Australia is a nation with no treaty or agreement with the people dispossessed by its invasion and colonisation.
Senator Lidia Thorpe’s challenge to King Charles on Aboriginal dispossession has gone without reply.
The consequent furore has been more about the manner of Thorpe’s challenge to the king than about its substance, but the latter will be what history remembers.
The treaty issue will not go away until our nation grows up and addresses it. A prime reason we are not confronting it is the sway multinational resource extractors have over the old political parties: can we envisage a world in which Rio Tinto, BHP or Woodside have to negotiate their extractions from the Australian seas and soils with First Australians holding a veto?
The same day as Thorpe challenged the king, 82-year-old Tasmanian Aboriginal elder Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta went into a public forest to object a logging corporation’s destruction and eradication of its wildlife. He was arrested but refused to recognise the “colonial court” system. He says his first obligation is to the ancient laws requiring people to protect, not destroy, country.
This is in a world where parliaments passing laws under the duress or financial incentive of capitalism and corporate interests is a core reason why – in just the last 50 years – three-quarters of the planet’s wildlife has been eradicated. And all for the prospect that our children’s disposable incomes will halve compared with ours due to global heating caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossilised and living forests.
Where respect for country ruled for millennia, money mania is now in full control. (Unless the money goes on reparations: my motion for compensation for the stolen generations after former prime minister Kevin Rudd said “sorry” was soundly defeated in the Senate.) But the Earth’s living resources are finite, and this materialist rule will be short before the rapidly accelerating depletion makes Thorpe’s shout-out seem like a raindrop in the resulting desert.
Having called former US president George W Bush to account for what I believed to be the breaking of international law with the invasion of Iraq by interjecting his speech to our parliament in 2003, I understand Thorpe seizing the moment.
There’s another link between our break in parliamentary decorum. As I faced a large media conference outside the House of Representatives after the US president’s speech, a former Queensland constable, freshly elected to Canberra, yelled at me from behind. It was Peter Dutton. I turned and wagged my finger at him, saying, “Will the puppy please sit down!”, emphasising the last two words. And he did – or, at least, he turned and scurried away, and I got on with addressing the war.
In 2024, now as opposition leader and, therefore, a potential prime minister, Dutton led the howls of outrage by calling for Thorpe’s resignation. That is despite the fact he sat mute rather than coming to the king’s aid while Thorpe was shouting her message. At the very least, his reflexes are slow. And the constable-turned-would-be-leader of Australia has provided no answer to Thorpe’s question as to why at least 576 Indigenous people have died in custody but no one has been charged.
In Tasmania, Uncle Jim says he is prepared to go to jail for failing to attend court on the charge of trespass in his ancestral forests. Like Thorpe, he is calling for a binding agreement with us post-1788ers to recognise his citizenship with this land, which entails caring for country and intergenerational equity. It is an obligation we should all be considering, an agreement we should all sign.
