“You come at the King, you best not miss”

The Last Place on Earth is a new media project on power and politics in the west. Each Sunday, we deliver 'The Week in the West', a roundup of our stories for the week, plus links and analysis to help make sense of what's happening in Western Australia and beyond.

This week:

• We were the first to report that Woodside was sponsoring a heritage conference in Perth.
• We came to understand the true spirit of Telethon: public relations via privatised health spending.

Read on to find out why Lidia Thorpe's protest against King Charles worked, what Mark McGowan has taught his successors, and why Basil Zempilas got fired up this week.

Lidia Thorpe does not miss. The Gunnai Gunditjmara Djab Wurrung woman and Senator strode into Parliament’s Great Hall and global headlines this week when she called out the British Crown’s responsibility for ongoing genocide against First Nations people in Australia. 

“You are not our king. You are not sovereign,” she yelled at the monarch. “You committed genocide against our people. 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 in this country. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land. You are not our king.”

“Fuck the colony…fuck the colony,” she concluded as she walked out with security.

She was of course pilloried and vilified as the press went into overdrive (they were especially keen to find First Nations people keen to call her out) but the pedantry misses the point. First and foremost, this was a cri de coeur from a woman representing her people in all their pain and rage and righteous rejection of foreign norms. But for all the commentary about the protest, I’m yet to see anything that breaks down the mechanics of her actions as political theatre (although David Crowe gave it a surprisingly good go here).

Tom Calma, a Kungarakan man and co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia who one might assume harbours some degree of resentment for Thorpe’s role as a loud voice for No, said she missed the mark by targeting the King for censure. “Treaties aren’t given by the Crown,” he told the ABC. “Politicians should understand how we’re governed and who has what responsibility.”

With respect to Mr Calma, one might have thought the co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia would have a better understanding of symbolism. This protest was not about King Charles as an individual, this was about what the Crown represents, as the original and ultimate auspicer of the laws and structures that govern the stark and shocking inequalities, injustices and theft faced by the first inhabitants of this land. 

Lidia has an instinctive understanding of visual semiotics – after all, her people pioneered it here long before anyone else. She met the King on his level, wearing a robe, striding down a hallway and declaiming. That’s a language Charles Windsor understands – he’s been surrounded by people speaking it his whole life and comes from a long line of people who invented and exported it. It probably explains why the King himself seemed so unruffled by the whole episode – indeed, I could be anthropomorphising royalty here, but did I even detect a note of respect in his countenance at the scale and splendour of the spleen coming his way? Game seemed to recognise game. 

Nor can we presume that Thorpe felt there was any likelihood that Charles was liable to respond immediately by personally enacting a treaty. This was about cutting through, a discursive disruption to hijack a boring conversation and take it where the Senator wanted to. And by Jove, I think it worked. Thorpe’s intervention transformed a low-key royal tour, with the usual little flags and babies and handshakes, into front-page news around the globe. It’s hard to imagine the British press would have given much attention to Charles and Camilla Down Under without it - but this week, thanks to Lidia, they ran front page stories about colonisation in Australia, probably a first for The Daily Torygraph at least.

Lastly, to the criticism that if Senator Thorpe doesn’t like or believe in the systems of government and democracy in this country then she should drop the Senator from her name and resign. Put simply, if she wasn’t a senator the performance wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t have been allowed in the room in the first place, and no one would care about an angry Blak activist shouting at King Charles on the street. The protest worked because of the shock value of the protocol breach of a supposedly loyal Senator “attacking” the King. The protest worked because of the majesty of a strong Blak woman in a possum skin cloak brandishing her warrant at the King of England. The protest worked because everyone knows what she showed them is true, at the deep level of narrative non-fiction and truth-telling if not in superficial procedural parlance. It just worked.

Don’t Do Dumb Things

Elsewhere this week, on another front page featuring a different visual protest, a former Premier unsealed his top tips for crisis management. His successors have certainly taken the second point to heart, ensuring that nothing and no one gets in the way of the latest round of fossil fuel approvals. Mark McGowan also explained that one of the best things about WA is a “kindler, gentler” media landscape that isn’t blighted by “relentless negativity”. He clearly hasn’t been keeping up with The Last Place on Earth lately - maybe this one will trigger a Google Alert.

With friends like these

Meanwhile, a future Premier was fulminating in Friday’s West about the kind of language used against his female leader by Labor. Basil Zempilas reckons that the way Labor talks about Libby Mettam is disgraceful – and he was happy to give some examples, comparing her to a “rag doll” on their behalf. This then turned into ten minutes of talkback later that morning where the Lord Mayor joined retiring 6PR host Gary Adshead to list all the different epithets hurled at Mettam. There’s protecting women, and then there’s political paternalism - can’t imagine it’s done her standing in the party room much good, but if she needs someone to fully assume the burden to shield her from further attacks, I’m sure a certain Lord Mayor could be persuaded. More on that soon.