Comment It was a short addition to her oath, but it was enough to cause an outcry among Australia’s conservatives. A newly elected Australian senator raised a fist at her swearing-in ceremony as she slowly pledged: “I, Sovereign Lydia Thorpe, do solemnly and truly affirm and declare that I will be true and hold true allegiance to her colonists. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II”. The word “colonization” is not, of course, part of the oath – and the introduction by Thorpe, an Aboriginal woman, was a sharp public rebuke of Australia’s colonial past. The Queen of Great Britain is the head of state of Australia, a British commonwealth. Australia’s ruling Labor Party has said it may consider holding a referendum to become a republic with its own head of state if Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wins a second term. But the party said efforts to give indigenous Australians representation in parliament should come first. Thorpe, who is of Djab Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent and a member of the Green Party representing the state of Victoria, said in a telephone interview that she hadn’t exactly planned to make the change in 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 felt really upset that I had to go and do something I didn’t want to do — swear allegiance to a colonist from another country.” Thorpe’s revised pledge was interrupted by Senate President Sue Lines, who informed her that she “needed to recite the oath as printed on the card.” Laughing, Thorpe said the oath as written, the second time omitting “colonization” from her pledge to the queen, “her heirs and successors, according to law.” However, Thorpe told the Washington Post that when she repeated the vow, “I absolutely did not mean what I said.” “It wasn’t from my heart,” he said. “I said it like I had a gun to my head.” Thorpe criticized the practice of requiring the Queen to take an oath to take a seat in the Senate. She was elected this year after previously being appointed to her Senate seat in 2020, becoming the first Indigenous representative for the state of Victoria in the national Senate. At that swearing-in ceremony, he said the oath as written, but did so with a raised fist and holding a “message stick” with 441 markings, which he said “represent Aboriginal deaths in [police] diligence.” Some senators in the room during her inauguration on Monday criticized her protest. The Australian, a newspaper owned by conservative media arm Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, put a photo of Thorpe on its front page, saying the “Green Queen’s gambit” had backfired. But a political columnist for the Guardian, Greg Jericho, speculated that “showing your picture strong and proud on the front page in your protest is the exact opposite of a gambit that backfires.” I suspect showing your picture strong and proud on the front page in your protest is the exact opposite of a gambit failing pic.twitter.com/ZcAhKQ2m5P — Greg Jericho (@GrogsGamut) August 1, 2022 Thorpe said that while her impromptu off-script moment was not “celebrated,” some of her colleagues also expressed displeasure with the required oath. Thorpe said she would work to either repeal the oath or provide alternatives for lawmakers “so we can choose for ourselves what we want to do and who we want to pledge allegiance to.”
