The Australian federal senator who interrupted a parliamentary reception for King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Monday has a history of activism and protest for progressive causes and Indigenous rights, courting controversy with a series of prominent public demonstrations through her political career.
Lidia Thorpe, a senator for the state of Victoria, yelled “give us our land back”, “fuck the colony” and “you are not my king” during an event in Parliament House on the royals’ Australian tour.
She was quickly escorted out of the room where other politicians and dignitaries had gathered to hear from the king. Thorpe’s interjection called for a treaty with Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and railed against the colonisation of the country by British settlers.
It is the latest and arguably highest-profile protest from the well-known parliamentarian and another demonstration of her Indigenous activism.
Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung Indigenous woman, was born into a prominent family of Aboriginal community organisers and activists.
“I had no choice in being influenced by black activists and the black struggle of my people … I was born into it and I don’t know anything else,” she told Nine newspapers in 2022.
Thorpe, 51, formerly served as chair of Victoria’s Naidoc committee, which works to recognise the history and culture of Indigenous Australians; she has also long advanced the case for a treaty process between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, and the “pay the rent” campaign for reparations.
Thorpe’s activism and protest, inside and outside parliament, has focused on progressive issues and those affecting Indigenous Australians, including justice system and prison reform, environmental issues, land rights, treatment of children, and housing.
In 2017 she was elected to the Victorian state parliament as a member of the progressive Greens party, becoming the first Indigenous woman to win election to that chamber. Thorpe lost her Victorian seat at the 2018 election, but was preselected in 2020 to become a Greens senator in the federal parliament.
She was sworn into the parliament wearing a traditional possum-skin cloak and raised her fist in a “black power” salute.
She also carried an Aboriginal message stick with 441 painted marks, one for each Indigenous person who had died – at that time – since the 1991 royal commission into deaths in custody.
In 2022, when she was re-elected, Thorpe referred to then-monarch Queen Elizabeth II as “the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” during her oath of office. She was forced to begin the oath again and recite the official words.
Thorpe was elected by colleagues as the Greens’ deputy leader in the Senate, but quit that position after it was revealed she had a relationship with the former president of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang, Dean Martin, while she was also serving on the parliament’s law enforcement committee.
She said in a letter to the parliament’s privileges committee that the pair “met through Blak activism and briefly dated”, but then – later quitting the Greens – denied they had ever dated and claimed she had been told to tell that story by the Greens party, an allegation the Greens denied.
Thorpe quit the Greens in early 2023 after the party announced its support for the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum – a reform Thorpe and some her supporters did not back. They instead called for a treaty process with Aboriginal people to be prioritised. She has sat as an independent senator ever since.
She had been opposed to the Uluru statement from the heart, the Indigenous community-led declaration calling for a voice to parliament, for some time; she led a 2017 walkout of the dialogues that led to the statement, over the issue of sovereignty. The seven delegates who left the meeting held that forming a voice to parliament under the Australian constitution would be seen as ceding sovereignty – a thing that, all 250 delegates agreed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had never done.
Thorpe has also made headlines after protesting against an anti-trans rally outside Parliament House led by British activist Kellie-Jay Keen, temporarily blocking the Sydney Mardi Gras in protest of police attendance, and numerous altercations inside parliament as she attempted to draw attention to Indigenous deaths in custody.
Thorpe’s protest inside parliament’s Great Hall accused Charles, as the British monarch, of “genocide against our people” during English settlement of Australia.
“Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” she said.
“You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land.”
Ahead of the king and queen’s arrival in Canberra, Thorpe’s office released a media statement with her position that “Treaty with First Peoples must be central in any move towards a republic”.
She also claimed Charles was “not the legitimate sovereign of these lands” and accused the British crown of having “committed a genocide of our people”.
“There’s unfinished business that we need to resolve before this country can become a republic. This must happen through Treaty,” Thorpe said in the statement.
“We can move towards a Treaty Republic now. The two processes are not opposed, they’re complimentary.”