When the newly crowned King Charles made his first visit to Australia in November 2024, his address to the Great Hall of Parliament in Canberra dissolved into a scuffle. The voice of Senator Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous politician of Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab-Wurrung descent, echoed through the chamber: ‘You are not our king. You are not sovereign. You committed genocide against our people.’ She was swiftly intercepted by security guards, managing to add before being evicted: ‘Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. Give us a treaty.’
Thorpe was censured by the Senate the following week, and later suspended for confronting Senator Pauline Hanson, Australia’s arch-racist leader of the One Nation Party. An equal tide of paternalistic disdain flowed from Australia’s media and political establishment: Thorpe was variously described as ‘abusive’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘childish’; her actions were ‘an outburst’. Penny Wong, the government’s Senate Leader at the time, described her colleague’s conduct as ‘part of a trend that we do see internationally which, quite frankly, we do not need here in Australia’.
Almost 20 years earlier, a similar story was told when the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne saw another monarchist celebration unsettled by Indigenous protests. Then, the voices of dissent came from so-called ‘Kings Domain’, a site in today’s Botanical Gardens, where Aboriginal remains lie buried under monuments to colonial power. Lighting a ceremonial fire, activists re-branded the site ‘Camp Sovereignty’. The movement – disparaged as ‘barbarians at the gate’ by mainstream media – called itself ‘Black GST’ after the message it carried: genocide, sovereignty, Treaty. ‘The visible and vocal presence of Indigenous people demanding recognition of both colonial violence and sovereign rights represented a public eyesore of deep resonance, forcing those who prefer the “white blindfold” version of history to confront the realities of frontier conflict,’ wrote Indigenous historian Tony Birch, reflecting on the events.1 Like Thorpe’s protest, Camp Sovereignty spoke of a reality that, again and again, the self-declared governors of the country called Australia have spurned.
‘The visible and vocal presence of Indigenous people demanding recognition of both colonial violence and sovereign rights represented a public eyesore of deep resonance’
But it’s a reality that cannot be refuted or erased. At the outset of 2024, as another genocide raged in Palestine, the sacred flame was re-lit at the site on 26 January. This date marks the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet and celebrated nationally as ‘Australia Day’ but now widely known among the progressive public and institutions as Invasion Day or Survival Day. Camp Sovereignty was re-established amid calls for the land to be returned to Kulin Nation who, like the continent’s some 250 other Indigenous nations, never ceded sovereignty to the colonizers.
These more recent assertions of sovereignty by Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants of around 60,000 years echo those made by their predecessors over the past two-and-a-half centuries – uninterrupted claims to self-determination raised from within and outside of the colonial structures that have sought eliminate them.
Undying histories
At a 2014 reception for then British Prime Minister David Cameron in Sydney, his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott – of the conservative Liberal Party – mused that in 1788 the burial site had been ‘nothing but bush’. His remarks harked disturbingly back to an older declaration: that of terra nullius. It was this legal principle, Latin for ‘empty land’, which had justified the colonization of the continent on the basis that it was without a sovereign and therefore open for occupation. The principle was a logic with a programme: the sanctioned elimination of the land’s existing inhabitants whose presence obstructed the colonial project.
Already commonly accepted as untrue, terra nullius was officially overturned by Australia’s High Court in 1992 after an historic, lengthy legal challenge brought by Torres Strait Islander man Eddie Koiki Mabo against the state of Queensland. The judgment quashed the notion that there was no land ownership prior to colonization and the doctrine of ‘native title’ was inserted into Australian law, paving the way for land claims and compensation.
The Mabo case arguably signaled one of the most radical upheavals in the story of Australia. And yet the fiction persists. As described by renowned Indigenous journalist Stan Grant, ‘it is so deeply lodged in the Australian consciousness that it can still render us invisible’.2 So too, the genocidal practices this ideology engendered – those of elimination, assimilation and absorption – have also endured under the guise of a new national myth of democracy, prosperity and multiculturalism.
We make a protest
As settlers consolidated control over expanses of the Australian landmass from the late 1800s, Indigenous survivors of the frontier massacres and conflict were forcibly moved from their lands to reserves, stations and Christian missions. In the colonizers’ view, this was essentially a ‘dying race’ and their strategies aimed to manage its decline. Confined to these sites of coercion, segregation and rampant illness, Indigenous lives were governed by the decrees of various state and territory departments, or ‘protection boards’. Numbering anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million in 1788, it is estimated that by the 1920s, Australia’s Indigenous population had fallen to around 60,000.
Among the states’ powers was that of removing Indigenous children from their parents for the purposes of training. Girls were primed for domestic service and boys for farm labour. This in essence created a class of ‘little black slaves’, in the words of educator Mundanara Bayles.3 The practice was formalized in 1937 in a policy of assimilation whereby all so-called ‘half-castes’ were taken from their families, shifted from reserves and institutionalized as wards of the state or adopted by non-Indigenous families. It was a project of ‘breeding out’, as summarized in the words of Auber Neville, the ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ between 1915 and 1940: ‘Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 Blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?’ Between 1910 and 1970, it is estimated that a total of 50,000 children were removed from their parents – now officially recognized as the ‘Stolen Generations’.
Assimilation continued through these and other means – including segregated education, curfews, lower wages and restrictions on movement and marriage – until Aboriginal people were granted the right to full citizenship in the 1967 referendum. But there were uncountable acts of both individual defiance and collective resistance throughout. On 26 January 1938, as the nation celebrated the 150th anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet, a group of Aboriginal men and women assembled in central Sydney to declare a ‘Day of Mourning’. They brought with them a resolution: ‘The Aborigines of Australia hereby make a protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to… raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community.’ The act symbolized years of work by the Australian Aborigines League and the Aborigines Progressive Association – fledgling organizations who became cornerstones for activism in the 20th century.
‘The Aborigines of Australia hereby make a protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years’
In an escalating, irrefutable claim to self-determination over the following decades, Indigenous people of diverse backgrounds sought to similarly denounce the hypocrisy, inequity and racism embedded in the Australian nation. In 1960s New South Wales, the young Charlie Perkins lead a busload of students from the University of Sydney in a tour across the state – the so-called ‘Freedom Ride’ – to highlight and subsequently protest the realities of segregation. The same year in the Northern Territory, the middle-aged Gurindji stockman Vincent Liangari led some 200 farm and domestic workers and their families off the Wave Hill cattle station. The strike eventually led to the partial return of their homelands the following decade, under the Labor government of Gough Whitlam – the first legislation allowing Indigenous peoples to claim land title. As the now legendary Liangiari stated in the lead-up to the walk-off, ‘This is my place… Something was steal before I was born, and I’m gonna be here forever.’6
From the heart
On paper, policies of assimilation have since given way to those of purported self-determination for Indigenous people and, most recently, to an era of nominal ‘Reconciliation’ first advocated by Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating.5 In his iconic 1992 speech in Sydney’s Redfern, he pledged a political commitment to ‘succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed’.
Under this banner, Australia has seen the establishment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander government bodies, a Royal Commission into Indigenous deaths in custody, the granting of land rights, the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report on the Stolen Generations, the ‘Close the Gap’ campaign for Indigenous health equality and the 2008 National Apology by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It has seen millions of dollars invested annually in Indigenous affairs, and vast change in terms of social representation.
But it is still failing the test. Indigenous Australians live shorter lives, with vastly higher rates of poverty and disease. Rates of imprisonment of Indigenous Australians have risen to 14 times that of non-Indigenous Australians since 2000, reaching record numbers in 2023.7 At least 580 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in police or prison custody since the 1991 Royal Commission. Despite continuing evidence of gross misconduct, no police or corrections officer has even been convicted over an Indigenous death in their care. Aboriginal children are still being removed from their families at ‘devastating’ rates – forecast to double over the next decade in a new Stolen Generation.8
These figures reflect the outcomes of top-down policies that continue a punitive, paternalistic approach to Indigenous Australians, granting the most limited self-determination while the roots of racism remain unaddressed. ‘We are not known as genocide survivors,’ observes author and public health expert, Professor Chelsea Watego, but instead, ‘we are told by the colonizers that “the dying race” actually want to die earlier.’9 This approach retains its grip at state and federal levels, as typified in the staggering 2024 decision by the Northern Territory to reduce the age of criminal responsibility to just 10 years old.
It is this context that gave rise to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, an ‘invitation’ to the Australian public that reflected the largest consensus of First Nations peoples on a proposal for substantive recognition. The statement called for constitutional change and meaningful, structural reforms based on justice and self-determination. It proposed a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution, followed by commissions for treaty-making and truth-telling. Read by historian Professor Megan Davis at its launch, the statement laid claim to the continuous sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: ‘This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’.
The call was taken up by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who committed to a national referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Held in October 2023, the referendum proposed the creation of an elected, non-binding, governmental advisory body known as ‘the Voice’. It was, in political terms, a minimal demand, though its symbolism was vast – and the campaign viciously divisive. While a camp of ‘progressive no’ Indigenous campaigners opposed the proposal on practical and ideological terms, Indigenous communities overwhelmingly supported it. But the opposition-backed ‘no’ campaign appealed to all the basest elements of disinformation, popular ignorance and xenophobia under the slogan: ‘If you don’t know, vote no.’ The proposal was defeated in all states, with 60 per cent voting ‘no’. Indigenous spokespeople described the result as ‘heartbreaking’, calling for a week of silence and mourning in its aftermath.
Truth and Treaty
The sober confirmation that Australia as a nation is unwilling to concede the most minor steps toward Indigenous sovereignty may have revised the strategy and priorities of many campaigners, but the broader demand for self-determination in the form of a treaty persists. Australia is somewhat of an outlier among settler nations such as the US, Canada and New Zealand... in not having signed some form of federal treaty with Indigenous peoples, and the demand is as old as the colony itself. Indeed, one was brokered in 1835 between the Wurundjeri people and one of Melbourne’s founders, John Bateman – only for other colonial authorities to immediately overturn it. Calls for Treaty have recurred ever since.
The most advanced proposal is now in the state of Victoria, where negotiations are ongoing between the state government and The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria – an independent, democratically elected body representing traditional owners. The parties have already legislated a Treaty Act, with provisions for a self-determination fund and dispute resolution. The process has also established the Yoorrook Justice Commission to investigate past injustices and inform the treaty process based on its findings. In practical terms, Victoria’s treaty is about implementing frameworks to ensure First Peoples have oversight of their own lives – from land-management to policing and public services.
The Victorian treaty process may fall short of many Indigenous visions of sovereignty, but it is the first and fullest step yet made towards true self-determination by and for Indigenous people in Australia’s history. It is also one which is under threat, with state opposition pledging to abandon it if elected in 2026 and thereby deliver another, potentially fatal, blow to reconciliation.
Once again, it seems true self-determination for Indigenous Australians remains in the hands of the nation’s ungenerous and unauthorized colonizers. With Australia’s identity cut through by a deep-seated denialism among its non-Indigenous majority, it can only be hoped that they too will eventually see that their own health and progress as a nation relies on that of its First Peoples. In the words spoken by Gangulu activist Lilla Watson at a UN conference in 1985: ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.’
- Tony Birch, ‘Rise from this grave’, Overland 230, Autumn 2018, a.nin.tl/Birc
- Stan Grant, ‘A reflection on the importance of language’, Charles Sturt University, 5 July 2017, a.nin.tl/nullius
- Black Magic Woman with Mundanara Bayles, ‘Professor Megan Davis Part 1’, 14 February 2022, a.nin.tl/magic
- David Clark, ‘Mr Neville: Removing Aboriginal Children From Their Family’, The Carrolup Story, 22 January 2019, a.nin.tl/removal
- Reconciliation Australia ‘Reconciliation Timeline: Key Moments’, 1 December 2024, a.nin.tl/reconcile
- Ingeborg van Teeseling, ‘Rebels - Vincent Lingiari’, 10 February 2023, a.nin.tl/liangari
- Australian Government, ‘2.11: Contact with the criminal justice system’, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework, a.nin.tl/justice
- ‘Australian Aboriginal child separation at “devastating rates”: Commissioner’, Al Jazeera, 5 October 2023, a.nin.tl/stolengen
- Chelsea Watego, ‘I’m not afraid of the dark’, E-Tangata, 30 July 2023, a.nin.tl/watego
- 'The last path forward to Treaty', 7am Podcast, 25 November 2024, a.nin.tl/path
