King Charles III, on his seventeenth trip to Australia, was heckled by Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, garbed in a traditional possum-skin cloak, just after he had finished speaking in the Great Hall at Parliament House in Canberra on 21 October 2024. Thorpe, the first Aboriginal Senator from the state of Victoria, a campaigner for Indigenous rights, and an anti-monarchist, accused Charles of committing “genocide against our people” and told him “This is not your land, you are not my king, you are not our king”, before being ushered out of the hall by security guards. The rest of the day’s proceedings thereupon went ahead, just as if nothing had happened. Many Indigenous people and sympathetic fellow-citizens applauded her actions, while others accused her of being “disrespectful” and engaging in a “childish” display of passion.
You only have to turn to the history books to begin to understand Lidia Thorpe’s recent outburst. British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay on 24 January 1788, followed by Captain Arthur Phillip’s acknowledgement of King George III as the lawful sovereign of the newly-settled territory. For long, early colonisers considered Australia to be terra nullius-a term that was only introduced in 1939- despite archaeological evidence of at least 65,000 years of human occupation. This notion of a land devoid of permanent human habitation prior to 1788, and thus open to unrestricted colonisation, was finally rejected by the High Court of Australia in June 1992, when its decision in Mabo v Queensland recognised native title, leading to the Native Title Act.
The initial convict arrivals were soon joined by free settlers, attracted by the prospects of pastoral farming, and later by the lucrative mineral riches of this vast land. The Proclamation of Demarcation of 1828 prohibited Aboriginal people from entering settled districts in Tasmania, to begin with. Some areas were soon cleared of their Aboriginal inhabitants. By 1834, the last remaining 135 Tasmanian Indigenous people had been relocated to Wybalenna on Flinders Island and forcibly converted to Christianity. The settlement of Melbourne was the direct result of an unequal treaty between John Batman and elders of the Wurundjeri tribe in 1835, in which substantial tracts of land were exchanged for food, blankets, and tools.
Australia’s nascent cities developed as monocultural bastions of Anglo-Celtic settlement. The new Australian nation left the First Nations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) behind, while the ‘White Australia’ policy rigidly maintained ‘racial purity’ in the face of rising immigration. The early histories of pioneer settlers largely ignored, derided, or attempted to erase narratives of the Aboriginal people they came in contact with. A form of apartheid was soon established. For example, the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 in Queensland removed Aborigines to isolated missions and reserves, ostensibly to protect them from White settlers, and created the position of ‘Protectors of Aboriginals.’ The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 even denied Indigenous people the right to vote.
From 1918 onward, children were removed from Aboriginal mothers and placed in foster homes and other residential institutions in an attempt at social engineering, creating the so-called ‘Stolen Generation.’ The Coniston massacre of August 14 to 18 October 1928, in what is now the Northern Territory, was the last officially sanctioned mass-killing of Indigenous Australians, as part of a bid to keep their numbers down.
The Canberra Conference of Aboriginal Authorities in 1937 was probably the first official meeting to advocate assimilation. The policy of ‘assimilation’ was formally adopted in 1951, only to be replaced by one of ‘self-determination’ in the early 1970s. Albert Namatjira became the first Aborigine to be awarded Australian citizenship in 1956, but it took the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 to give all Indigenous Australians the right to vote in federal elections. The Commonwealth Referendum on Aboriginal Rights of 1967 allowed Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to be counted in the national census, from 1971 onward, and gave the Commonwealth of Australia the power to pass laws specifically for those people. At a time of rising awareness of racial injustice, the American Civil Rights movement inspired the Australian Freedom Rides of the 1960s. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, on the grounds of what was then the Parliament House in Canberra for six months in 1972, highlighted the issue of land rights for Indigenous people, and introduced the Aboriginal flag-in black (representing the Aboriginal people), red (for Australia’s red earth), and a central yellow circle (depicting the Sun).
The federal government’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975 has had a limited effect since its enaction. Meanwhile, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody of 1991 and the 1997 ‘Bringing them Home’ report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families have only confirmed the systemic racism that had prompted the Act in the first place and led to the National Apology to the Stolen Generations on 13 February 2008. Even today, it is well-recognised that Indigenous people lag behind their peers in their access to educational opportunities, have poorer health outcomes, succumb to alcohol abuse and sexually transmitted infections, are more likely to be incarcerated, and do not live as long as their fellow Australian citizens. Some observers have indeed referred to “third-world conditions in a first-world country” to describe the Aboriginals’ status within their native homeland.
Senator Thorpe and other like-minded people contend that the Indigenous people of Australia have not formally ceded sovereignty to, nor signed a legally-binding treaty with, the British Crown. She thus voted ‘No’ in the October 2023 referendum- “The Voice”- which sought to amend the constitution to recognise First Nations people, demanding stronger measures instead. Thorpe, however, does not speak for the Indigenous community in Australia as whole, which accommodates a variety of opinions. But no matter whether Australia remains a constitutional monarchy or makes the expected transition to republic, it will take much more than symbolic gestures and legislative measures to improve the lot of its First Nation inhabitants, who account for a mere 3.3 per cent of Australia’s population. It is up to the Australian people to re-examine their attitudes to their disadvantaged fellow citizens, and for the government to reconsider the manner in which it seeks to advance equality of opportunity for a small minority of hard-done-by original Australians.
Ashis Banerjee