In 1989 John Mulvaney proposed that ‘the greatest gift of Aboriginal society to multicultural Australia’ was ‘a spiritual concept of place’. It was a momentous pronouncement, but two decades later both the statement and the gift itself need reassessment. If Mulvaney was right, then non-Aboriginal Australians enunciated their most precise and passionate concepts of place in the two decades after 1980. Yet ‘multicultural Australia’, that is, non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, didn’t really share the gift at all. Maybe they didn’t want it. Nor did the great gift of a spiritual concept of place come without cost to the indigenous people themselves. Today, newer forms of belonging are sometimes not concerned with Australia-specific land at all. Mulvaney’s observation, I conclude, is losing some of its force.