Aboriginal tent embassy burns down

On Monday, fire destroyed the Kuradji Aboriginal tent embassy 
established almost four years ago to guard a sacred site at a 
controversial housing development at Sandon Point near Wollongong 
in NSW.

Three people in the embassy at the time escaped injury when the 
fire broke. Police refused to say if the blaze was deliberately 
lit. The tent embassy was staffed 24 hours a day and was set up 
to guard a 6000-year-old burial site uncovered by a storm in 
1998.

"There were about three people inside the actual tent embassy", a 
police spokesman said. "One felt the warmth of it all and then 
looked and saw the flames." The trio managed to escape the iron 
and wood structure.

The latest fire follows a series of suspicious blazes at the 
Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra. The embassy, on lawns 
opposite Old Parliament House, has been attacked three times 
since June 2003. Residents of the embassy said a fire, which 
started in a six-man tent on August 16 this year, was a 
deliberate attack while another suspicious fire destroyed a shed 
and a tent on April 10. In June 2003, a shipping container at the 
site was severely damaged by fire. Police said there could have 
been an attempt to set another building alight at the time.

Not all the suspected attacks on the Canberra embassy have been 
carried out under such mysterious circumstances. "Every time we 
put in decent structures at the embassy the NCA (National Capital 
Authority) and the police move in and take them down" Gandra 
Penola, Aboriginal Tent Embassy representative told the media in 
July. "They are complaining that the embassy is an eyesore, what 
about the eyesore the government is turning our country into with 
mining, farming, logging, nuclear waste dumps, detention centres, 
it just goes on and on."

Aboriginal tent embassies have found themselves under violent 
attack ever since the first one was established outside the Old 
Parliament House in Canberra in July 1972. However, the 
Aboriginal people have not been deterred from their struggle to 
put their issues before the rest of the Australian community in 
one of the few ways available to sparsely resourced grass roots 
organisations.

In recent times Aboriginal communities have worked to maintain 
the Victoria Park Embassy in Sydney, Jarrah Going Home Camp near 
Bendigo in Victoria, and the Lake Cowal Embassy in Central West 
NSW.