A peaceful, well-managed Indigenous justice protest in Melbourne gives rise to a media circus. A bewildered GRAHAM RING* surveys the debris.

Last Thursday, demonstrators at Melbourne’s ‘Camp Sovereignty’ complied with a Melbourne City Council direction and pulled down the tents which had been standing in Kings Domain since the start of the Commonwealth Games.

The protest village was located not far from the spot where a plaque commemorates the internment of the skeletal remains of Aboriginal people from many of Victoria’s Aboriginal nations.

They are the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Victorians.

In some quarters, there may be dispute about whether this little pocket of Melbourne parkland belongs to the Boonerwrung people, whose country stretches away to the south towards Wilsons Promontory - or to the Wurundjeri mob who own the land to the east of the city.

What is not in doubt is that before the whitefellas arrived with their intolerance and gunpowder the whole of the country was Aboriginal land.

There was no treaty. There was no ceding of land or sovereignty.

Hence the ire of the ‘Black GST’ group. The ‘GST’ bit reflects the group’s aims of ending genocide, acknowledging sovereignty and securing a treaty.

The media focus on the Commonwealth Games provided an opportunity to raise awareness around the world of the injustices meted out to Indigenous Australians over the last 200-odd years.

The Black GST crew dubbed the event the ‘Stolenwealth Games’, reflecting the fact that Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their land without compensation, and brutally mistreated by the invaders.

Some brilliantly staged media events did indeed generate much publicity for the cause. ‘Stolenwealth Games’ protest signs received widespread media coverage. A ceremonial fire was lit, and visitors to the camp were invited to participate in a smoking ceremony.

The mainstream media did its usual woeful job of covering the dispute, with the shabbiest performer being the mass-circulation Melbourne Herald-Sun.

The ‘currant bun’ - in its inimitable fashion - was able to sweep aside all the complexities and nuances and simply deal in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys.

No prizes for guessing how the paper categorised the GST mob.

The low point was reached by the paper’s columnist, Andrew Bolt, in his 12 April piece ‘Ferals run amok’.

Victorians know that on matters requiring cultural sensitivity, a blue from the Bolt is no bolt from the blue. In fact it’s par for the course.

The man’s stock-in-trade is to produce the sort of inflammatory stuff that induces apoplexy in well-intentioned, woolly-jumper lefties.

But Bolt’s commentary on Camp Sovereignty was reckless even by his standards.

The opening line was a real zinger: 'If they really wanted the sniff of a genuine black camp they could have pitched a tent in the river bed at Alice Springs.'

Remarkably, he was able to go downhill even from there.

The man appears to have an unhealthy fascination with skin tone, as he found it necessary to record that ‘not even one-third of the campers looked even tanned’.

It would seem that Mr Bolt holds the view that fair-skinned folk - some of whom he derides as ‘ferals’ and ‘failures’ - shouldn’t be in the business of campaigning for social justice.

After that stomach-churning main course, Bolt’s dessert was a serve of uninformed speculation about the percentage of ‘British blood’ flowing through the veins of one of the Camp Sovereignty spokespeople.

This is nasty, ignorant stuff.

File it away with the utterances of the deluded types who believe that the government gives all the blackfellas a new bicycle every Christmas.

Indigenous folk tell me they’ve been putting up with this sort of tripe all their lives, and that it’s not worth getting all bent out of shape about this kind of deliberate provocation.

Deal with the genuine people, they say, the ones with an open mind and a willingness to listen. Leave the hard-core types to stew in their own juices.

Good advice too, I reckon.

A curious aspect of Indigenous protest politics is that middle-class whitefellas in positions of power always expect the blackfellas to play scrupulously by the rules.

That is, ‘the rules’ that were put in place after Indigenous Australians had been stripped of their country and their possessions.

It takes a lot of gall to steal everything a person owns and then squeal when they light a fire without a permit.

At Kings Domain the tents and caravans have gone - but the flame of Indigenous justice still burns brightly.



graham.ring@bigpond.com
* Graham Ring is based in Melbourne and is a part-time, award-winning writer and a fortnightly NIT columnist.