An independent senator shouts at King Charles just after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, reports BBC.
The king faced the shout on the second official day of his engagements in the country.
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian woman also a senator, kept shouting for a minute before she was escorted away by the security. The ceremony where the senator interrupted was held at the capital city of Canberra.
The king had just walked away from a lectern to rejoin Queen Camilla sitting on the stage when Thorpe started shouting as she walked forwards from the back of the assembly.
Claiming of genocide against “our people”, she could be heard yelling: “This is not your land, you are not my king.”
The ceremony concluded without any reference to the incident, and the royal couple proceeded to meet hundreds of people who had waited outside to greet them.
Australia is a Commonwealth country where the King serves as the head of state.
Thorpe, who is an independent senator from Victoria, has long advocated for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.
Australia is the only ex-British colony without one, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people emphasise that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown.
Afterwards, Thorpe told media that she had wanted to send a “clear message” to the king. “To be sovereign you have to be of the land,” she said. “He is not of this land.”
She said the king needed to instruct the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the first peoples.
“We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country - but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide.”
Thorpe, who was wearing a traditional possum skin cloak, described the late Queen Elizabeth II as “colonizing” when she was sworn in as a senator in 2022.
Despite the protest many others were happy to see the royals, with people queueing outside Parliament House all morning in the punishing Canberra sun, waving Australian flags.
However, the King and Queen had arrived in Canberra earlier in the day and were greeted by a reception line of politicians, schoolchildren and Ngunnawal Elder Aunty Serena Williams, a representative of the Indigenous people.
They were given a traditional welcome into the Great Hall of Canberra’s Parliament House to the sound of a digeridoo.
The king spoke about indigenous communities and what he had learnt from them saying his own experience had been “shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom”.
“In my many visits to Australia, I have witnessed the courage and hope that have guided the nation’s long and sometimes difficult journey towards reconciliation," he said.
But as he sat down the shouts of Thorpe's protest rang around the hall.
Buckingham Palace has made no official comment on Thorpe's protest, instead focussing on the crowds who had turned up to see the King and Queen in Canberra.
Bd-Pratidin English/ Afsar Munna
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