The few times I’ve been to Canberra, I’ve felt drawn to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Australians are an obedient lot and, once in a while, it’s nice to see some ‘un-Australian’ breaking of rules.
So this year, on Australia Day, I decided to leave my de facto and baby at home – for my first night away since our boy’s birth – and camp at the Tent Embassy for its 40th anniversary celebration. For the first time in almost a year, I might get a decent night’s sleep.
I arrived to see TV crews leaving and an angry speaker on stage. I didn’t know what had just happened, but the sprawling camp looked like it had been grabbed by the collar and shaken up.
There was still plenty of light so I sat – away from the chai-tent with its dreadlocked Caucasians perching on cushions – and contemplated my tent.
A black hand appeared on my shoulder.
“You here by yourself?”
It was the public service to the rescue. Enjoying a day off from DFAT, three smart young blackfellas invited me into their circle. On stage, the speaker was now naming names – calling them coconuts.
“It’s embarrassing sometimes,” said one of my new companions.
“But you’re here,” I said. “You support the Tent Embassy?”
“Of course,” he said. “But I’d rather see it become a place of education. It sprang up from ‘Black Power’, but that movement’s divisive and not really who we are. African Americans weren’t colonised; they don’t share our connection to country.”
A band started playing on the stage.
“You should talk to the elders who live here.”
“They live here?”
“Sure, I’d like to live here myself one day,” he said. “I’d have to go back to my country to die, but, once I’ve retired, I could do a few years here – teaching our history.”
“If you live long enough,” joked his friend.
“Good point,” he said laughing. “Here’s something … we all know Aborigines die 20 years earlier than white folks, so why can’t we access our super earlier as well?”
“I never thought of that,” I said.
Canberra, they said, offered them a chance to learn skills to take back to their communities. When I told them I was in town looking for a story for the Journal, they smiled and told me the tale of ‘Gingerella’.
“After Gillard and Abbott took off,” one said, “Auntie was on stage when rain came, so everyone started shuffling off. ‘Where do you mob think you’re going?’ said Auntie. ‘Get back here! I’ve got something to show you … Julia Gillard’s shoe!'”
I hardly believed it but, after the public servants had left for a drink (it was a dry camp), everyone gathered around the shoe for a press conference. Delightfully tongue-in-cheek, it probably played better to the audience on the ground than those in armchairs at home.
“We wish to make it known that we are appalled at the brutal behaviour of the Federal Police and the Australian Security Service handed out to the Prime Minister of Australia that forced her to lose her shoe. We would like to … extend an invitation to the Prime Minister of Australia to attend the new Aboriginal parliament to kindly receive her lost shoe. We are not a nation of thieves. And we hope that, in a gesture of goodwill, the Prime Minister of Australia will respond … and start looking at issues that affect Aboriginal people.”
Unfortunately, the message then splintered.
“And if she doesn’t come get it, we’ll sell it on ebay!”
A mock shoe trying-on ceremony followed.
“If the shoe fits, you get to be Prime Minister.”
“Every black woman in Australia could try it on,” said a woman. “It won’t fit any of us!”
“I haven’t even got a right foot.”
That night, still giggling, as I pitched my tent by a rosebush, I reflected that the Embassy had free entertainment, free food and free medical help, but what it really needed was a free PR professional. I zipped myself in – ready for slumber on somebody’s country – just as Australia Day fireworks exploded overhead. I didn’t bother to look.