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22-10-2024
CANBERRA: An Australian senator has defended heckling King Charles and accusing him of genocide after he addressed Australia’s Parliament House, telling media that “he’s not of this land”.
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian woman, interrupted the ceremony in the capital of Canberra by shouting for about a minute before she was escorted away by security.
After making claims of genocide against “our people”, she could be heard yelling: “This is not your land, you are not my King” but Aboriginal elder Aunty Violet Sheridan, who had earlier welcomed the King and Queen, said Thorpe’s protest was “disrespectful”, adding: “She does not speak for me.”
The ceremony concluded without any reference to the incident, and the royal couple proceeded to meet hundreds of people who had waited outside to greet them.
After her protest, Thorpe told media she had wanted to send a “clear message” to the King.
“To be sovereign you have to be of the land,” she said. “He is not of this land.”
Thorpe, who is an independent senator from Victoria, is among those who have advocated for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.
Unlike New Zealand and other former British colonies, a treaty with Indigenous peoples in Australia was never established. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people emphasize that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown. She called on the King to instruct the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the first peoples.
“We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country but we cannot bow to the colonizer, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide.”
Thorpe, who was wearing a traditional possum skin cloak, described the late Queen Elizabeth II as “colonizing” and was made to repeat her oath when she was sworn in as a senator in 2022. There has been a long-held debate on how to tackle the glaring disparities between First Nations people and the wider population, including poorer health, wealth and education outcomes and greater incarceration rates.
Last year a referendum on giving greater political rights and recognition to Indigenous people was resoundingly rejected.
Thorpe was elected to parliament as a member of the Greens but left the party over its support for the Yes campaign in that vote as she supported a separate movement and has staged attention-grabbing protests in the past.
Despite the protest, many others were happy to see the royals, with people queueing outside Parliament House all morning in the punishing Canberra sun, waving Australian flags. Jamie Karpas, 20, said she did not realize the royal couple were visiting on Monday, adding: “As someone who saw Harry and Meghan the last time they were here, I’m very excited. I think the Royal Family are part of the Australian culture. They are a big part of our lives.”
Meanwhile, CJ Adams, a US-Australian student at the Australian National University, said: “He’s the head of state of the British empire right you’ve got to take the experiences you can get while in Canberra.”
A small number of dissenters had also gathered on the lawn in front of the Parliament House building.
The royal visit to Canberra was always going to touch on Australia’s history with its Indigenous peoples but Thorpe’s intervention meant the King and Queen faced it more directly than initially planned. (Int’l News Desk)
