Things Got Tense During King Charles’s Australia Visit
King Charles touched down in Australia on Friday, marking the first visit to the country by a British monarch since 2011 — and things are already off to a rocky start. During a trip to the nation’s parliament, the king was confronted by Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe, per the New York Times. Thorpe interrupted the figurehead’s remarks to senators on Monday, shouting, “This is not your land. You are not my king.”
Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe yells at King Charles after he finished giving a speech at the Australian Parliament:
— Pop Base (@PopBase) October 21, 2024
“You committed genocide against our people, give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us! You are not our King!”
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“You committed genocide against our people. Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” Thorpe shouted, referring to the violent history of British colonial rule in Australia, which NBC News estimates is responsible for some 400 massacres of the land’s Aboriginal peoples and thousands of deaths. “You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty,” Thorpe continued. Although Australia became an independent country in 1986, it remains part of the British Commonwealth. Per the Times, King Charles and Queen Camilla were ushered from the room shortly after the outburst.
According to the AP, Thorpe comes from a family of prominent activists and is well known for advocating for Aboriginal rights in Australia. In 2022, after she was reelected to the senate, the 51-year-old raised her fist in a Black-power salute and referred to the monarch as “the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” while taking her oath of office. While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he also hopes Australia will one day retain its own head of state, he pledged allegiance to the king in 2023 and took a much gentler approach in addressing Charles and Camilla on Monday. “You have shown great respect for Australians, even during times when we have debated the future of our own constitutional arrangements and the nature of our relationship with the Crown,” he noted.
In his first visit to the country as king, Charles acknowledged “Australia’s First Nations” in his remarks at the reception, thanking the Indigenous people for sharing their “traditional wisdom.” However, as of Monday, Buckingham Palace had no official response to Thorpe’s protest, though the Times received the following statement from an anonymous source within the palace: “Their majesties are deeply grateful to the very many thousands who turned out to support them, and are only sorry they didn’t have a chance to stop and talk to every single one. The warmth and scale of the reception was truly awesome.” That’s one way of putting it.
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