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Environment and Planning A

Making space public through 2017, Vol. 49(3) 537554
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Tent Embassy, Canberra DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16682496

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Kurt Iveson
University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract
Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity
movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of
public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect.
These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for
making space public. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the critical geographical
literatures on occupation and public space, through analysis of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy a
politically motivated occupation of a patch of land in the Australian capital that is now entering its
45th year. The Embassy activists mobillised occupation in the process of making and sustaining a
counterpublic. Counterpublic participants face a distinct set of geographical challenges in making
space for both withdrawal and representation in the face of spatial subordination. Occupations
like the Embassy seek to resolve these challenges by combining both of these activities in a single
site. The Embassy draws our attention to two important sets of issues in relation to the
counterpublic geography of occupations. First, it has much to teach about how space is made
public through occupation, including dynamics related to the location, duration, reproduction and
relations of occupation. Second, the Embassy issues a challenge about whose space is made public
through occupation as an embodied enactment of indigenous sovereignty, the Embassy reminds us
that democratic politics in settler colonial nations like Australia is premised on a violent
dispossession that has yet to be fully acknowledged or addressed.

Keywords
Public space, counterpublics, occupation, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Land Rights, Indigenous
Sovereignty

Prologue: The day after Invasion Day, 1972, Canberra

The 26th of January is a public holiday in Australia, known ocially as Australia Day to
mark the date of the arrival of the First Fleet of the Royal British Navy sent to establish the
colony of New South Wales in 1788. Unocially, many refer to this day as Invasion Day.

Corresponding author:
Kurt Iveson, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Email: kurt.iveson@sydney.edu.au
538 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

On Invasion Day in 1972, Australian Prime Minister William McMahon issued a

provocative statement making it clear that his Government would not agree to Land
Rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. His said his government had
decided not to translate the Aboriginal anity with the land into some form of legal
right under the Australian system (quoted in Stanner, 2014 [1972]: 125). That night, four
Aboriginal men Michael Anderson, Tony Coreey, Billy Craigie and Bertie Wiliams were
given a lift from Sydney to the national capital Canberra by Noel Hazzard, a sympathetic
photographer from the Communist Party newspaper Tribune. They werent sure exactly
what they were going to do, they just knew that they had to get to Canberra to protest
McMahons statement and press the case for Land Rights.
Well after midnight, after theyd nished the four hour drive to Canberra, they sat around
in the house of a Canberran communist whod given them tea and a feed, talking about what
they would do next. They debated slogans and strategies without agreement. Then, as
Michael Anderson tells it:

Anyway, we are sitting down there and we are debating this you see. And Tony Coorey went
down the hall to the toilet. And he is sitting there with the door open, obviously because he is
listening to everything we are saying. And we are in this discussion in the lounge room saying,
well, what are we going to call it? Theres got to be some name. And out of the blue from the
throne, deep down, in the hallway, theres Tony Coorey sings out and he says, well this is the
home of the embassies, why dont we call it the Aboriginal Embassy? Done. It snapped like that.
It was just wonderful. You know, it was the thing. So Tony Coorey called that out and we said,
yes, thats the name for it. Well set up an Aboriginal Embassy. (Anderson, 2014 (2011): 120)

It was the middle of the night, and construction materials were pretty limited. Very early in
the morning on 27 January, the four men gathered up a beach umbrella and some cardboard
signs, and made their way to the grass across the road from Parliament House to establish
the Aboriginal Embassy (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Michael Anderson, Tony Coreey, Billy Craigie, and Bertie Wiliams, January 27, 1972, Canberra.
Source: Tribune/Search Foundation and Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. www.acmssearch.sl.nsw.gov.
au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID995910
Iveson 539

Some 45 years later, the Embassy is still there. Its not on the ocial maps of the
Parliamentary Zone. But its presence remains both an embodiment of Aboriginal sovereignty
and a thorn in the side of those whose authority to regulate the space is founded on colonial
dispossession.

Introduction: Making space public through occupation with the

Aboriginal Tent Embassy
Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-
austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term
occupations of urban public spaces have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social
movements to spectacular eect (see for example Castells, 2012; Davidson and Iveson,
2014; Mason, 2012). These events have dramatised the potentials and limits of occupation
as a spatial strategy for the making of publics and the enactment of insurgent politics. In the
wake of these events, Vasudevan (2015) has called for development of a critical geography of
occupation that can articulate its signicance for the right to the city. He suggests that such a
geography must empirically chart emergent forms of resistance, theorise their conceptual
relationship to emancipatory urban politics, and contextualise instances of occupation
within an on-going history of occupations archived in the very fabric of the urban.
This paper takes up this challenge, with a close examination of an occupation that has
recently entered its 44th year. It considers some of the lessons we might learn from the
activists of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy about making space public through a long-term
occupation. Of course, each occupation has its own unique dynamics, and the Embassy is no
exception. Like Vasudevan, I think we can study diverse occupations in search of some
generalisable lessons about the spatial politics of occupation (see also Davidson and
Iveson, 2014). But moving between the particular and the general is of course tricky.
Rose (2014: 210) suggests we approach theorisation with some modesty, by allowing the
theory and empirics to relate to each other in a manner where they are not required to
seamlessly and convincingly join, but can speak to each other across a distance a space
where disjuncture, refraction and even betrayal are possible.
In this article, I approach the task of drawing lessons about occupation from the
Aboriginal Tent Embassy in three stages. In Part 1, I argue that the process of making
space public through occupation can be usefully conceptualised as a form of counterpublic
geography. In Part 2, I draw on this conceptualisation to provide an account of the making
of the Embassy, focusing on the ways in which key individuals involved with the Embassy
have talked about its form and purpose. In Part 3, I oer two related but distinct sets of
reections on the lessons the Embassy holds for a critical geography of occupation. The rst
identies some of the geographical dynamics of making space public through insurgent
occupation that are highlighted by the Embassy experience. The second focuses on the
nature of spaces that might be made public in a colonial settler society like Australia
founded on (and sustained by) the violence of dispossession. The conclusion reects on
the challenges of bringing these two sets of reections into dialogue with one another.

Part 1: Counterpublics and their spaces On occupation

as a counterpublic geography
In this section, I set out a conceptual framework for understanding the process of making
space public through insurgent occupations. I argue that occupations like the Embassy and
more recent occupations bear the hallmarks of a counterpublic geography. That is to say,
540 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

the process of making space public through insurgent occupation involves a set of spatial
dynamics that are specic to people whose particular ways of being public are subordinated
and counter-hegemonic.
In order to develop this concept of counterpublic geographies, it is necessary to consider
the concept of a public geography more generally. Publics are social imaginaries dened
by a chicken-and-egg circularity (Warner, 2002: 63). To participate in a public is to imagine
the existence of a social space in which we can address others, and in which we can
be addressed by others, as strangers. But such a social space can only exist through the
particular acts of public address and interaction that take its existence for granted.
Here, reference to publics as social spaces must not be simply metaphorical, but
geographical. To talk about publics as social spaces shared with strange others is to talk
about the making of public geographies a geography of sites and media through which we
might nd and interact with others (Iveson, 2007: 2829; Taylor, 2004: 2526). Crucially, we
must not confuse this public geography with sites colloquially referred to as public spaces,
i.e. as sites where we are in public. Such sites may be crucial to a given public geography.
But other spaces both physical and mediated may be equally as crucial in the making
of public geographies if they allow people to address, and be addressed by, strange others.
So, what kind of a public is a counterpublic, and what is its particular public geography?
Nancy Frasers widely quoted formulation of the concept of a subaltern counterpublic
denes it as a parallel discursive arena where members of subordinated social groups
invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their
identities, interests and needs (Fraser, 1992: 123). However, Frasers denition does not
really emphasise that counterpublics are oppositional not only in what they say, but in how
they say it (Sziarto and Leitner, 2010; Warner, 2002). Just as some ideas are privileged over
others in their incorporation into structures of authority, so too are some forms and styles of
public expression and interaction privileged over others in the governance of public life.
Warner (2002) therefore denes counterpublics in the following terms:

A counterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate

status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself o is not just a general or wider
public, but a dominant one. And the conict extends not just to ideas or policy questions, but
to the speech genres and modes of address that constitute the public and to the hierarchy
among media.

These matters of style and form that dene the social space of publics and the
subordination of some forms of publicness to which Warner refers in his discussion of
counterpublics are also matters of geography. In the public life of any polity, some
spaces tend to be privileged as spaces of publicness. And in such spaces, some ways of
being public tend to be privileged as normal while others are problematised as deviant
and/or dangerous. This is a variegated spatial order of publicness that Staeheli and Mitchell
(2008) refer to as a regime of publicity. Those participating in some publics make space
public in ways that challenge the designation and/or operation of so-called public spaces in
existing regimes of publicity. As Butler (2015: 73) puts it, the material supports for action
are not only part of the action, but they are also what is being fought about.
Given this, the dening subordination of counterpublics to which Warner refers is to a
signicant extent achieved through the policing of space (noting that such policing is not
only conducted by the police see Iveson, 2014a). That is, one manner in which participants
in a counterpublic can be made aware of their subordinate status is through spatial
interventions that seek to deny them the use of a given space for their particular form of
being public. Their imaginary of the social spaces in which they can practice a given form of
Iveson 541

publicness is shaped by the anticipation and experience of subordination through the

policing of the city. Shaped by an awareness of this subordination, participants in
counterpublics face particular challenges in making space public that give rise to a
distinct counterpublic geography. This counterpublic geography typically involves both
(a) spaces for withdrawal and the formation of alternative modes of public interaction
and alternative discourses, and (b) spaces for representation of those alternative styles and
ideas to the wider public sphere. Sziarto and Leitner (2010: 383) put it this way:

Counterpublics are spaces with a dual character: they are spaces of withdrawal and regrouping,
and spaces of publicity. This dual character must be examined in relation to the geographic
scholarship on public space.
This is the geographical dimension of a tension that is a dening characteristic of
counterpublics the tension between maintaining a counterpublic with an open horizon
in the hope of expanding its social space and dissolving the boundaries of hegemonic publics,
and establishing a counterpublic as a separate camp in an eort to insulate the oppositional
values and practices that are subordinated when exposed to the wider public sphere
(Negt and Kluge, 1993: 6263; see also Iveson, 2007: 2627). And in pursuit of spaces for
formation and representation, participants in counterpublics frequently make space public
not only by using a space as a venue for public address, but also by contesting the authorities
that subordinate them by making the policing of such spaces the object of public address and
debate (Iveson, 2007: 3240).
This discussion of counterpublic geographies helps us to better understand the particular
dynamics of occupation as a spatial practice. Occupations fuse the dual public geography of a
counterpublic in a single site, by remaking that site as both a space for formation/withdrawal
and a space for representation. Indeed, more than that, an occupation can transform the very
process of public formation into an act of representation in itself. As Butler (2015: 83) argues
in relation to recent occupations:

Although the bodies on the street are vocalising their opposition to the legitimacy of the
state, they are also, by virtue of occupying that space, repeating that occupation of space, and
persisting in that occupation of space, posing the challenge in corporeal terms, which means that
when the body speaks politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of
the body calls that legitimacy into question, and does so precisely through a performativity
of the body that crosses language without ever quite reducing to language. In other words, it
is not that bodily action and gesture have to be translated into language, but that both action
and gesture signify and speak, as action and claim, and that the one is not nally extricable from
the other.

The occupants of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy have plenty to teach us about the fraught
process of holding these two functions in productive tension in an occupation of any
duration.

Part 2: Anatomy of an occupation The Aboriginal Tent Embassy,

1972present
In this section, I oer an account of the Embassy that is informed by this understanding of
counterpublic geographies. The section begins by situating the Embassy historically and
geographically. It then moves on to consider the way the contestation of the Embassy site
developed, both in the tense months of 1972 when the site was initially occupied, and in the
years since.
542 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

The antecedents of the Embassy occupation

While the Embassy was a spontaneous protest with little planning and plenty of luck, this
particular occupation of space did not materialise out of thin air. The Embassy was the
culmination of over a decade of Aboriginal activism. In Australia in the 1960s, new forms of
pan-Aboriginal politics were beginning to emerge among Aboriginal people, particularly
among those who had moved to cities like Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. In Redfern
(Sydney), for example, Aboriginal people from all over New South Wales and beyond were
coming together, sharing their experiences of oppression in dierent places. Indeed, for Negt
and Kluge (1993), the notion of a counterpublic is meant to capture a social space through
which a counter-narrative of shared experience is produced meaning that a social imaginary
of shared experience with others is made through the very public interaction with others in
which stories and concepts and aspirations circulate, rather than pre-dating that interaction.
As Embassy activist and historian Gary Foley (2001) has written, through bookshops like
Bob Goulds Third World Bookshop, and through connections between Aboriginal dock
workers and African-American seamen, Aboriginal people were also increasingly exposed to
Black Power and Black Panther material. They were also well aware of Native American
political actions like the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. Gradually, a group of activists
started experimenting with self-determination and Black Power politics in the form
Aboriginal-run services like school breakfast programs, the Aboriginal Legal Service
(1971) and the Aboriginal Medical Service (1972) (see for example Anderson, 2014 (2011);
Foley, 2001). These emerging Black Power networks seized on the event of the Embassys
establishment and the luck of its legality.

The making of the Embassy occupation: Enacting land rights, symbolising dispossession
While the Embassy might have been the culmination of all this hard political labour, it was
also a catalyst for new forms of claim-making and politics by this increasingly condent
Aboriginal counterpublic.
The Act of establishing an Aboriginal Embassy through the occupation of land across the
road from Parliament House was an inspired piece of spatial politics. By hitching their
umbrella across the road from Parliament House, Anderson, Coorey, Craigie and
Williams turned one of the foremost symbolic public spaces of the colonial state against
itself. This was public space designed in a ceremonial mode (Iveson, 1998: 23) a space in
which the the people were imagined as a backdrop to events celebrating the achievements
and leaders of the white Australian nation, rather than as active constituents making
demands on the institutions of representative democracy.
But the Embassy activists made all the plans, the architecture, the statues and the laws of
colonial authority speak for something else. The Embassy occupation enacted the kind of
Land Rights the activists were claiming they had been denied. As Embassy activist Gary
Foley put it, The Tent Embassy was not simply a sit-in protest, but in fact was a
demonstration of Aboriginal sovereignty (Foley, 2007: 123). Permission was neither
sought nor granted, in an act which presumed the authority of a sovereign people to use
their land as they saw t, even as that sovereignty was denied by the laws of the settler
society (Schaap, 2009: 219). This was not the rst time Aboriginal people had used the
Parliament as a site of protest. Indeed, at the very opening of Parliament in 1927, an
Aboriginal protester by the name of Jimmy Clements had staged a land rights protest
that received considerable media attention at the time (McKenna, 2003). But the Embassy
operates on a distinct register.
Iveson 543

In naming their camp an Embassy, the activists drew attention to colonial dispossession,
pointing out that without Land Rights, they were aliens in their own land. And the
enactment of Land Rights through the establishment of the Embassy consisting of a
beach umbrella and later tents also drew attention to the poor living conditions of so
many Aboriginal people across Australia. In response to criticism of the ramshackle nature
of the Embassy, John Newfong was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald in May of 1972 as
saying:

If people think this is an eyesore, well it is the way it is on Government settlements. The place is
beginning to look as tired as we are . . . we all wish we were in other places doing other things. But
we know we have to stay here until we get what we want. (quoted in Dow, 2000)
Having said all that, no-one involved though the Embassy would last. Michael Anderson
(2014 (2011)) recalls that the four originators of the Embassy assumed that their protest
would last a few hours at most perhaps long enough to attract the attention of journalists
and members of the public before they were ordered to move on and then arrested for
refusing that order.
But something unexpected happened. Shortly after daybreak, police showed up on cue as
predicted. But after a quick check with their superiors, the attending ocers realised that
they had no legal powers to remove the four. As luck would have it, Aboriginal people were
exempt from laws prohibiting camping on Crown Land in the Commonwealth-administered
Territories. And the nice lawns across the road from Parliament House where the umbrella
had been pitched were Commonwealth land. Crucially, this gave the Embassy precious time
to establish itself.
As the Embassy established a fragile permanence, this enabled activists to move between
using the site for the staging of outwardly oriented claims and for the long internal
discussions and relationship-building that could actually generate those claims. The grass
across the road from Parliament House became a political public space through which
Embassy occupants could continue a process of Aboriginal counterpublic formation. I now
turn to consider how an occupation both emerged from, and contributed to, that parallel
process of counterpublic formation and representation.

Consolidating the Embassy: A space for Aboriginal counterpublic formation and

representation
With police initially powerless to remove the Embassy, the beach umbrella was quickly
replaced by tents (Figure 2). Word spread to activists around the country. When
Parliament resumed in February, the Embassy was the site of a signicant protest of
Aboriginal activists and their supporters who had made their way to Canberra by
whatever means they could. The consolidation of the initial protest into an extended
occupation saw the Embassy become a crucial space for formation and representation of
an Aboriginal counterpublic.
As with many contemporary occupations in the face of austerity and corporate
capitalism, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy did not initially convene around a xed set of
proposals for reform, and it attracted its fair share of criticism as a consequence. But
such criticism misses the fact that the public space opened up by the Embassy was highly
signicant for the process of counterpublic formation. The Embassy served as a public space
through which dierent Aboriginal people came together young and old, male and female,
city and country to contest their treatment, assert their equality, press for recognition, and
544 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

Figure 2. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy takes shape, Parliament House in background.
Source: National Archives of Australia.

to discuss and debate political strategy. As Bruce McGuiness observed in a speech at the
Embassy on 30 July 1972, the Embassy was bringing together:

Black people of all age groups, from all organizations. Non-organizational people. Individuals.
Who feel and really believe in their cause. They know what it is all about. They know what it is
like to be stood on by the government. Theyve been stood on all their lives and they are still
being stood on. Today they are all here. We see there is unity in diversity. We can see it. It is here.
Staring everybody in the face. And no amount of police bashings, no amount of police brutality
is going to stop us from standing up and demanding what rightfully belongs to us. (McGuiness,
2014 [1972]: 177)

Many of those who were involved in the early days of the Embassy emphasise its crucial role
as a space of political formation and education. For instance, Legendary Aboriginal activist
Mum Shirl said in her autobiography that her time at the Tent Embassy was:

the beginning of a whole new road for me, another education, and learning about politics. If I
was going to think of a sign along the road of my life that marked, for me, the beginning of
militant Black Power politics, that sign would have printed on it-Aboriginal Embassy. (quoted in
Dow, 2000)

The fact that the Aboriginal ag came to prominence through the Tent Embassy protest is
testament to its signicance for new processes of Aboriginal subject formation.
As well as its signicant role as a site of counterpublic formation, the Embassy was
signicant as a stage through which claims about Land Rights emerging from this
counterpublic could be directed towards the wider national and international public
spheres in other words, it also served as a space for representation (Mitchell, 1995).
Iveson 545

In a speech at the Embassy on 30 July 1972, Roberta Sykes summed up the dissonant space
that had been opened up in Australian politics through the establishment of the Embassy.
Speaking of negotiations between Embassy activists and the Commonwealth Government
about the legal status of the Embassy, she said:

We sat down last night, twelve or fourteen of us, at the same table and we talked into the air and
they talked into the air. They talked about things like articles, constitutions, laws, which they
made. And we talked to them about bloodshed, people in creek beds, people in humpies, people
dying, children dying, lack of food, malnutrition. And they couldnt hear us. Well we want them
to hear us now. What do we want? [Land rights!] When do we want it? [Now!]. (Sykes, 2014
[1972]-b: 179180)

This is a brilliant statement of the fundamental challenge posed by the Embassy, its utter
non-conformity with the spatial and political coordinates of the colonial Australian nation-
state (see also Muldoon and Schaap, 2012).
The discussion and debate that took place in and around the Embassy was eventually
formalised into a ve-point plan for Land Rights.

1. Control of the Northern Territory as a State within the Commonwealth of Australia; the
parliament in the NT to be predominantly Aboriginal with title and mining rights to all
land within the Territory.
2. Legal title and mining rights to all other presently existing reserve settlement throughout
Australia.
3. The preservation of all sacred sites throughout Australia.
4. Legal title and mining rights to areas in and around all Australian capital cities.
5. Compensation monies for lands not returnable to take the form of a down-payment of
six billion dollars and an annual percentage of gross national income (Newfong, 2014
[1972]: 139).

The ve-point plan was presented to Labor Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam, who
visited the Embassy to talk to activists and made important changes to Opposition policy on
Aboriginal self-determination and Land Rights immediately after his discussions. (Whitlam
was eventually elected in November 1972. While he did not agree to all elements of the plan,
his Government took some important steps in enacting Aboriginal land rights, including the
consolidation and hand-back of several blocks of formerly private housing to the newly
established Aboriginal housing company in Redfern and of land in the northern territory.)
As we shall see, maintaining the occupied space of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy as both a
space for counterpublic formation and a space for representation towards the wider public
sphere constituted one of the key challenges facing Aboriginal activists and their supporters.

Defending and extending the Embassy: The site as both venue and object
of public debate
After its initial lucky break, the Embassy eventually became the target of state intervention
that sought to undermine its existence. In May 1972, the Minister for the Interior agged the
introduction of a new ordinance revoking the legal loophole that had oered the Embassy
protection from removal. With this threat in place, Embassy occupants were oered a formal
space where they might be able to establish a kind of club house if they would only pack up
their tents. This was dismissed unequivocally as John Newfong put it: we didnt come here
for a club, we came to get land rights (quoted in Robinson, 1993: 128). He told a
546 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

Tribune journalist that They are not going to be able to move us without using force and
that will be more harmful to them than to us (quoted in Robinson, 1993: 128).
Unable to enforce their compromise, the Government gazetted the ordinance in July
that made the Embassy subject to new trespass laws. The irony of laws of trespass being used
by the colonial state against Aboriginal people was not lost on the Embassy occupants.
The eventual repression of the Embassy in a series of three violent police raids in July of
1972, in which hundreds of police clashed with thousands of protesters, had at least three
crucial eects for the process of counterpublic formation that was taking shape through the
Embassy occupation.
First, police repression drew renewed national and international press attention
to the Embassy occupation, several months after the initial media interest in the
establishment of the Embassy had died down.1 Second, police repression reinforced, and
even extended, the solidarities that had emerged during the occupation over the previous six
months. Roberta Sykes (2014 [1972]-a: 166) observed at the time that police attacks aroused
the anger of even the most conservative blacks. Gary Foley (2001) similarly noted that after
the pictures of police violence circulated around Australia:

Even Faith Bandler of FCAATSI, who had in 1969-70 fought Black Power attempts
to aboriginalise her organisation, now came out and said that the Government action
against the Embassy had brought everybody together and strengthened ties between the
black people.

This solidarity was also in evidence at the August 1972 national conference of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Councillors, largely made up of appointees to State and
Territory Advisory Councils. In staging of this conference, the Government deliberately
sought to marginalise the Embassy activists by positioning them as an urban and/or
militant minority in the wider Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. The
white Minister for Aborigines was somewhat taken aback when the conference ended up
passing resolutions in favour of Land Rights, and in support of the re-establishment of the
Embassy, having earlier invited delegates from the Embassy to address the meeting
(Robinson, 1993: 175; see also Dow, 2000).
A third consequence of state repression was that Embassy activists were increasingly
forced to divide their attention between advancing their claims for Land Rights through
the Embassy, and protecting the Embassy itself. While Roberta Sykes noted that even before
the raids, everyone connected with it including myself sensed the constant threat of
closure, the raids introduced a new dynamic. Reecting on the situation immediately after
those raids, Sykes (2014 [1972]-a: 168) wrote at the time:

If [black] hopes and aspirations are symbolised by the ragged embassy tent, as indeed they are,
then it is up to us to prove to the government that we are determined, rst, to retain the symbol,
and then to work toward the hopes and aspirations.
Here, we see the emergence of a dynamic that has characterised the Embassy occupation ever
since the productive but dicult relationship between the Embassy occupation as a means
to an end (the staging of claims about land rights) and as an end in itself (a symbolic
and open Aboriginal public space as against state-sponsored visions of the site). This dual
function reects the over-lapping geographies of counterpublic formation that I highlighted
earlier, in which sites of occupation are both venues and objects of public address and
debate. It is a fraught balancing-act for Embassy occupants and activists.
The tensions between maintaining the Embassy as a means to an end and as an end in
itself can be further illustrated with reference to a few episodes in the life of the Embassy
Iveson 547

since 1972. After its violent repression in July 1972, the Embassy was re-established
sporadically to coincide with protests over a variety of issues over the next couple of decades.
In 1988, the spatial context of the Embassy changed signicantly, with the opening of a
new Parliament House further up Capital Hill from the former Parliament House. For a
while, the Old Parliament House across the road from the Embassy was used as a venue for
the National Portrait Gallery. It currently houses the Museum of Australian Democracy.
In 1992, the Embassy was permanently, although still illegally, re-established. This began
with a temporary occupation of the Old Parliament House by dozens of activists including
original Embassy activists like Billy Craigie, Isobel Coe and Kevin Gilbert along with other
high-prole and more mainstream Aboriginal activists like Charles Perkins. The protesters
presented a Declaration of Aboriginal Sovereignty to the Minister for Aboriginal Aairs
Robert Tickner. While the expensive new Parliament House has a mosaic in its Forecourt
based on the work of an Aboriginal artist from the western desert, those who re-occupied the
Embassy site and the old Parliament House argued that such recognition was token, because
genuine progress on the political and legal recognition Land Rights had been non-existent.
Billie Craigie said:

. . . twenty years down the track we found we had to re-establish the Embassy because Aboriginal
aairs was starting to stagnate back to the position prior to 72 . . . Were now asking the
politicians and the rest of white Australia to recognise us as a race of people and to recognise
us as the sovereign owners of this country. (quoted in The Age, 4 February 1992: 13)

Four of the protesters were arrested. The arrests were peacefully and deliberately provoked
so that those arrested could challenge the Crowns ownership of the land and claims of
trespass, by taking the matter of Land Rights to the International Court of Justice. They
were not granted leave to do so by the Magistrate, who ned them for trespass.
Eorts to dismantle the Embassy have been initiated by various politicians on several
occasions since then in 1994 during an Inquiry into Protest on Parliamentary Land, in 1995
in response to its listing on the Heritage Register, in 1999, in 2005, and controversially again
in 2012 (for details, see Iveson, 2014b). On none of these occasions were police used to break
up the Embassy. Since 1972, the state seems to have learnt its lesson about the perverse
eects of violence and police force as a strategy to erase the Embassy Newfong had been
right about it hurting them more than us. But considerable energy has been expended on
defending the Embassy and ghting o these attempts at erasure through marginalisation
and/or recuperation. And of course, in between these sporadic government interventions,
much more energy and resources have been expended maintaining the Embassys on-going
presence over a remarkably long period.
What purposes have been served through this lengthy occupation? For the vast majority
of the past 40 years, the Embassy has been a quiet place occupied only by a handful of
people. They maintain the Embassy grounds. They talk with curious locals and tourists
about the issues of Land Rights and Aboriginal sovereignty. They provide a spot to stay
for activists passing through Canberra. Even when occupied in this manner, the Embassy
serves a symbolic political purpose, as an embodied representation of the persistence of some
Aboriginal peoples claims that sovereignty over Australia was never ceded.
However, at other times, the Embassy site comes alive as the site for particular actions in
the service of this agenda. At these times, it temporarily emerges again as a stage for claim-
making and/or a site for discussion and counterpublic formation. Sometimes this occurs in
conjunction with other signicant sites. For instance, in 1998, Wadjularbinna Nulyarimma,
Isobel Coe, Billy Craigie and Robbie Thorpe, all from the Aboriginal Embassy, brought a
charge of genocide in the ACT Supreme Court against the Australian Prime Minister and all
548 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

members of the Commonwealth Parliament, alleging that the new native title legislation
passed by the Parliament would hasten the genocide of Aboriginal people. A full day of
the hearing was held at the Embassy, along with several others sessions, to enable
testimonies to be given in this more appropriate space. This remarkable case ultimately
failed at law. Nonetheless, in his decision, Justice Crispin recognised that genocide had
occurred in Australia: There is ample evidence to satisfy me that acts of genocide were
committed during the colonisation of Australia, and his decision incorporated many pages
of testimonies he had heard during the trial to support that conclusion (this case is detailed in
Balint, 2014).
In 2000, Isobel Coe from the Embassy led the establishment of a new Embassy in Sydney,
just outside the grounds of the University of Sydney where I now work. While at various
times Canberra had been the right place to be, in 2000 the worlds attention was focused on
Sydney for the Olympics, and so thats where the Embassy went (Elder et al., 2006). This was
a particularly interesting instance of the Embassy being conceived of as a counterpublic
space in a more mobile sense to paraphrase the Greek conception of the polis that
Hannah Arendt (1958) has written about, wherever we are, we are the Embassy.
More recently, the Embassy has served as an important space for critique and protest
directed to the Commonwealth Governments Intervention in the Northern Territory, which
has included (among other things) the introduction of income management, the closure of
community-run employment schemes, changes to land tenure on Aboriginal settlements,
alcohol and pornography bans all of which has been enable only through the
suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act.
In such events, I would suggest, there is signicant political pay-o for the signicant
human, economic and political resources that have been devoted to maintaining the
occupation of the Embassy site.

Part 3: Making space public through occupation: Lessons from the

Aboriginal Tent Embassy
In this section, I seek to draw out some of the implications of this account of the Aboriginal
Tent Embassy for our understanding of the process of making space public through
insurgent occupation. As noted in the introduction, this is no easy matter. No two
occupations will be the same, so generalising from the experience of any one should be
approached with some caution. But the challenge of generalising from this particular
occupation goes even deeper, precisely because of the spatial politics that are in play in
the Australian settler colonial context. In what follows, I oer two sets of lessons from
the Embassy one about how space is made public through occupation, the other about
whose space is made public through occupation in a context of colonial dispossession. As we
shall see, these two sets of reections do not necessarily sit comfortably side-by-side a point
to which we will return in the concluding reections.

Lesson 1: The challenges of occupation Location, duration, social reproduction and

spatial relations
The Embassys counterpublic geography draws our attention to some of the dynamics that
are unleashed in attempts to make space public for the two distinct but related purposes of
counterpublic formation and public representation. In their eorts to enact both formation/
withdrawal and representation through occupation, Embassy activists have had to navigate
Iveson 549

a series of challenges concerning location, duration, social reproduction and spatial

relations, each of which will be considered in turn below.
Perhaps most obviously, nding the right location for an occupation that seeks to enable
both formation and representation of a counterpublic is crucial. People establishing
occupations are likely to want to occupy a site with symbolic signicance, to ensure that
their site works eectively as a space for representation. But for an occupation to work also
as a space for withdrawal and formation, its location also has to aord activists sucient
time to establish themselves before being shut down by authorities. Inevitably, this is dicult
to achieve. As we saw above, in the case of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the location of the
Embassy at a highly symbolic site where activists could not (initially) be forcefully removed
was a matter of luck. On the other side of the world some 40 years later, Occupy Wall Street
activists made their own luck in choosing a site for occupation over which police (initially)
had no authority to remove their encampment. As the Embassy became established, activists
continued to move between using the site for the staging of outwardly oriented claims and
for the long internal discussions and relationship-building that might eventually produce
those claims. As with many contemporary occupations in the face of austerity and corporate
capitalism, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy did not initially convene around a xed set of
proposals for reform, and it attracted its fair share of criticism as a consequence.
Nonetheless, through the lengthy discussions that took place at the site itself among
diverse Aboriginal (and non-Aboriginal) groups, and in the wider Aboriginal public
sphere in response to the event of the Embassy, specic claims began to emerge in
particular, the ve point plan noted above.
Inevitably, occupations will provoke responses from authorities seeking to restore the
order of the site that has been contested by its occupation. Sometimes such responses
backre, as when state-led eorts to forcefully end the Embassy actually generated just
the kind of publicity and attention that the activists sought. The emotional intensity of
witnessing and experiencing those moments of violent repression helped to forge even
stronger solidarity among Embassy occupants, and between Embassy occupants and other
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal on-lookers who may not have been initially sympathetic to
either their aims or methods (on the signicance of emotions in counterpublic formation, see
Sziarto and Leitner, 2010). This has been an on-going dynamic, and it has certainly been
replicated in other contemporary occupations for instance, the infamous arrest of
hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protestors on a march over Brooklyn Bridge is one
contemporary example of a police action that actually generated substantial public
interest in the protest.
Nonetheless, in the face of sustained attempts to restore order by breaking up
occupations, participants in occupations must inevitably confront temporal questions
about duration. Attending to the endurance of occupations is just as important as
attending to the eventfulness of their establishment. At key points, activists have to
confront dicult choices about whether or not to abandon the occupation in the face of
on-going state subordination and violence and the increasing diculty of maintaining a
permanent presence at a xed site. Facing such choices, tensions can emerge between
defence of the site as a means to an end of on-going formation and representation, and
defence of the site almost as an end in itself in which establishing permanence becomes an
over-riding goal. Staying put has risks, personally and politically. Extended occupations risk
containing forms of politics to a particular place in a manner that becomes predictable rather
than remarkable, and contained rather than expansive. Famously, in 1972, the Embassy
activists eventually decided to vacate the site, and while the manner of their vacation was to
550 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

some extent on their own terms, their hand was clearly forced by on-going threats of violent
repression. The Embassy was subsequently permanently re-established. But it has not stayed
put completely, and it has a lesson for us concerning the relationship between territorial
xity and a more exible mobility. The shifts of the occupation away from the Embassy site
to the New Parliament House, the ACT Supreme Court, and to Sydney during the
Olympics have been quite powerful forms of political action, even as they have drawn
on the original Embassy site as a kind of basecamp. Likewise, contemporary occupiers have
discussed the various merits of focusing their energies on centralised, high prole
occupations, as distinct from an eort to a more mobile ethic and practice of occupation
a shift from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere, as some have put it.2
To extend an occupation for any signicant duration is also an exercise in social
reproduction, in which occupants experiment with alternative forms of domesticity and
subsidiarity as well as alternative forms of political action. By its nature, occupation
involves occupants in apparently private activities of eating, washing, sleeping etc. But
for participants in occupations, these apparently private activities are also deeply public,
in that they are attempts to enact new ways of being together that challenge existing regimes
of publicity (see also Butler, 2015). The Embassy occupation has involved activists in moving
between a kind of quasi-domestic quietude and frenetic moments of publicly oriented
activity, and the same can be said of many contemporary occupations. These structures
and experiences of social reproduction are a signicant aspect of the political geography
of occupation alongside the more visible moments of publicly oriented activity. Indeed, they
have been a point of contention with spatial authorities. An experience shared by Embassy
occupants and those who have occupied sites like Zucotti Park more recently is that
authorities have sought to justify their removal on the grounds that their occupations
have exceeded the time-space of legitimate protest and become private camps that
erode the publicness of public space.
Having focused on the topographical location of an occupation, and its duration and
reproduction, it is also important to think topologically about occupation. An occupation is
not only sustained by its occupants. And its occupants are not permanently bound to the site
of occupation. Thinking about occupations as a form of counterpublic geography requires us
to consider them in relation to the sites and media (and times) through which such
counterpublics are made, and which form part of their social space. As noted above, the
Embassy in 1972 had strong connections with activities in places like Redfern in Sydney, where
Aboriginal people were experimenting with new forms of housing, care, service provision and
the arts. Aboriginal people involved in those eorts provided material support to the Embassy
even if they were not present at the Embassy for any or all of its duration. And many of the
high prole Embassy occupants moved between the Embassy and such other sites in securing
and sustaining such support (see for example Sykes, 1998). It is also important to note that
counterpublics are not distinct groups with xed boundaries. As Hansen puts it, there are
always seams and overlays between dierent types of publicity. Participants in the Aboriginal
Embassy engaged with others in the labour movement, the student movement, the anti-war
movement and the feminist movement, among others. Sometimes these engagements were
tense as when a group of Aboriginal women involved in the Embassy confronted a group
of white Australian feminists about their qualied support for the Embassy.3

Lesson 2: Occupation as Aboriginal sovereignty in a context of colonial dispossession

I have argued above that the Embassy teaches us something about the dynamics of
counterpublic geographies of formation and representation through occupation.
Iveson 551

However, the Aboriginal counterpublic is not like other counterpublics in one crucial respect it
has a distinct relationship to the land that forms the basis of the Australian nation-state. The
Australian nation-state is built upon the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples. The
insurgent occupation of the ground across the road from Parliament House in Canberra was
at once a process of political subjectication and a declaration and enactment of sovereignty by a
people dispossessed of their land through colonial invasion, dispossession and occupation. The
actions of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy activists are in this sense a quite particular to the
indigenous people of a colonised nation-state. Indeed, they constitute a declaration that all
forms of democratic politics within the Australian nation-state including those of other
counterpublics are taking place on stolen land. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson says:

Indigenous people cannot forget the nature of migrancy and position all non-Indigenous people
as migrants and diasporic. Our ontological relationship to land, the ways that country is
constitutive of us, and therefore the inalienable nature of our relationship to land, marks a
radical, indeed incommensurable, dierence between us and the non-Indigenous. This
ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share, and which
cannot be shared, with the postcolonial subject whose sense of belonging in this place is tied
to migrancy. (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 11)

The Embassy occupation draws attention to, and challenges, the bracketing out of
indigenous dispossession as the basis for the broader politics of citizenship in Australia.
To make this observation about the particularity of indigenous identities and authorities
in a settler colonial context is not to say that alliances with others are not possible, or that
the Aboriginal counterpublic is ultimately a separate camp in the sense discussed earlier in
this article. The Embassy involved a number of productive and powerful solidarities between
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. But the settler colonial context infuses those
solidarities with a distinct dynamic, based on mutual recognition of dispossession, and the
need to address this dispossession rather than continuing to pursue a politics of equality and
citizenship premised on its continuation. For Moreton-Robinson (2015: 7), [t]here can be no
equal partnership while there is still illegal dispossession.
Thinking about Tent Embassy occupation as an instance of Aboriginal people enacting
sovereignty through an act of trespass against the Crown puts a dierent spin on the issues of
location, duration, social reproduction and spatial relations discussed above. In the
establishment of this Embassy in 1972, in its on-going occupation, and in the subsequent
establishment of Embassies in other places in Australia, public open spaces have become a
key tactical resource for Aboriginal assertions of sovereignty. While such spaces are owned
by the Crown or by private property owners, they also lend themselves to articulations of
Aboriginal ownership that operate outside of (and sometimes in parallel with) native title
claims pursued through the legal system. In the Australian legal system, for Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people, the burden of proof for repossession of our lands is now placed
on us, and we must demonstrate proof in accordance with the white legal structure in courts
controlled predominantly by white men (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 16). Embassies take
possession of public spaces against the forms of ownership and possession authorised by
the colonial nation-state, and in their very duration they assertively challenge that authority.

Concluding reflections
My account of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy has been oered as a contribution to the on-
going development of a critical geography of occupation one that might be of use to
scholars interested in the process of making space public, and also to contemporary
552 Environment and Planning A 49(3)

activists who could well look to the Embassy experience to understand better the kinds of
challenges that occupation might generate. I have approached this by considering the
Embassy as an instance of the making of a counterpublic geography, shaped by a form
of spatial subordination that generates a distinct set of dynamics. A potential risk with the
idea of counterpublics is that it conjurs an image of the public sphere that is populated by a
group of heroic counterpublics up against an unchanging dominant public. This has not
been my intention. Rather, in developing this concept, I am suggesting that all those of us
engaged in dierent forms of public address do so in a dynamic social eld that is structured
(but not fully determined) by inequalities of power and resources. Reecting on Negt and
Kluges approach to publics and counterpublics, Miriam Hansen (1993: xxxix) argues:

the question of what constitutes a counterpublic cannot be answered in any singular,

foundational manner but is a matter of relationality, of conjunctural shifts and alliances, of
making connections with other publics and other types of publicity.
She goes on to argue that part of task of theory is to identify points of contiguity . . ., of overlap,
among diverse and disparate counterpublic projects (xxxix). My attempt to tell the story of the
Embassy occupation and make some theoretical observations about occupation has taken just
this approach. And it has emphasised the signicance of geography in that theorisation.
To occupy is to mobilise a site simultaneously as a space for formation/withdrawal and a
space for representation. While this is a fraught process, the Embassy experience shows that
occupation also has the potential to work spectacularly well as a means for people to enact a
politics by making another space within that space (Ranciere, 2009: 282). As Vasudevan
(2015: 316) argues, occupation is as a political process that pregures and materializes the
social order which it seeks to enact and a process that speaks to the city as an enduring site
of political contestation. And while the Embassy is of a dierent time and place to other
recent occupations, there is surely considerable resonance between these events. The
Embassy draws our attention to the declarative and demonstrative dimensions of
occupation as a form of public-making; the physical demands of occupation, from
everyday maintenance to coping with violence; the fraught relation between occupation as
a means to an end and an end in itself; the necessity of adjustments to shifting strategies of
policing, and; the rhythms of occupation, as it moves between mobility and stasis, and
between periods of quiet solidarity and moments of eruption.
But while there is indeed resonance, there is also a warning to those of us interested in the
development of a critical geography of occupation to do so modestly, and to think carefully
through the particular dynamics and issues of dierent occupations. To begin with, while
counterpublics are dened by their subordination, this does not imply that they are
necessarily progressive or just or democratic indeed, other occupations of sites close to
the Aboriginal Tent Embassy have been quite regressive in their politics (e.g. Iveson, 2007:
64). It is crucial that we ask about the kinds of claims and authority that are enacted by any
counterpublic that uses occupation as a spatial strategy. And the Aboriginal Tent Embassy
enacts a quite particular kind of claim, founded in a particular assertion of authority. It was
an enactment of land rights. And, as Heather Goodall has argued, on-going claims to land by
Aboriginal people who had struggled to maintain their associations with country and
resisted its colonisation were the authority for the Embassy, and the basis for the
activism around land in the 1970s (Goodall, 1996: 414). She continues:

The Embassy had ung onto the public stage the powerful idea of land rights. Land had been the
underlying current for so long in Aboriginal politics, but it had not until then reached the wider
public debate. Now there was a urry of political responses. (Goodall, 1996: 417)
Iveson 553

With the Embassy and other activism, There could be no return to the pretence that land
justice was not a central issue for Aboriginal people and therefore for all Australians
(Goodall, 1996: 417). So, if the Embassy story can inspire those engaged in occupations
for justice, its on-going presence is also a powerful reminder about the status of the land that
we might occupy for insurgent political purposes. In Australia, at least, the activists of the
Aboriginal Tent Embassy insist that any space that people might try to make public always
was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. An index of Australian newspaper coverage of the police repression of the Embassy in July 1972 has
been compiled by Gary Foley at his Koori Web: see www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1970s/
emb72/nwsdx.html
2. See for example the 2011 discussion at Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org/2011/11/25/
occupy_everywhere_michael_moore_naomi_klein
3. This confrontation is documented in the 1972 documentary film Ningla A-Na, directed by
Alessandro Cavadini.

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