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Raising the sovereignty stakes

David Flickling

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy shed On Australia Day 1972 Prime Minister McMahon . . . announced his government's Aboriginal policy. There was no admission that Aboriginals had any right to land or compensation, because land rights would threaten the security of tenure of every Australian. Aboriginal communities were to be granted only special purpose leases if they could demonstrate adequate economic or social use for them. Mining was to be allowed on Aboriginal reserves . . . After the frustration of the Gurindji land claim, the High Court's rejection of the Yirrkala people's case against Nabalco and the Commonwealth, and the release of figures showing that Aboriginal infant mortality way up to 17 times higher than the national average, this was the last straw for the young Aboriginal leaders. On the afternoon of Australia Day 1972 a tent appeared on the lawns in front of Parliament House Canberra. This was the Aboriginal Embassy and became famous as the "Tent Embassy".

19 August 2002-When a fire started last Tuesday morning in the heart of Canberra's Aboriginal tent embassy, Australia's federal territories minister, Wilson Tuckey, moved quickly.

The National Capital Authority, which administers the city as part of Mr Tuckey's department of transport and regional services, asked local electricity company ActewAGL to cut off power to the site.

The next day he called for Aboriginal residents to be moved on, and went on to warn that, whether they went or not, electricity would not be returning to the site. To ratchet up the pressure, portable toilets were also removed because, claimed Mr Tuckey, "they are adding to the incentive for people to camp there in third world conditions".

It seems a great deal of fuss to be made about a fire that caused some minor damage to a couple of power cables and a tent. But the Aboriginal tent embassy, directly opposite Canberra's old federal parliament building, has long been a thorn in the side of Australian governments.

Set up in 1972 to protest against the government's refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights, it has been erected and closed down countless times in the past. A ramshackle collection of huts, freight containers and tents inhabited by a handful of Aboriginal families and activists, it is one of the most potent and divisive symbols of Aborigines' continuing fight for recognition.

Politicians from the rightwing Liberal party routinely decry it as an "eyesore", and Labor governments have often had equally uneasy relationships with the embassy's residents.

Its role has also divided the Aboriginal community, with Geoff Clark, head of the government's Aboriginal affairs agency Atsic, recently calling on residents to keep the expanding campsite under control. There has even been a long and bitter dispute between two local tribes, the Ngunawal and Ngunnawal, which both claim to own the land on which it sits.

Peter Howson, the British-born minister who led the fight to shut down the first embassy in 1972, unwittingly touched on the key to the issue when he complained about the fact that it was called an "Aboriginal embassy". He said the term implied "a sovereign state".

The possibility that Aborigines could have their own sovereignty was out of the question. Long legal precedent held that the continent to which European settlers came in 1788 was "terra nullius" - a land belonging to no one, least of all its million-odd Aborigines.

The most basic civil rights for indigenous Australians were still a novelty in 1972. Their first voting rights had been granted just 10 years before, and they became citizens and appeared on census rolls only after a national referendum in 1967.

Mr Howson's then job title - minister for the environment, Aborigines and the arts - gives a clue to how the Australian government preferred to see its indigenous population: not so much a sovereign people, but as a part of Australia's rich and diverse fauna, a docile aspect of the country's heritage. For such people to claim prior ownership rights to the land of Australia was inconceivable.

Last week's attempted closure came at a particularly sensitive time. Australia's high court had ruled the previous week that Aborigines had no rights to the mineral wealth of their land, and further declared that any land rights they held could be removed by a sitting government.

The ruling confirmed the feelings of many Aborigines that their rights will always be something either granted or taken away by successive white governments; and in contrast to the vagaries of the law courts, the embassy seems more than ever an uncompromising assertion of indigenous claims.

Politicians from Australia's Liberal party have come up with several suggestions to replace the embassy, from an information centre to a lobbying office located somewhere less prominent in the capital.

They say that sanitary conditions in the tent embassy are appalling - although critics point out that they are no worse than those in other, government-administered Aboriginal settlements in less visible locations.

The National Capital Authority complains that it has had to spend A$27,000 (£10,000) since 1994 providing electricity and toilets at the site, but the amount is dwarfed by the A$5m spent on the nearby Reconciliation Place, a museum and memorial to indigenous Australians criticised by many Aboriginal groups for presenting a whitewashed picture of their history.

Canberra residents have been more supportive of the site, bringing armfuls of wood and blankets to help stave off the freezing winter temperatures. The local branch of Greenpeace even donated a solar-powered generator, restoring electricity to the camp yesterday.

Most agree that the embassy is never going to be Canberra's most picturesque monument; but its importance as an emblem of Aboriginal defiance seems undiminished.

"They give the blackfella something and think we're ungrateful, so they just take it off us like children," says indigenous campaigner and tent embassy spokesman Darren Bloomfield. "But we're not children: we're sovereign people."

Source: The Guardian (UK)

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