Blacks Court World Spotlight
The Age
Saturday July 29, 2000
SYDNEY
It's a world away from the Sydney that Olympic Games organisers want to portray.
Twenty Aborigines living in 16 tents, surrounded by a couple of old sofas, a motorised tricycle, a VW Kombi van, piles of dried firewood and a host of other items of less obvious use, such as an upside-down lampshade hanging from a bent coathanger, a shopping trolley covered in clear plastic, and a brass bedhead.
It is not the Sydney that Olympic organisers want the world to see, which is exactly the point. As Sydney Aboriginal tent embassy spokeswoman Isabel Coe puts it: ``We're not part of the charade. Aborigines have been out of sight, put on missions, locked away, for too long. Australia likes to give the impression it's all sweet here but that's not our version of events."
Aboriginal and other protest groups are banned by law from protesting in Olympic Park, so the embassy has been established at Victoria Park, close to the main Olympic ticket office and SOCOG's headquarters.
This central location was chosen precisely because ``we don't want to be out in the middle of nowhere. The whole world is coming, and we want them to see the other Australia, Aboriginal Australia".
To this end, Aborigines living at the tent embassy will conduct tours of the desperately poor Aboriginal housing estates in nearby Redfern. Ms Coe said journalists from international media organisations who had already taken the tours were ``astounded and horrified" by what they had seen.
Future tours, and the future of the embassy, hang on talks between Ms Coe and the South Sydney Council, which is responsible for the site.
The council wants the embassy to confine itself to one tent, and to contain its fires in bins, but the residents say this is not possible.
A council spokesman Damian Furlong said it was in a difficult position. ``If anybody else came and set up tents in the park, we'd throw them straight out, without question."
South Sydney, which includes the suburb of Redfern, has a large Aboriginal population. Mr Furlong said the council was receiving several hundred complaints a day, mostly about loud music.
``If people are to stay there, they'll have to be quieter, and take better care of the place," Mr Furlong said.
``At the moment, there's cars being driven all over it, and that's not on."
Two meetings between protesters and the council were held yesterday, but Ms Coe said agreement was unlikely. The fire could not be contained, she said, because it was sacred, lit from ashes taken from the Canberra tent embassy fires.
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