A big thank you to ICRR in Read Street, Woolloongabba, for putting on the film Ningla A-Na La — Hungry for Our Land.
It was great to catch up and yarn with people supporting First Nations peoples, and to listen to elders in the film and hear about the manner in which they undertook their struggle for land rights and against the Acts in Queensland in the 1970s.
Sadly, nearly everyone shown in the film during the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the parliamentary forecourt in 1972 has now passed. I knew many of those people. It is very good that they had the foresight to document their history of struggle during that campaign for land rights in the 1970s.
A big thank you to the organisers who provided food, tea and coffee, and created a platform for people from diverse anti-colonial struggles to participate in a discussion of the film afterwards.
I have to say that the only two people I recognised in the film who are still active today are Gary Foley and Cheryl Buchanan.
Watch Ningla A-Na | Stream free on SBS On Demand https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/movie/ningla-a-na/32612931559
So many of the others have been claimed by life: Chikka Dixon, Billy Craigie, Maureen Watson, Tiger Bales, Sam Watson Senior, Bob Maza, John Newfong, Paul Coe and Isabel Coe, Jack Mundy — the list goes on.
Dennis Walker was an outstanding advocate for his people, possibly the most articulate I have ever seen. But so too were the many others whose voices and actions formed part of that struggle. In 1974 his mother Oodgeroo (then known as Kath Walker) was travelling on a British Airways flight that was hijacked by Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine PFLP. During her three days in captivity, Aunty Kath wrote two poems on an airline sickbag with a blunt pencil.
If you get a chance, have a look at this film. It gives a very good indication of the pathway followed by our elders.
It was good to see members of the Palestinian community Remah Naji, Omar Ashour and Dr Jamal Nabulsi present at the film and to hear their comments afterwards in a discussion led by Sam Waibura Watson.
One of the tactical ideas in the film is something we unwittingly followed here in Brisbane during the Not Our Law campaign for Palestinian resistance against genocide in this country.
In Canberra, the activists recognised that it was impossible to defeat the police directly in front of Parliament House. Instead, they created a pathway to the embassy — a trap that the police fell into.
The police came and confiscated the tent and various belongings of the tent embassy activists. They left the Aboriginal Tent Embassy wooden plaque and then appeared ready to arrest the people, as they had done violently only a few days before.
But because of the considerable crowd that turned up in support, the police — under orders, no doubt, from the Federal Government — retreated, carrying off umbrellas and incidental articles of little or no value.
The spirit of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and its resistance lives on strongly today.
Here is a link to the film on a channel without the ads that SBS insists on playing on its version.
Ningla A’Na:
In 1972 at the peak of Aboriginal political militancy in Australia, two Italian brothers, Allessandro and Fabio Cavadini, made a film called Ningla a-Na about the “Aboriginal Embassy” demonstrations in Sydney and Canberra that year.
The demonstrations took the reality of a dispossessed people right to the front door of Parliament House in Canberra. Aboriginal activists were able to convey their message to the world as a major television news item. The appalling, health, housing, education and incarceration rates of Aborigines were at last in the public domain.
On “Australia Day”, January 26, 1972, the Tent Embassy was established in response to the McMahon Coalition government’s refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights. A new general purpose lease for Aborigines would be conditional upon their “intention and ability to make reasonable economic and social use of land” and it would exclude all rights they had to minerals and forests.
The reaction was instant and dramatic as Redfern-based Aboriginal activists moved quickly to establish a protest camp on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra. Some of the people involved in its establishment included Gary Foley, Chicka Dixon, Pearl Gibbs and Paul Coe.
Efforts to remove the Tent Embassy were prevented by a flaw in Canberra ordinances. It was discovered that there was no actual prohibition on camping on the parliamentary lawn. This enabled the activists to establish a permanent presence.
It is interesting that a documentary recently screened on ABC TV Black Panther Woman was heavily reliant on this film for footage and for the discussion between Black Women and Feminists about the nature of their struggle.
Thanks to Peter Gray from Radical Times Historical Archive for information about this film.
Ian Curr, 22 August 2026