King Charles was shouted at, “You are not my King,” by an independent senator just after he finished speaking at Australia’s Parliament House on the second official day of engagements in this country.
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian woman, had interrupted the ceremony in Canberra, the capital city, by shouting for about a minute before she was escorted away by security.
After saying that genocide had taken place against “our people,” she yelled: “This is not your land; you are not my King.”
But Aboriginal elder Aunty Violet Sheridan, who had earlier greeted the King and Queen, said Thorpe’s protest was “disrespectful,” adding: “She does not speak for me.”
The ceremony was conducted without a single word about the incident, while many hundreds of people waited outside and freely greeted the royal couple.
Australia is a Commonwealth country where the King still serves as head of state; however, relatively recently, there has been debate regarding removing the monarch.
Thorpe, an independent senator from Victoria, has pushed for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.
Australia is still the only ex-British colony to lack one, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people claim that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown.
After her protest, Thorpe told the BBC that she wanted to send a “clear message” to the King.
“To be sovereign, you must be of the land,” she said. “He is not of this land.”
She said the King needed to instruct the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the First Peoples.
“We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country. We cannot bow to the colonizer, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide.”
Wearing a traditional possum skin cloak, Thorpe described the late Queen Elizabeth II as “colonizing.” Again, she had to repeat her oath when sworn in as a senator in 2022.
