The Indigenous people of Australia and their persecution by British settlers has been

long left unreconciled, with discrimination and hollow promises. Indigenous

Australians have endured the removal of their children with the stolen generation, the
theft of their land through the decree of Terra Nullius and the loss of their lives from
an increased incarceration rate. The Tent Embassy stands as a symbol against
these horrendous acts of ignorance and malice, providing a beacon to Indigenous
people looking to protest the conditions that they are forced into. The Tent Embassy
has a marked similarity to the Pathalgadi movement of the Adivasi people of the
Indian sub-continent, despite the difference in treatment between them.

In 1972, on the 26th of January, four Indigenous men set up a beach umbrella
opposite Parliment house (now known as Old Parliment house) in Canberra (NMA,
2022). This was the beginning of the Tent Embassy, a protest against then prime
minister William McMahon and his treatment of Indigenous land rights. To
understand the reason that the Tent Embassy was created, stepping back to 1966 is
required, back to the Wave Hill Walkoff. 200 Gurindji workers and their families
walked off the Wave Hill station in a strike that lasted seven years. A referendum in
the following year recognised Indigenous Australians as citizens, which fueled the
protests further, creating hope for Indigenous Australians in their fight for land rights.
The case of Milirrpum vs Nabalco in 1971 caused outrage in Indigenous
communities due to the refusal to recognise Native Title; citing that it wasn’t part of
Australian Law. The McMahon government announced the rejection of Indigenous
land rights and instead provided Indigenous communities with 50-year general
leases for traditional lands. This pushed many Indigenous groups to action, and led
to the founding of the Tent Embassy.

Over the years following, the Tent Embassy was moved and re-established many
times. Initially it wasn’t illegal to camp on the lawns of the Parliment, and thus police
were unable to remove the four men who had planted a beach umbrella in protest.
Michael Anderson, Billy Craigie, Bertie Williams and Tony Coorey set up the
“Aboriginal Embassy”, stating that the term embassy was needed, because they
were “aliens in [their] own land, so like other aliens, [they] needed an embassy”
(Tuohy, 1995). By April the embassy had grown to eight tents, providing shelter for
Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike who came to protest for Indigenous land rights.
The embassy was garnering attention from all corners of the globe, and was
amassing support from the general public of Canberra where it was stationed this
however, came with the obvious resistance from a large group of politicians and
members of the general public who believed the protests to be an eyesore on the
Canberran landscape.

The Tent Embassy caused major upheaval within the socio-political landscape of the
time, raising the issues of Indigenous land rights, similar to the Pathalgadi
movement. Unlike the Pathalgadi, however, the Indigenous Australians were fighting
for their land from outside of the constitution rather than from inside. The Pathalgadi
movement was used to invoke the Panchayat or the Forests Conservation Act,
whereas the Tent Embassy worked to protest the lack of legal protections and the
theft of land rights from the Indigenous populations. The similarities between the Tent
Embassy and the Pathalgadi movement warrants analysis of the treatment of
Indigenous individuals and communities within colonised nations.

Colonisation as a concept can be defined as the act or process of settling among

and establishing control over the Indigenous people of an area as provided by the
Oxford English Dictionary. This only goes part of the way to describing the effects of
colonisation upon Indigenous communities and the disadvantages that they face
within the colonial established society. By reducing the Indigenous populations ability
to contest the settlement, the coloniser indoctrinates the Indigenous populations into
their newly established heirarchy. As observed by Cowan (2001) “Western societies
are often preoccupied with imposing hierarchical order and permanence through
buildings and settlements, while nomadic societies do not generally share these
concerns.” Creating heirarchies divides the society and allows the coloniser to more
easily subjugate and control the Indigenous populations, one such example is
providing recognition to someone of the lower class in order to give them an inflated
perception of their own status, creating power imbalances within Indigenous
communities. Separating Indigenous communities and sowing dissent to reduce the
chance of their objection to the coloniser’s actions. Through this, colonisation not
only takes the land of the Indigenous populations but also takes their solidarity and
sense of community.
“Reconciliation processes can provide productive ways of responding to the ongoing
legacy of colonial practices of dispossession and assimilation…” Muldoon and
Schaap (2011) explore the idea of reconciliation, “Yet, in focusing upon the victim of
injustice rather than the agent of injustice, such processes risk entrenching the view
of the state as a neutral arbiter and diverting attention from the underlying source of
identity-based harms.” Allowing the focus of a campaign to be that of the victim
allows the true cause of problems, the hierarchy created by colonisers as stated by
Cowan, to remain uncritised by the general public who are engaging with the
protests. To expose the underlying problems within a society created by colonisers
from within a colonised society is unfathomably difficult, thus the choice of creating
an embassy allows the Indigenous activists to separate themselves from the existing
structures and show that they aren’t content with the oppressive system that was
created to assimilate them.

“The pathalgadi movement’s aspiration for sovereignty was a continuing legacy of

insurgent/transformative constitutionalism,” Roy and Singh (2022) explain the history
of the pathalgadi movement and revealing the underlying need of the Adivasi people
for an Indigenous constitution or the ability to self-govern such areas within the fifth
schedule. “... Assertion of sovereignty against colonial rule through an
autochthonous Constitution, rupturing the old regime of power, was inherent in the
constitutional moment (Roy and Singh, 2022).” Comparing the intentions of the
Pathalgadi movement to the Tent Embassy allows a deeper insight into the ambitions
of Indigenous Land Rights Activists along with the later history of the Embassy,
regarding the rights to self-determination, political representation and the sovereignty
of Indigenous Australians. Through this comparison, the Pathalgadi shows the
trajectory of the Indigenous peoples of Australia even if constitutional recognition is
achieved; the fight for equity will never end as long as hierarchical society still
survives, unchallenged for it’s deceptive stealth.

Lawson (2016, p.14), makes the observation that “...[they] hoped the Tent Embassy
would remind Australians about the poor living conditions of Aboriginal people.” To
explore the poor living conditions of Indigenous Australians as part of the message
they were attempting to send, a comparison to the Adivasi can be used, showing the
lack of self-governance they are provided by the State constitutions. “Thousands of
Adivasis involved in the “Pathalgari Movement” were criminalised for fighting for their
collective rights to self-determination and protection of their lands, territories, and
natural resources in Jharkhand State of India (Dungdung, 2021).” Adivasi resistance
being criminalised creates parallels between their struggle and the struggle of the
Indigenous Australians, as purported by Lawson (2016, p.15), “Many violent and
angry confrontations occured between protestors and police,” along with “[the
government] passed a law banning camping in public areas [in order to remove the
Tent Embassy].” The necessity of political representation for Indigenous Australians
can be ascertained by such events occurring without any form of challenge from
within the government. To allow government to enact such a law without challenge is
equivalent to targeting citizens of Australia, due to the referendum previously that
recognised the Indigenous people of Australia as official citizens.

The Adivasi people of India face similar problems within their movement, being
targetted overtly by the states that they reside in, persecuting them for the benefit of
development and control of land. The condemnation of government action within
India is not limited to the media, but also to academic writings, such as Prasad and
Sole (2019), “Development should not take place at the value of sacrificing the
identity of indigenous tribes for achieving economic growth, is not justified by any
moral standards.” The actions of the state governments that prosecute the Adivasi
people can be seen mirrored by the Australian McMahon Government, forcefully
removing the protestors of the Tent Embassy by way of outlawing their action of
protest; simple camping in order to disrupt the pristine image of Canberra and the
politicians who maintain it. The eyesore of the Tent Embassy allowed the Indigenous
Australians to make a statement, one of being separate from the country of Australia,
a group that has been alienated to the point of separation from the very system put
in place to subjugate them.

The plight of the Adivasi people can be seen as a minority fighting the governing
body of their country with the very rules made by the government they fight. The
plight of the Indigenous Australians can be seen as a parallel to the Adivasi, both
contest the colonial government of their original lands, both Adivasi and Indigenous
Australians use their given rights in an attempt to reason with a hierarchical power
who doesn’t honour the rights they gave, and both have been displaced by colonial
powers that sustained ignorance towards their right to the land on which they lived.
The similarities between the Adivasi and Indigenous Australians extends to their
shared experience of colonial subjugation, their falsely promised rights and their
connection to the land from which they are displaced. Despite this, the plight of
Indigenous Australians can be seen as a modern will towards recognition and
reconciliation, whereas the Adivasi retain their connection to the land and fight to
continue to keep their connection.
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