Australia’s Indigenous senator Lydia Thorpe accused Britain’s King Charles III of “genocide” and “stealing lands” at Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra on Monday, October 21 after he paid “respects to the traditional owners of the lands”.
“You committed genocide against our people”, Senator Thorpe shouted while confronting King Charles.
“Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land.”
“Give us a treaty. We want a treaty. This is not your land!”, said Lidia Thorpe marking her disapproval of King Charles and the British Monarchy’s sovereignty over Australia.
The independent politician Lidia Thorpe said that incarceration and violence caused by colonisation can only end with a national treaty between the government and Indigenous people to address the First Nations people’s issues, reports Reuters.
King Charles and his wife Queen Camilla are on a nine-day-long visit to Australia and Samoa.
Though the country gained independence from Britain in1901, it remains a Commonwealth realm with the British monarch as the head of state.
Australia, the biggest landmass in Oceania, was settled by the British during the late 18th century which marked a catastrophic genocide over the continent nation’s indigenous people, who had lived in the country for at least 60,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans.
In under 250 years of British colonialism, the Indigenous population in Australia has gone down to just 3.2 percent of the total population, according to the 2021 census.
Senator Lidia Thorpe, 51, an Indigenous woman from Victoria, is a representative of this population, who is an outspoken advocate of the Indigenous people’s rights, and has been in a long fight for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to recognise their autonomy and set right historical wrongs over the original inhabitants by the colonial Britishers.
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