through aestheticised Indigeneity. Figures such as Tracey Howie, Neil Evers, and Lisa Bellamy have performed cultural authority through symbolic gestures and spiritual rhetoric, while opposing the decisions and projects of real Aboriginal organisations (guringai.org, 2023–2025; bungaree.org, 2024). Institutions and media platforms, including Coast Community News, have platformed these performances, ignoring genealogical scrutiny and community recognition.

The Coast Environmental Alliance and Save Kariong Sacred Lands campaigns exemplify the stakes. Framing their opposition to Darkinjung LALC developments as a spiritual defence of “sacred lands”, these groups promote fabricated narratives of custodianship and sacredness based on New Age reinterpretations of Aboriginal culture. Their rhetoric blends faux Aboriginal spirituality with ecofascist mysticism and sovereign citizen ideology (Walker, 2023; Taplin, 2023). This not only undermines genuine Aboriginal governance, but recruits settler publics into affective alliances with simulation.

The Erosion of Genealogical Protocols
Institutions have failed to implement rigorous protocols that protect Aboriginal cultural governance. In many cases, arts organisations, universities, and local councils rely on self-identification and aesthetic performance as sufficient criteria for cultural authority. This approach reflects a broader epistemological failure to distinguish between Blak Law, rooted in kinship, descent, and Country, and settler spiritualised mimicry (Watego, 2021; Kolopenuk, 2023).

The failure to enforce the three-part identity test—descent, self-identification, and community recognition—enables simulation to be institutionalised. AIATSIS (2023) and Land Councils such as DLALC (2021, 2022) have repeatedly called for formalised identity verification protocols across all sectors. Yet, in the absence of mandatory implementation, simulated custodians continue to occupy positions of authority, participate in cultural consultation, and access public funds earmarked for Aboriginal people.

Cases like Warren Whitfield, Grandmother Mulara, and Walkaloa Wunyunah (Tracey Howie) demonstrate how spiritualised performance and pseudo-genealogical claims are legitimised by settler institutions and media platforms, including local governments, educational institutions, and planning bodies (Cooke, 2025; guringai.org, 2023–2025).

Reasserting Cultural Sovereignty
The response from Aboriginal communities has been powerful. Through community-led genealogical research, public truth-telling, and the creation of media platforms like guringai.org and bungaree.org, communities are reclaiming authority and exposing simulation. These efforts are acts of epistemic repair. They document not only the falsity of specific identity claims, but the structural mechanisms that allowed simulation to flourish unchecked (Crabtree et al., 2020; Fforde et al., 2013).

Land Councils such as DLALC have also taken a firm stance, issuing policy statements rejecting the legitimacy of simulated groups and demanding that planning authorities consult only with recognised Aboriginal organisations (DLALC, 2021, 2022). Their efforts are supported by national advocacy platforms such as the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds and Indigenous Watchdog, which document and challenge the institutional enablers of identity fraud (Indigenous Watchdog, 2023; Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, 2024).

Community researchers and Elders, particularly from the Marramarra, Darkinjung, and Darug clans, are also reasserting sovereignty through protocols grounded in kinship and Law. The Marramarra clan of the Garigal, for example, have established genealogical continuity to Bungaree and Matora, countering simulated claims from individuals such as Tracey Howie and Paul Craig (bungaree.org, 2025).

Beyond Inclusion: Jurisdiction and Truth-Enforcement
The path forward must involve a shift from symbolic inclusion to jurisdictional authority. Aboriginal cultural governance cannot be subject to settler affirmation or aesthetic criteria. It must be defined by community-verified descent, kinship law, and unbroken connection to Country. As Watson (2014) argues, Blak Law is not accountable to settler structures: it exists independently of them and must be respected as sovereign.

To protect Aboriginal cultural authority, institutions must:
• Legislate and enforce the three-part test of Aboriginality.
• Establish community-governed panels to verify identity claims in arts, heritage, education, and policy sectors.
• Defund and deplatform simulated groups and individuals.
• Invest in genealogical and historical truth-telling led by communities.

Rebuilding cultural governance in Australia is not simply a matter of redress. It is a matter of national integrity. As long as simulated identities are allowed to speak over Country, the settler state remains a perpetrator of epistemic violence. The work of truth-enforcement must begin with listening, not to the loudest voice or the most romantic story, but to the quiet law of kinship and the custodianship that endures beyond performance.

As Watego (2021) and Moreton-Robinson (2015) remind us, sovereignty is not a feeling: it is a structure that cannot be appropriated or borrowed, only recognised.

Chapter 7: Reparative Futures: Policy, Accountability, and Epistemic Repair

From Exposure to Structural Response
As the preceding chapters have shown, Indigenous identity fraud is not merely a cultural misunderstanding. It is a structural and epistemic crisis, with consequences that reverberate through every domain where Aboriginal presence, voice, and Law are supposed to matter. The simulation of Aboriginality by non-Indigenous actors is an ongoing form of settler-colonial violence that undermines sovereignty, redirects resources, and legitimises false authority. Reparative futures demand more than exposure: they require institutions to move beyond passive recognition towards active jurisdictional redress (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watson, 2014).

The long-standing call from Aboriginal communities is not for symbolic inclusion, but for the enforcement of genealogical and cultural governance. AIATSIS (2023) articulates this through the three-part test: descent, self-identification, and community recognition. Yet this test is inconsistently applied and often politically resisted. The time has come to legislate it across all sectors that interface with Aboriginal identity, from the arts and media to education, government, and heritage planning (DLALC, 2021, 2022; Cooke, 2025).

Policy Recommendations: Structural and Legal Reforms
The institutional complicity in identity fraud must be addressed through enforceable protocols. This includes the development of statutory frameworks, codes of conduct, and mechanisms for investigation, retraction, and redress.

Key recommendations include:
Mandatory Identity Verification: All organisations receiving public funds for Indigenous-related projects must require formal verification according to the three-part test. This should be administered by Indigenous-led governance panels, not settler-controlled agencies. The case of Hornsby Shire Council’s continued use of unverified “GuriNgai” representatives illustrates the risks of bypassing Aboriginal verification in favour of simulated proxies (Cooke, 2025; guringai.org, 2025).
Audit and Removal of Simulated Identities: Public registers and audits must identify roles, projects, or appointments currently held by individuals with unverified or fraudulent claims. These positions should be vacated and reassigned based on legitimate community consultation. The exposure of public figures like Neil Evers and Bronwyn Carlson underlines the institutional reluctance to act without formal structures in place (Dark Emu Exposed, 2023; bungaree.org, 2025).
Accountability Frameworks for Institutions: Universities, councils, funding bodies, and media organisations must be held accountable for platforming simulation. This includes consequences for those who knowingly enable identity fraud and those who fail to respond to credible community concerns (Kolopenuk, 2023; Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, 2024; Leroux, 2019).
Support for Community-led Truth-Telling: Investment in genealogical research, community archives, and oral history projects should be prioritised to empower Aboriginal communities to assert and verify their identities through culturally appropriate means (Fforde et al., 2013; Grieve-Williams, 2021). Websites such as bungaree.org and guringai.org model this process, providing community-controlled platforms to correct the historical record. Initiatives such as the Marramarra archival project and the public exposure of the GuriNgai group illustrate how digital platforms can enact accountability and epistemic resistance (Cooke, 2025).
Legal Redress for Harm: Legal avenues must be made available for Aboriginal individuals and organisations harmed by identity fraud, including defamation, misappropriation, and economic displacement. Restorative mechanisms should be community-controlled. In cases such as Save Kariong Sacred Lands, settler activists have invoked spiritual narratives to block LALC housing and land use proposals, constituting a direct harm to Aboriginal development rights (guringai.org, 2025; bungaree.org, 2024).

International Frameworks and Global Parallels
Australia is not alone in grappling with Indigenous identity fraud. In Canada and the United States, the Pretendian phenomenon has triggered academic, legal, and community reforms. Scholars such as Leroux (2019), TallBear (2021), and Kolopenuk (2023) emphasise the need to return authority to Indigenous nations, bands, and tribal governments as the sole arbiters of identity. Institutional policy, they argue, must defer to Indigenous governance structures rather than impose settler-defined standards of authenticity.

In the Canadian university sector, for example, public scandals involving false claimants have led to the establishment of Indigenous verification protocols, increased funding for Indigenous-led hiring committees, and the creation of disciplinary review boards (CBC, 2023; McMaster University, 2023). These reforms provide valuable models for Australia to consider, particularly in areas of tertiary education, publishing, and the creative arts. The parallels with Bronwyn Carlson’s case highlight how the absence of verification harms Indigenous scholars and inflates fraudulent careers (Watt & Kowal, 2019; Cooke, 2025).

In the United States, the exposure of false claimants such as Sacheen Littlefeather, Andrea Smith, and Gina Adams has resulted in widespread institutional review processes and increased scrutiny in Native American Studies departments, arts grants, and political appointments (The Pretendian Problem, n.d.; Indigenous Watchdog, 2023). These efforts are mirrored in grassroots-led watchdog groups like the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds and Pretendians.com, which advocate for both institutional transparency and restorative justice.

Epistemic Repair and Cultural Healing
True repair must go beyond policy. It must attend to the affective, spiritual, and cultural wounds produced by simulation and dispossession. The cultivation of reparative futures requires a return to Blak epistemologies, to forms of knowing that are embedded in kinship, Country, Law, and intergenerational obligation. As Watego (2021) insists, sovereignty must be lived and practiced within Aboriginal systems of value, not abstracted into settler frameworks of recognition.

Community media such as bungaree.org and guringai.org offer a model of epistemic repair. They do not simply debunk false claims: they curate truth. They document genealogy, uphold cultural memory, and assert sovereign authority. They function as sites of epistemic refusal and cultural resurgence, reclaiming the narrative from settler distortion. Their work echoes what Walker (2023) describes as critical storytelling, interrupting white possession through acts of counter-mapping and archival reclamation.

Langone et al. (2021) and Crabtree et al. (2020) suggest that the exit from cultic or conspiratorial structures often requires not just disillusionment, but the rediscovery of grounded meaning. For many Aboriginal communities, this return to cultural grounding is already underway. It must be protected, resourced, and led by those with true connection to Law and Country. The cultic dynamics of simulation—charismatic fraud, spiritual narcissism, epistemic mimicry—must be met with clear protocols, spiritual boundary-setting, and cultural literacy embedded within institutions (Menzel & Green, 2013; Ross, 2024).

Conclusion: From False Worlds to Real Accountability
The simulation of Aboriginality in Australia, whether through fraudulent identity claims, settler conspirituality, or spiritual narcissism, is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a systemic epistemic crisis. This crisis is sustained by institutions that mistake feeling for fact, performance for truth, and inclusion for justice. These false worlds are seductive because they offer settler Australians a way to belong without being accountable, to reconcile without relinquishing power.

But false worlds fracture real ones. When non-Indigenous people simulate Indigeneity, they do more than misrepresent: they displace. They crowd out legitimate Aboriginal voices, distort the public understanding of cultural authority, and reroute resources meant to repair colonial harm. These simulations function like mirrors with no reflection, absorbing attention while returning nothing to the communities they exploit.

Throughout this analysis, we have seen that Aboriginal knowledge systems—what Graham (2008), Watson (2014), and Watego (2021) term Blak Knowing—are grounded in relational accountability, Country, and collective governance. These systems are not open-source: they are living sovereignties embedded in kin, Law, and ancestral continuity.

What emerges from the case studies of figures like Tracey Howie, Neil Evers, and Bronwyn Carlson is a settler culture in search of meaning, grasping at Aboriginality to resolve its own alienation. This dynamic is not innocent: it is the logical extension of what Moreton-Robinson (2015) calls white possessiveness, the settler will to consume, emulate, and ultimately erase the sovereign Aboriginal subject.

International comparisons reinforce the urgency of this problem. In the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, Pretendians have infiltrated academia, politics, and media. In each context, institutional complicity has allowed simulation to masquerade as authenticity. What is needed is not merely individual exposure, but structural reorientation toward Indigenous-defined legitimacy (Leroux, 2019; Kolopenuk, 2023).

The concept of epistemic sovereignty offers a pathway forward. It insists that knowledge, identity, and authority cannot be severed from the communities that hold them. It demands policy reform, genealogical rigour, community governance, and an end to aestheticised identity politics.

Settler Australians face a choice. They can continue to indulge the fantasy that anyone who feels Aboriginal can claim to be. Or they can engage in the far harder, more ethical work of listening to, deferring to, and standing behind Indigenous communities who are already doing the work of cultural governance.

From false worlds, we must return to grounded ones: worlds in which truth is not a feeling but a relationship, not a performance but a history, not a vibe but a Law. Aboriginal people are not here to be imagined. We are here to be respected.

Real accountability begins when institutions, communities, and individuals decide that identity is not a costume to be worn, a story to be claimed, or a platform to be monetised. 

It is a covenant that it belongs to those who carry it.

JD Cooke

Glossary of Terms

Affective Indigeneity
A mode of identity performance that uses emotion, intuition, or personal narrative to claim Aboriginal belonging, often bypassing genealogical descent and community recognition. It privileges feeling over verification and is frequently associated with settler mimicry.

AIATSIS Three-Part Test
A widely accepted framework used to verify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity in Australia. It requires: (1) descent from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, (2) self-identification as such, and (3) recognition by the relevant Indigenous community.

Blak Knowing
An epistemological framework rooted in Aboriginal worldviews, kinship structures, Law, and Country. It embodies collective, intergenerational knowledge governed by cultural protocols and community accountability (Graham, 2008; Watson, 2014; Watego, 2021).

Conspirituality
A belief system that fuses New Age spirituality with conspiracist ideologies such as sovereign citizenship, anti-vaccination, and ecofascism. In settler contexts, it often manifests as settler spiritual narcissism claiming alignment with Indigenous knowledge while opposing Indigenous sovereignty (Halafoff et al., 2022).

Cultural Authority
The recognised right of Aboriginal individuals or communities to speak on matters of culture, heritage, and Country. This authority is earned through kinship ties, community recognition, and adherence to cultural Law—not through performance or self-declaration.

Cultural Governance
The right and responsibility of Indigenous peoples to manage, protect, and transmit cultural knowledge, protocols, and identity in accordance with their own laws and structures, independent of settler validation.

Epistemic Mimicry
A process by which settler actors imitate Indigenous ways of knowing to gain legitimacy. This imitation lacks cultural accountability and often distorts or commodifies Indigenous epistemologies.

Epistemic Repair
The process of restoring and protecting Indigenous knowledge systems from misrepresentation, erasure, or fraud. It includes truth-telling, restitution, and institutional reform aimed at re-establishing Indigenous authority.

Epistemic Sovereignty
The right of Indigenous communities to control the production, validation, and dissemination of their own knowledge systems. It challenges settler institutions’ authority to determine what counts as Indigenous knowledge.

Epistemic Violence
The harm caused when dominant institutions erase, distort, or appropriate Indigenous knowledge, identity, or voice, often under the guise of inclusion or recognition (Spivak, 1988; Watson, 2014).

Identity Fraud (Indigenous)
The act of falsely claiming Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander identity for personal, cultural, or material gain. This includes individuals who fabricate genealogies, rely solely on family lore, or use spiritual narratives to bypass community recognition.

Institutional Complicity
The role of state, academic, media, or cultural institutions in enabling identity fraud by platforming unverified claimants, funding simulated groups, or ignoring community objections.

Pretendian
A North American term referring to individuals who falsely claim Indigenous identity. The term has been adopted in Australian contexts to describe similar patterns of identity fraud and settler simulation (Leroux, 2019; The Pretendian Problem, n.d.).

Settler Conspirituality
A form of spiritual appropriation in which settler Australians combine New Age mysticism, conspiracy theory, and anti-government ideology while claiming spiritual affinity with Aboriginal culture. It often masks political resistance to Aboriginal land rights and sovereignty.

Settler Magical Thinking
A cognitive and cultural tendency among settler populations to use intuition, myth, or fantasy as a substitute for historical accountability. It often manifests in beliefs about “spiritual connection” to land, past lives as Aboriginal people, or inherited sacred knowledge, and is used to bypass Aboriginal protocols.

Simulation (of Indigeneity)
The performance of Aboriginal identity, culture, or custodianship by non-Indigenous individuals, particularly when lacking descent, community recognition, or cultural authority. Drawing on Baudrillard’s (1994) theory of hyperreality, simulation refers to the reproduction of Indigeneity as a symbolic aesthetic rather than a lived relational reality.

Spiritual Narcissism
A dynamic in which individuals use spiritual identity or rhetoric to elevate their moral status, often while co-opting or appropriating Indigenous cultural authority. This is especially visible in white women’s performances of the “divine feminine” as custodial.

White Possessiveness
A settler-colonial logic in which whiteness asserts ownership over land, culture, and narrative. It underpins much identity fraud and settler simulation by positioning the white subject as entitled to Indigeneity (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

Welcome to Country (Simulation)
The appropriation of ceremonial practices such as Welcome to Country by individuals without cultural authority, often sanctioned by councils or institutions that fail to verify Aboriginal descent or community recognition.