Alan Sharpley with placard, Bob Perry in a Ningla-a-Na T-shirt and John Newfong with hands on hips at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. The Pitjantjatjara expression Ningla-a-Na is translated as 'we are hungry for our land'. Source: Ken Middleton collection, National Library of Australia.
The historical and political significance of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, established in protest in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra in 1972, will be the focus of a conference at The Australian National University today. Organised by the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, the Aboriginal Embassy Symposium will be held over three days at the National Film and Sound Archive, the Australian Museum of Democracy at Old Parliament House and ANU. The conference will bring together a number of activists who were involved in the establishment of the Embassy through a series of lectures, discussions and a 1972 documentary screening. Activist and symposium speaker Sam Watson said the Aboriginal Embassy was set up on Invasion Day in 1972 and it became the most successful and stubborn point of Aboriginal resistance in modern times. ?From January 1972 until the cops moved on the tents in July, hundreds of Aboriginal people and supporters from across the nation and from overseas flocked to the Embassy to show their solidarity and stand with the hardy band of full time staff who guarded the site and worked hard to present the political word of the day,? he said. ?I was flown down from Brisbane to represent the Brisbane chapter of the Black Panther Party and I chose to stay through the winter and into July. ?It was on the lawns that I learnt much of my politics and it was on the lawns that I also shed blood in defence of our most sacred place of protest.
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