King Charles faced shouts of “you are not my King” from an independent senator just after he finished an address at Australia’s Parliament House on the second official day of his engagements in the country.
Lidia Thorpe interrupted the ceremony in the capital city of Canberra by shouting for about a minute before she was escorted away by security.
The King had just walked away from a lectern to rejoin Queen Camilla sitting on the stage when Thorpe started shouting as she walked forwards from the back of the assembly.
After making claims of genocide against “our people”, she could be heard yelling: “This is not your land, you are not my King.”
The ceremony was then concluded without any reference to the incident, and the royal couple proceeded to meet the public who had waited outside the building to greet them.
Australia is a Commonwealth country where the King serves as the head of state.
Thorpe, who is an independent senator from Victoria and an Aboriginal Australian woman, has long advocated for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.
Australia is the only ex-British colony without one, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people emphasise that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown.
Afterwards, Thorpe told the BBC she had wanted to send a “clear message” to the King.
“To be sovereign you have to be of the land,” she said. “He is not of this land.”
She said the King needed to instruct the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the first peoples.
“We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country – but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide.”
Thorpe, who was wearing a traditional possum skin cloak, described the late Queen Elizabeth II as “colonising” when she was sworn in as a senator in 2022.
