Lidia Thorpe is not one to adhere to respectability politics. She may work in the major house of respectability politics, but as she has been clear from the time she set foot in any parliamentary building, she grew up working class, came from a background of activist politics, and is incredibly proud of these humble, yet powerful, roots.
The screeching, therefore, about the fact that Thorpe’s brand of activism infiltrated a solemn function to honour King Charles is not only ridiculous, it is nonsensical. Several column inches of moralising “cease and desist” tripe has been allowed to flood the discourse, ironically penned by many who claim to be free speech warriors. Peter Dutton has called for Senator Thorpe’s resignation (again) while essentially claiming she is a hypocrite for being in parliament pocketing the pay cheque when she doesn’t believe in “the system”. Several Aboriginal figureheads have also come out to join in the condemnation.
If I were, like so many others, to believe what it is I have heard and seen since Thorpe took to the floor, I would be convinced she had broken through the barricades, thrown open the doors, stormed to the front and then proceeding to call his majesty everything under the sun. I certainly wouldn’t get the impression that she, as an Australian senator, attended an event she had been duly invited to, engaged in an act of peaceful resistance by turning her back as God Save the King played and then proceeded to yell a few hard truths about the Crown and the history of this country.
Yet that’s precisely what she did. Where was the lie in stating that in the name of colonisation, Aboriginal lands, remains and children had been stolen? That there was no treaty? That there had not been an agreement with First Peoples to be a part of the empire? That our sovereignty remains to this day?
In cultural institutions across the UK and Europe are many Aboriginal human remains, stolen from this country. In many instances, these remains were used by scientists, anthropologists and eugenicists to “prove” Aboriginal inferiority and justify colonisation. Some concerted community efforts have seen the repatriation of remains, but there were so many taken and there is so far to go.
Since the beginning of colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have consistently engaged in acts of resistance. Contrary to the idea that Thorpe’s “rudeness” was a generational thing that would not have happened in previous decades of activism, this resistance was not all polite.
There was nothing polite about Pemulwuy or raids and guerrilla war tactics. There was nothing polite about the freedom riders fighting for Aboriginal kids to have access to public pools and highlight apartheid in regional New South Wales. Sticking a beach umbrella in the lawns at Old Parliament House and declaring the area the Aboriginal Tent Embassy wasn’t polite. I don’t remember the first rally I attended as a kid – the convergence at the opening of new Parliament House – being polite as Aboriginal people marched, chanting “Land rights now, bicentennial bullshit.”
Working “within the system”, rather than taking these actions, is also necessary. Mabo may have been more polite in his tactics, but he still used the imposed Australian legal system to dismember one of Australia’s longest-standing legal lies. When Thorpe undertook her mandatory oath of office, there was nothing polite about her being censured by the Speaker because she inserted “colonising” before “queen”, and then retook the entire thing in a mocking tone full of purposeful mispronunciations to highlight the spectacle.
Last year, Australia showed how unengaged and racist this country remains by refusing to insert an Indigenous advisory voice into a constitution that still contains racist passages. Yet fast-forward 12 months, and we are supposed to be bowing and scraping at the figurehead whose institution this land was claimed in the name of, while not showing up the country that cannot even grant us a tokenistic gesture. The idea of this is, frankly, absurd.
It’s simple: the Crown remains the figurehead of British colonisation and Indigenous dispossession. As the current hat-wearer, Charles III is the representative of Australia’s subservience to the Commonwealth, and the original crime of the false terra nullius declaration to clear the way for this to occur. Challenging royal authority has a long and proud history in the Indigenous community, and perhaps if Australians engaged in actual truth-telling, such as what the Albanese government committed to when promising to implement the Uluru statement in full, hearing these truths would not come as such a shock.
For what it’s worth, I was informed by an older Aboriginal person about Thorpe’s actions. They had been watching the news footage live and rang to tell me immediately. There was no shame in their voice, just pride – pride that Thorpe had seized the opportunity, asked some questions so many Aboriginal people are still waiting, after two centuries, to get the answers to, and pride that the Auslan interpreter saw fit to continue relaying Thorpe’s message to the deaf community of Australia.
I share this pride, and if my social media today is any indication, so do so many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly those who have staged protests throughout the entirety of the royal visit that the media has barely seen fit to cover. If the country really does want this to change, perhaps it’s time they engaged with the points raised by Thorpe and worked to change them.
• Celeste Liddle is an Arrernte woman living in Melbourne. She is a freelance writer, social commentator and activist. Liddle was a Greens candidate for the seat of Cooper in the 2022 federal election. She left the party in February 2023
