Cheering Observations at an ‘Invasion Day’ Rally

Like all sensible Quadrant readers, I am not in the habit of attending any of the ‘Invasion Day’ protests on January 26. At one of these get-togethers in Melbourne a few years ago, the pyromaniacal sentiments of organiser Tarneen Onus-Williams provided the day’s surprise attraction. As you may recall, she concluded her semi-literate tirade by spluttering: “F*** Australia, hope it burns to the ground.” Ever since, I must admit, such rallies have never seemed like my idea of a good time.

This year, however, with the Voice referendum looming over the proceedings, I decided to stop by the event in Sydney’s Belmore Park, or — as the attendees insisted on re-naming it — unceded and therefore stolen Gadigal land in so-called Australia. I arrived in the middle of an address by a female Aboriginal speaker, who exhorted her listeners to “Open your eyes, hearts, minds, ears and fuckin’ listen!”

The crowd dutifully obeyed, offering self-flagellating applause at all the right moments, especially when she advised the whitefellas there to feel ashamed of their whiteness. She kept reminding the audience — unnecessarily in my view, as one could tell from her tone — that she was quite angry.

Next up was an alleged musician whose name and music were — sorry — unfamiliar to me. He rapped about sovereignty or something for a while and then invited the rabble to extend their middle fingers and repeat the chant: “Fuck the colony.” This continued for some time, so I wandered over to a group handing out campaign literature. Funnily enough, it turns out that the local chapter of the Australian Communist Party is also opposed to the Voice to Parliament. Their larger quarrels, I gathered, are with the idea of having a Parliament in the first place, the Constitution and the Australian nation itself, as the six-page pamphlet explained.

In fact, as I looked around, opposition to the Voice was just about everywhere. I didn’t see a single placard with a good word to say about it and there were quite a few explicitly rejecting it. The chappie with the poster that read “Land back, ya dogs”, I suspect, wouldn’t have much patience with an advisory body, either. One speaker, Lizzie Jarrett, seemed to have as much contempt for the Voice as she did for her other targets, like the police and settler colonialism. She warmed to her subject by mocking the Queen for being dead and then barked at the cheering crowd: “Will you support us? If you do, when that referendum comes around, kick it to the ground like Australia.”

Earlier in the week, the organisers had made it clear that opposition to the Voice would be a key talking point of the rallies. Some in the media seemed surprised by such an announcement, though they shouldn’t have been: ‘Invasion Day’ protests are principally the work of the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, the far-left activist group that regularly burns the Australian flag and is quite open about their incendiary plans for the country itself. (The aforementioned arson enthusiast, Ms. Onus-Williams, is a member, of course.) Something tells me that they would prefer constitutional abolition over any amendment.

The rebarbative Lidia Thorpe had also previewed how the rallies would reject the Voice. The Victorian Senator, whose utterances usually contain derivations of “coloniser” and not much else, showed off her slightly expanding vocabulary this week when she growled at The Guardian:

“The war is not over so we have to continue to fight the war. Every Invasion Day is a reminder that we are still at war.”

She stuck to this theme at her own rally in front of Parliament House in Melbourne, where she brandished a battle stick, and then banged on for a while about both the ongoing “war” and the inadequacy of constitutional change. To her credit, she summed up the mood pretty well by saying:

“What do we have to celebrate in this country? Do we want to become an advisory body to the colonial system?”

Back in Sydney, as the rally-goers left Belmore Park and headed towards Broadway, I moved through the crowd in the opposite direction, surprised at what a terrific time I was having. As one who would like to see the Voice referendum not merely fail, but fail badly, I think the events of the day may foretoken such a result. As the grassroots Left’s opposition to the the Voice gets stronger, Anthony Albanese may well find it difficult to add up the numbers for his ‘yes’ case, especially if the Greens refuse to formally support it. Lidia Thorpe’s coalition, the Blak Greens, who dislike both the Voice and spelling conventions, will be impossible to persuade after yesterday’s theatrics.

There is also a warning here for moderate or undecided voters, those who do celebrate their country but may think of the Voice as some innocuous gesture of goodwill: remember, nothing you do — whether it’s voting for constitutional change, paying the rent, enthusiastically acknowledging country every five minutes, you name it — will ever satisfy the demands of the Aboriginal Industry and its urban activist class. Should the referendum actually succeed, these are the same radical groups that the Voice will have to listen to and placate. They may oppose the Voice now, but they’ll still use it to their advantage if the opportunity presents itself. Are their demands not worthy of utter rejection? Why take such a risk with a ‘Yes’ vote?

Of course, the Left’s divisions over the Voice shouldn’t be the only cause of its failure. Going forward, I’d like to see the Right cast off its timidity, make fewer demands for details, and cultivate a whole lot more annoyance with the industry that hates the country and seeks to disfigure our Constitution. Let us be optimistic: post-referendum, when the next Australia Day rolls around, we should have even more reason to celebrate.