ABC The Drum
Adam Stone
Around 6am yesterday, a line of police snaked into view at the other end of Musgrave Park in Brisbane's West End and moved quickly down toward the fenced Brisbane Sovereign Embassy.
It was a much longer snake than I had anticipated, and more squads were arriving from other directions.
Media were everywhere, choppers circling overhead, as we linked arms around the sacred fire that our Indigenous hosts had told us was the most important thing to safeguard in what was to come. The young white man to my left was trembling like a leaf in a high wind when I threaded my arm through his.
During the several hours that followed, while a crowd of supporters gathered and chanted on Cordelia St (outside the fence kindly donated by unionists the day before and now surrounded by police), the police negotiated with representatives of the Embassy.
The rumours circulating inside the fence had it that negotiations were going quite well and the Embassy may agree to move to another site within the park. We relaxed, sat in the sun, chatted, passed around some snack lollies. The police surrounded us. Negotiations were not going so well after all, it seems.
Everyone had forsworn violence at a meeting the night before, but some pushing and shoving broke out nonetheless as police tried to take hold of the people around the fire. The Indigenous people present quickly decided that a peaceful exit was best and asked us all to file out of the Embassy. We did.
I asked the nearest officer whether I could retrieve my bike from the tree it was leaning on some five metres away. He shoved me and told me to keep moving. I agreed that I would exit, but asked again about taking my bike. He shoved again. We didn't seem to be communicating. I walked out, bikeless for the time being.
There was some more marching and chanting, a few impromptu speeches at nearby Jagera Hall, and a march to Parliament House was planned, but the Embassy was over two months after it first began. What a shame.
There were no credible reasons for dispersing the Embassy that I could identify, and none that have been identified publicly by Brisbane's Lord Mayor or the Queensland Premier. There was talk of freeing the park up for other users, but the Embassy was tucked into a small corner of the park and was open to others. The Lord Mayor repeatedly said that the park needed to be freed up for the Paniyiri Greek festival on the weekend, but the folk at the Embassy have been talking to the organisers of the festival and cooperating with them about sharing the park (to the extent of
offering to perform a welcome to country ceremony and have it translated into Greek). A sign welcoming the Greek festival was erected on the fence around the Embassy.
The people at the Embassy told me that they have stamped out Aboriginal crime in the park since they arrived, erected empty tents for Indigenous and non-indigenous alike who are in need of shelter, started to develop relationships with local kids with drinking/chroming/other drug problems (the Embassy itself had signs up saying 'No Drugs, No Alcohol, Respect Tribal Lore'), and a single mother told me of the importance of being able to bring her son to the site so he could learn from Aboriginal men. He had just started to try his hand (try his feet?) at some
traditional dancing.
Of course, as many will be quick to point out, rules are rules and we generally don't let people set up permanent camps in our parks even if they are doing commendable things. But it's not so simple in this case.
The people at the Embassy advised that their presence at the site is entirely consistent with their rules. They got the right permissions and conducted the right ceremonies. They were also quick to point out that they have never ceded their sovereignty or agreed to be bound by Brisbane City Council's or Queensland's rules.
This is not an argument that we ought to have two entirely separate systems of law operating for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. I have trouble seeing that working. But I also have trouble seeing how we can overcome the grievous wrongs of the past and create a fair, respectful, just and unified Australia through a rigid insistence that Aboriginal people forsake their law/lore and simply accept the new order.
Reconciliation - the process of reconciling or bringing into alignment different positions - will not be achieved by simply insisting that one side moves all the way over to accommodate the other.
They won't do it. Why should they. We'd be asking them to give up too much.
But that's what Campbell Newman and Graeme Quirk demanded of the people at the Embassy when they insisted that the Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy abide by Council by-laws because... well, because they're Council by-laws and we'll send in the police.
Campbell Newman and Graeme Quirk were implicitly saying "this is our land and you'll follow our rules". Describing the Embassy as a "squatters camp" (yes, Campbell Newman really called first Australians asserting their sovereignty "squatters") underlined the point nicely.
A better approach would have been to look at the arrival of the Embassy as an opportunity to take some small, careful steps toward a more just accommodation of one another. By all means, trouble-shoot any real, practical problems that arise, just as a sensible government would embrace the incidental benefits (less crime etc) that pop up. But don't just shoot the whole thing down because it's outside the current rules.
Instead, ask: "How can we use this opportunity to improve Indigenous people's sense of their place in our community? What role could this Embassy play in representing their views (bearing in mind that we have signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and that document expressly provides that States ought to engage with Indigenous people through their own representative institutions)? What local community needs might the Embassy meet?"
The opportunity to handle the situation in this way has not gone, although yesterday morning's events might have strained the friendship a tad. The Council had been negotiating with representatives of the Embassy for some time and knows who they are. But I feel a sad certainty that the relevant political leaders will see this as a problem fixed, rather than an opportunity gone begging.
Adam Stone is a spokesperson for the Queensland Greens and was the Greens' lead candidate in the recent Queensland State election.