The Tent Embassy has been in Canberra for 33 years and we’ve seen numerous governments come and go. We are still there. We’ve been called an eyesore we’ve been called everything. We’ve been fire bombed; we’ve been petrol bombed but we’re still there. We’ve been under attack since day one since 1972. For 33 years the Aboriginal Tent Embassy hasn’t compromised. We at the Tent embassy believe that it’s a big shame job on this country that we’ve had to stay there for 33 years. If these governments were doing the right thing by Aboriginal people we wouldn’t have to be there. We could take our place as the nations first people. We will stay at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy until our sovereignty is recognized and if it takes another 33 years we’ll do it. We’re not going anywhere and if they pull down the tent embassy, we will just go back and put it up again.
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy grew out of the streets of Redfern when four men went down to Canberra and set up a beach umbrella on the lawns of Parliament House. The umbrella turned into tents and we maintained the site there for over 6 months. Then the Liberal McMahon Government called a special sitting of parliament in the early hours of the morning and moved legislation to remove the tent embassy. The police moved in and everyone was arrested. They pulled the tents down. We kept coming back until the third confrontation with the police, and we out numbered the police and we won. That was a major victory for the first time in history Aboriginal Land rights was an issue on the agenda.
We’d just left the missions and we lived under the Aboriginal Protection Board and the Aboriginal Welfare Boards. The town I come from, Cowra, had three concentration camps, the Japanese one, the Italian one and the third one, Errambi mission Cowra, for the Aboriginal people. These concentration camps were all over Australia and Aboriginal people lived in them. And they were continually attacked, our children were kidnapped, we lived on rations, we weren’t allowed to leave the mission without the permission of the station manager. Not many people in this country know the history of what was going down back then.
In 1972 there were curfews for Aboriginal people, and we couldn’t be on the streets of Redfern after 10 o’clock and if we were seen by the police we could be arrested and locked up in jail. They used to hunt us down like dogs in the streets. And they are still doing it today. It hasn’t stopped. They are still locking up our people in institutions-this has got to stop.
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is about all of our people, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is about sovereignty. Which means that we own from one end of our country to the other end. There has never been any treaties signed here. We have never relinquished our sovereignty to our country in any form. Now our people wee forced from day one, from when the first boat landed in the harbor in Sydney, our people have been fighting. We’ve been fighting to protect our lands; we’ve been fighting to protect our people.
We’ve moved the Aboriginal Tent Embassy where ever the issues are most affecting our people, in 1982 we went to Brisbane for the Commonwealth games and set up a tent embassy in Musgrave Park. In Sydney for 1988, at Lady Macquarie’s Chair for the Bicentennial we had the embassy set up there. In the year 2000 we moved the tent embassy to Victoria Park during the Olympic Games. The south Sydney council charged me with trespassing, and I might add that today there is no such thing as the south Sydney council. Just recently we moved back into Victoria Park after the death of T.J. Hickey and the Sydney City mayor Clover Moore signed a document to recognize our sovereign rights.
The atrocities against our people have got to end. We believe that the only way for these atrocities to end is to form government. We can’t wait any longer for any other governments to kill our people off, to commit genocide. So, we are forming our own Aboriginal Sovereign Government. On the 26 of January 2004 the elders from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy gave notice to the Australian government that we were forming government, and now we are moving to formalize the process. We believe each of the 500 plus aboriginal nations needs to form its own constitution, a register of every aboriginal person within that natin and then we will put to place a national constitution.
The current constitution of Australia is illegal because it is based on Terra Nullius, which is a legal lie under British law and International law. If you live in this country, and you are not Aboriginal, you need to get permission to be here. You can’t continue to live a lie. Australians can’t continue to live in denial about who they are or where they come from. Our connection to our country goes back to the beginning of time.
We as the people of this country have got to come together to end the genocide. We can make this right, where there is peace and justice, but we all have to do it together. We have got to make peace, let’s end the war against Aboriginal people.
