One Australian senator, Lidia Thorpe, has rejected British royal, King Charles III, heckling and calling him a genocide perpetrator.
The Aboriginal Australian senator, who was telling the BBC that “he’s not of this land”, shouted for approximately a minute during the ceremony in Canberra’s capital at Australia’s Parliament House, where King Charles spoke before she was led 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 royal couple met hundreds of people who had gathered outside to welcome them after the ceremony without mentioning the issue.
Thorpe told the BBC that following her protest, she had wished to send a “clear message” to the King.
“To be sovereign, you have to be of the land, he is not of this land,” she said.
Thorpe, an independent senator from Victoria, is one of the people who has pushed for a treaty between Australia’s government and its original inhabitants.
In contrast to New Zealand and other former British colonies, Australia never established a treaty with its Indigenous peoples. Many Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people emphasise that they never gave the Crown their land or sovereignty.
She urged the King to give Parliament instructions to negotiate a peace agreement with the indigenous peoples.
“We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country – but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide.”
Australia’s past with its Indigenous peoples was always going to be discussed during the royal visit to Canberra, but Thorpe’s intervention forced the King and Queen to confront it more head-on than they had originally intended.
A receiving line of politicians, schoolchildren, and Ngunnawal Elder Aunty Serena Williams, an Indigenous elder, welcomed the King and Queen when they arrived in Canberra earlier in the day.
To the tune of a didgeridoo, they were formally welcomed into Canberra’s Parliament House’s Great Hall.
The King discussed indigenous groups and the lessons he had learned from them, stating that his personal experience had been “shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom”.
“In my many visits to Australia, I have witnessed the courage and hope that have guided the nation’s long and sometimes difficult journey towards reconciliation,” he said.
However, Thorpe’s outcry echoed through the hall as he sat down.
She said: “The King’s not well. He’s going through chemo, and he didn’t need this.
“I surely appreciate him visiting here. It may be the last time he comes. Heaps of people share my thoughts.”
BBC
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