CANBERRA, Australia
King Charles faced shouts of
"you are not my King" from an independent senator just after he
finished an address at Australia's Parliament House on the second official day
of his engagements in the country.Thorpe interrupted the ceremony before being escorted out by security
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal
Australian woman, interrupted the ceremony in the capital city of Canberra by
shouting for about a minute before she was escorted 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 ceremony concluded without
any reference to the incident, and the royal couple proceeded to meet hundreds
of people who had waited outside to greet them.
Australia is a Commonwealth
country where the King serves as the head of state, but recently there has been
debate about removing the monarch from the role.
Thorpe, who is an independent
senator from Victoria, is among those who have advocated for a treaty between
Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.
Australia is the only
ex-British colony without one, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people emphasise that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown.
After her protest, Thorpe told
reporters she had wanted to send a "clear message" to the King.
"To be sovereign you have
to 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 - but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose
ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass
genocide."
Thorpe, who was wearing a
traditional possum skin cloak, described the late Queen Elizabeth II as
"colonising" and was made to repeat her oath when she was sworn in as
a senator in 2022.
There has been a long-held
debate on how to tackle the glaring disparities between First Nations people
and the wider population, including poorer health, wealth and education
outcomes and greater incarceration rates.
Last year a referendum on
giving greater political rights and recognition to Indigenous people, known as
the Voice, was resoundingly rejected.
Thorpe was elected to
parliament as a member of the Greens but left the party over its support for
the Voice and has staged attention-grabbing protests in the past.
Despite the protest, many
others were happy to see the royals, with people queueing outside Parliament
House all morning in the punishing Canberra sun, waving Australian flags.
Jamie Karpas, 20, said she did
not realise the royal couple were visiting on Monday, adding: “As someone who
saw Harry and Meghan the last time they were here, I’m very excited. I think
the Royal Family are part of the Australian culture. They are a big part of our
lives.”
Meanwhile, CJ Adams, a
US-Australian student at the Australian National University, said: "He’s
the head of state of the British empire right – you’ve got to take the
experiences you can get while in Canberra."
A small number of dissenters
had also gathered on the lawn in front of the Parliament House building.
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