Shortly after King Charles III had finished making remarks in Australia’s parliament on Monday, a voice rang out from the back of the hall. “You are not our king,” shouted Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous senator and activist for Aboriginal rights. “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us.”

As security guards hustled Thorpe out of the chamber, she continued to heckle the king, demanding that Britain enter a treaty with Australia’s Indigenous population and accusing British colonisers of genocide. “Our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” said Thorpe, wearing a traditional possum skin cloak and shaking her fist at Charles, as the guards backed her towards the door. “You destroyed our land.”

Once out of the room, Thorpe could be heard shouting an epithet about the British “colony” in Australia. The king watched impassively from the stage and along with his wife, Queen Camilla, left the reception later.

It was a jarring interruption of Charles’s first visit to Australia since becoming king in 2022, though from a familiar figure of protest in Australian politics. Thorpe, who comes from a prominent family of Indigenous activists, has long campaigned for aboriginal rights and against the British monarchy.

In 2022, when she was swearing her oath of office after having been re-elected to the federal senate, she raised her fist in a Black power salute and referred to the then-queen as “the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II”. She was instructed to repeat the oath and did so in a tone of open mockery.

Buckingham Palace had no response to the incident on Monday. An official at the palace said, “Their majesties are deeply grateful to the very many thousands who turned out to support them, and are only sorry they didn’t have a chance to stop and talk to every single one. The warmth and scale of the reception was truly awesome.”

For Charles, the trip to Australia is his most ambitious foreign travel since the palace confirmed in February that he had been diagnosed with cancer. The king’s itinerary has been shaped to give him plenty of time for rest. After arriving in Sydney on Friday evening, Charles and Camilla took a day off on Saturday, before attending a church service on Sunday.

New York Times News Service