Floating proudly amongst the grey stone in Bath Abbey is an Australian flag. The gravestone it hangs from reads:
In memory of Admiral Arthur Phillip, R.N.
Founder and First Governor of Australia
This man was part of the First Fleet, the force of British men who sailed to Botany Bay and established Australia as we know it. “To his indomitable courage…inspiration, and wisdom was due the success of the first settlement of Australia at Sydney, 26 January 1788.” Here, kilometres from home, I was faced with words that commemorated the most horrific event in Australian history. From the First Fleet’s landing, Australia’s First Nations people – the oldest living culture in the world – counted not as people, but as ‘flora and fauna.’ The pervasive paternalist attitude that drove British colonial endeavours globally was no different on Aboriginal land – they ruled that the Aboriginal people were ‘uncivilised,’ and therefore unfit for independence. Researchers have found evidence of at least 270 massacres of Aboriginal people in the colony’s first 140 years. The nation, from its bloody inception in Botany Bay, is built on deep-seated racism, violence, and attempted genocide of Aboriginal peoples.
Despite Australia no longer existing as an official colony of Britain, it is not an independent republic either. Australia, alongside the 55 other countries in the British Commonwealth, is a “constitutional monarchy,” with King Charles acting as head of state. The King recently made his first trip to Australia as Sovereign, and in record time he had done a whirlwind trip across Sydney and Canberra.
The incident that created the most waves was the interruption of a Parliamentary address in Canberra by Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe. Thorpe, a Djab Wurrung, Gunnai, and Gunditjmara woman, is the first Aboriginal Senator in the state of Victoria. Originally part of the Greens Party, she became an Independent Senator in 2023 following disagreements on an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. The Australian media has often made cruel, racist remarks about Thorpe, electing to focus on her identity as an Aboriginal woman. Criticisms have historically dripped with the condescending, racially charged language often aimed at Black women who speak out. Thorpe strode across Parliament house in a traditional possum-skin cloak, declaring as Charles took his seat: “You are not sovereign. 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 are a genocidalist… You are not our King.”
Thorpe’s words raise a pertinent question amongst an Australia making efforts to rectify the wrongs it has made: are we still a colony?
Of course, we are no longer literally a colony. In many ways, we like to perpetuate the idea we could not care less about our old motherland. However, a country does not need to be a colony to be rooted in coloniality. Coloniality, as opposed to simply territorial ownership and management, is the “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that [continue to] define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production.” Coloniality bleeds through from our history into our present. Earlier this year, two First Nations boys died in custody after 100 days in solitary confinement. In 2022, the rate of death by suicide for First Nations boys and men was 2.6 times the rate for their non-Indigenous counterparts. In 2020, a sacred site at Juukan Gorge was legally destroyed in the name of mining expansion. Steven Nixon-McKellar joined the 562 First Nations people that have died in custody after Queensland police officers decided to “choke him out” as he pleaded for help, struggling to breathe. Australia Day is celebrated on the day of colonisation, and we are the only nation to not have a Treaty with its Indigenous peoples. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still refer to the nation as “the Colony,” and you can see why. If Australia’s traditional owners identify the nation’s institutions by their pervasive coloniality, it is a good indicator that something is still very wrong.
When Australia’s foundational structures remain within the framework, symbolism, and influence of Britain and its Empire, it is difficult to see a path to fully dismantling colonialism. Thorpe was not exaggerating – official government policy meant that, in the name of assimilating First Nations people into white society, First Nations people were forced into reserves and subjected to slavery, curfews, alcohol bans, lack of healthcare, and segregation. Cultural artefacts and possessions were stolen, land occupied, resistance met with lethal force. Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia, A.O. Neville, famously saw the policy as “breeding the colour out” of the country:
As such, Aboriginal children suspected to have any white ancestry were taken from their mothers, renamed, forbidden from speaking their language, and placed with white families. This resulted in what we now know as the Stolen Generations. The practice echoed well into the 1970s: thousands and thousands of First Nations people that don’t know their mothers, brothers, daughters, sons – a spectre that hangs heavy over Australian society.
So no, Senator Thorpe was not exaggerating when she spoke of stolen land, stolen bones, stolen babies. That is the legacy of the Commonwealth. It is under the Commonwealth that First Nations people have had to desperately fight to be recognised in the census, and under the Commonwealth First Nations people continue to die at the hands of police. When that is the shadow that Australia lives under, it is ignorant to expect decolonisation to occur without a radical rethinking of what Australia looks like without Britain it its prow. This too extends to other nations in the Commonwealth. To try and decolonise within the bounds and comfort of British sovereignty seems to be appeasing a colonial ghost at the cost of true progress that can be found through the voices of people Indigenous to the land on which we stand.