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Around the fire: Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne's King's Domain was an expression of the complexities of Aboriginal strategies of resistance.

Article Excerpt
On Sunday March 12, the Tent Embassy mob arrived in Melbourne from Canberra, with coals from the embassy's 'sacred fire for peace and justice' lit in 1998. It was a dry, total fire-ban day; the heat was thick and still. In the deserted CBD, Flinders Street Station glowed gold and, just days before the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, the white lines along the roads seemed freshly painted.

Kings Domain is a stately colonial creation: green slopes, old trees and tended flowerbeds in full bloom. Statues of monarchs dot the rolling parklands. The fire was set up on the edge of a hill. Beneath it lay the skeletal remains of Victorian Aboriginal people from the Melbourne Museum collection, repatriated and re-buried with a traditional ceremony in 1985.

Robbie Thorpe spoke to the 400-strong crowd. Australians were living, he said, on the 'proceeds of crime'. Behind him, the city's office towers glinted. Below him sat the freshwater Yarra River. We were just upstream from a favourite fishing spot, which local people continued to use for years after a township sprung up and the streams turned to streets of mud. All this, Thorpe argues, is stolen wealth.

Thorpe went on to suggest that, in this context, the 'sacred fire' signalled that Aboriginal cultural and governance traditions were alive in Victoria. The fire did much more than...

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