What does the aboriginal tent embassy symbolize?

Answer 1

What did it achieve?

The 1970s were a period of some of the most important gains in the history of Aboriginal politics.

The Tent Embassy's demands included: an Aboriginal controlled state in the NT; legal title and mining rights to all reserve lands, as well as the land around capital cities; the preservation of sacred sites and compensation for lands lost including a $6 billion down payment. Underlying them was a desire for an end to the policy of assimilation into white society and a demand for self-determination and Aboriginal control over their land, communities and lives.

The Whitlam Labour government rode to power at the end of 1972 on the back of social movements, including the Aboriginal rights movement. Whitlam dropped the charges against activists over the Tent Embassy protests and abolished assimilation as official policy, creating the first Department of Aboriginal Affairs. His government also drew up the NT Land Rights Act that was eventually passed under the Liberal Fraser government, which finally gave the Gurindji and many other Aboriginal communities in the NT back their land.

These steps were significant gains for Aboriginal people showed the power of political protest to win gains.

But the government never fully delivered self-determination or the compensation for dispossession that were demanded in the 1970s. In the decades since the Tent Embassy, subsequent governments have left Aboriginal communities poverty-stricken, under-resourced and disadvantaged.

Today there is an attempt to wind back the gains of the past through an ongoing assault on the "rights agenda" and the goal of self-determination for Aboriginal people.

The NT Intervention is in many ways a return to the assimilationist policies in place before the 1970s. Communities operate under government control and there is pressure on Aboriginal people to leave their traditional land where the government deems communities "unaviable".

Native title has not delivered anything for the majority of Aboriginal people.

The Tent Embassy represented the emergence of a mass movement for Aboriginal rights and a layer of radical black activists who rejected the idea that the courts or politely lobbying parliament could win change.

The unity between Aboriginal activists and the organised working class was a central feature of the Tent Embassy's successes.

A return to these politics today could begin to reverse the backlash against Aboriginal rights.

Unknown (2012), Tent Embassy 1972: "Land rights or else"