King Charles III Heckled by Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous Australian Senator

Shortly after King Charles III had finished making remarks in Australia’s Parliament on Monday, a voice rang out from the back of the hall. “You are not our king,” shouted Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous senator and activist for Aboriginal rights. “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us.”

As security guards hustled Ms. Thorpe out of the chamber, she continued to heckle the king, demanding that Britain enter a treaty with Australia’s Indigenous population and accusing British colonizers of genocide.

“Our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” said Ms. Thorpe, wearing a traditional possum skin cloak and shaking her fist at Charles, as the guards backed her toward the door. “You destroyed our land.”

Once out of the room, Ms. Thorpe could be heard shouting an epithet about the British “colony” in Australia. The king watched impassively from the stage and along with his wife, Queen Camilla, left the reception a few minutes later.

It was a jarring interruption of Charles’s first visit to Australia since becoming king in 2022, and it revived a perennial question about how long the British monarch will reign over Australia. When that question was last put to Australians in 1999, they voted against becoming a republic by 54.8 percent to 45.2 percent.