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It was a brief addition to her oath, but it was enough to spark an outcry among Australia’s Conservatives.
A newly elected Australian Senator clenched a high fist at her swearing-in ceremony as she slowly vowed: “I, Sovereignty Lidia Thorpe, solemnly and truly certify and declare that I will be faithful and swear true allegiance to the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. “
The word ‘colonize’ is not part of the oath, of course – and the insertion of Thorpe, an Aboriginal woman, was a harsh public rebuke of Australia’s colonial past.
The British Queen is the head of state of Australia, a British Commonwealth. Australia’s ruling Labor Party has said it may consider holding a referendum on becoming a republic with its own head of state should Prime Minister Anthony Albanese win a second term. However, the party has said efforts to give Indigenous Australians representation in Parliament should come first.
Thorpe, who has legacy of Djab Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara and is a member of the Green Party representing the state of Victoria, said in a telephone interview that she had not exactly planned to change the oath.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said of the ceremony, which took place on Monday. “I felt really uncomfortable. I was really upset that I had to go and do something I didn’t want to do—swear allegiance to a colonizer from another country.”
Thorpe’s revised promise was cut short by Senate President Sue Lines, who told her she must “recite the oath as it is printed on the card.”
Chuckling, Thorpe said the oath as it was written, the second time omitting “colonization” in her promise to the Queen, “her heirs and successors, according to the law.”
But Thorpe told the Washington Post as she repeated the oath: “I absolutely didn’t mean what I said.”
“It didn’t come from the heart,” she said. “I said it like I had a gun to my head.”
Thorpe has criticized the practice of requiring the Queen’s oath in order to get a seat in the Senate.
She was elected this year, having previously been appointed to her Senate seat in 2020, becoming Victoria’s first indigenous representative to the national Senate. At this swearing-in ceremony, she took the oath as written, but did so with a raised fist and carried a ‘message stick’ with 441 markings which she said ‘represent the death of the Aborigines [police] Custody.”
Some senators in the chamber criticized her protest during Monday’s swearing-in ceremony. The Australian, a newspaper owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, put a photo of Thorpe on the front page and declared that the “Queen of the Greens’ gambit is backfiring”.
But a Guardian political columnist, Greg Jericho, surmised that “having your front-page photo looking strong and proud at your protest is the polar opposite of a Gambit backfire.”
I suspect making your front-page photo look strong and proud in your protest is the polar opposite of a Gambit backfire pic.twitter.com/ZcAhKQ2m5P
— Greg Jericho (@GrogsGamut) August 1, 2022
Thorpe said that while her spontaneous off-script moment wasn’t exactly “celebrated,” some of her colleagues have also expressed displeasure at the required oath.
Thorpe said she will work to either abolish the oath or give lawmakers alternatives “so that we can choose for ourselves what we do and who we want to pledge allegiance to.”