Independent federal senator Lidia Thorpe’s forthright haranguing of King Charles during his visit to the Australian parliament has made global headlines.
Reactions have been mixed. Many have criticised Thorpe’s decision to disrupt the event, labelling the 51-year-old’s behaviour as “disrespectful” and “grandstanding”.
The federal conservative opposition are considering introducing a censure motion against Thorpe, a Gurnai Gunditjmara and Djab-Wurrung woman, when parliament resumes on 8 November.
Others, such the deputy leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, support Thorpe’s views and her right to express them directly to the king.
“It is a fact that the British committed genocide here. It is a fact that their racist legacy lives on in Australia today and that should absolutely be resisted and confronted,” Faruqi said.
As she was removed from the reception in Canberra on Monday, Thorpe shouted several claims about the status of Indigenous people in Australia.
“The truth is, this colony is built on stolen land, stolen wealth and stolen lives,” Thorpe said in a statement immediately afterwards.
Thorpe said later that she protested to highlight Australia’s poor record on Indigenous deaths in custody, child removals and the need for a treaty.
“We have 24,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in 2024: it’s worse than the stolen generation. We have over 600 deaths in custody that we know about. That does not include babies who’ve died in the system,” Thorpe told the ABC on Tuesday morning.
So, how do Thorpe’s claims stack up?
The crown has ‘committed heinous crimes’ against First Nations people
Thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by British troops and later by government forces acting on instructions from the crown, in a deliberate effort to eradicate all resistance to colonisation.
Almost half of all frontier massacres were perpetrated by colonial forces.
This finding was made by the first major research project to document frontier violence in Australia, led by the University of Newcastle’s Emeritus professor of history, Prof Lyndall Ryan.
Prof Ryan and her team’s eight-year study of the colonisation of Australia concluded: “From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued into the 1920s frontier massacres were a defining strategy to contain and eradicate that resistance. As a result thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children were killed.”
Calls for treaty
Despite this legacy of frontier conflict, no treaty has ever been negotiated between Aboriginal and Islander nations and the commonwealth.
Because of this, according to the Human Rights Commission, state institutions and laws, including the national constitution, have developed without any negotiation with First Nations.
Calls for treaties go back decades. A line is often traced from the 1963 Yirrkala bark petition – in which Yolngu (the Indigenous people of north-east Arnhem Land) asserted their sovereignty over lands where the federal government had allowed a bauxite mine, all the way to 1988, when the Treaty 88 campaign took off amid huge Aboriginal protests against the bicentennial of European settlement.
In June that year, traditional owners presented the Barunga statement to Bob Hawke, who promised there would be a treaty by the end of 1990. That did not occur.
Activists like Senator Thorpe say that until a treaty is signed there can be no peace or reconciliation between Indigenous people and the crown.
Aboriginal child removals
Aboriginal children were systematically taken from their families, communities and culture, many never to be returned, under assimilation laws and policies adopted by all Australian governments until 1970.
Children were put into institutions, fostered or adopted out to non-Indigenous families. Many suffered harsh, degrading treatment, sexual abuse and were frequently indoctrinated to believe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were inferior, or that their parents were dead or did not want them.
It is estimated between one in 10 and possibly as many as one in three Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.
In 2023 22,328 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were in out-of-home care (OOHC). Indigenous children were 10.5 times more likely to be in OOHC than non-Indigenous children according to data collected by SNAICC, the national advocates for Aboriginal children and families.
Under the “closing the gap” agreement, Australian governments have promised to reduce the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in OOHC by 45% by 2031. That target is unlikely to be met. In fact, the federal government’s own data says that nationally the removal rate of Aboriginal children is actually worsening.
“The reasons for the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child protection substantiations are complex,” according to a 2019 report by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW).
AIHW said the legacy of past policies of forced removal – known in Australia as the stolen generations, as well as poverty and generational disadvantage – were among the underlying causes.
Deaths in custody
According to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s database, at least 576 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in police and prison custody since 1991.
The National Deaths in Custody Program has monitored Indigenous deaths in prison, police custody and youth detention since 1980. But it only began real-time tracking in 2023 after decades of calls by advocates and family members who lost loved ones.
Since January, 18 Indigenous people have died in custody. In the past 12 months two children have died in juvenile detention in Western Australia.
Nationally the imprisonment rate of Indigenous adults is worsening.
Last week, the Northern Territory lowered the age of criminal responsibility back to 10. The Queensland government has suspended its Human Rights Act to imprison children in police watch houses for adults; the Victorian government has backflipped on a commitment to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14; and New South Wales has toughened youth bail laws.
Repatriation of human remains
Institutions in the United Kingdom hold thousands of artefacts stolen from Indigenous communities during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The British Museum holds human remains, listed in a macabre spreadsheet, from Queensland, South Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania as well as others whose provenance is unknown. These include the burial shroud from a baby taken from Cape York, men and women’s skulls from the Northern Territory as well as cultural artefacts such as masks, sticks, knives and spears made from human bone.
The British Museum Act 1963 specifically forbids the museum from disposing of its holdings. The National Heritage Act of 1983 prevents trustees of institutions, including the V&A, Science Museum and others, from deaccessioning objects unless they are duplicates or beyond repair.
Sovereignty, an apology and reparation
Thorpe’s definition of sovereignty is about Indigenous connections to the land, not about allegiance to the crown.
“Our sovereignty is in the soil. It’s in the waters. It’s in our songlines. It is what this country is made up of. We come from the land, and we are of the land,” Thorpe told Guardian Australia.
“You can’t go to someone else’s country and claim sovereignty when you’re not from there ... for the so-called King of England, for him to assert or think that he has legitimate claim to this country and he is sovereign is simply not possible.”
Thorpe said the king should apologise as a form of reparation and that crown land should be given back to the First Peoples.
“Whoever wears that crown is taking on the wealth, a transfer of wealth happens. Well, what about the transfer of responsibility? Who is accountable? He’s meant to be a king with power. He can use that for the good.”
