ABSTRACT
The relationship between the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Australian Parliament has been widely discussed. This chapter reorients our perspective to face the Australian War Memorial. It addresses the following questions: what is the role of race in shaping the relationship between war and policy in Australia? How does the Aboriginal Tent Embassy rearticulate this relationship? Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2006: 388) suggests, ‘the refusal to declare war [might itself be] a tactic of war’ through which the sovereignty of the Australian state is constituted. I will argue that the exclusion of frontier wars from offi cial military commemoration is a powerful symbolic means by which white Australian subjectivity is affi rmed and Indigenous Australians are kept in their place as controllable objects of domestic policy. Inverting Carl Von Clausewitz’s [1832] (1982: 119) account of war as ‘a mere continuation of policy by other means’, I consider the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s challenge to a white racial regime of sovereignty reproduced by the cultural space of the Australian War Memorial and the associated national public holidays of Anzac Day and Australia Day. I present recent events surrounding the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s fortieth anniversary and participation in the Anzac Day parade as evidence of an Indigenous sovereign will that resists policy as a means of incorporation within a white state.
