Sovereign Union calls Frontier Wars Commemorative March for ANZAC Day

Giovanni Torre
Giovanni Torre Published April 16, 2025 at 5.30am (AWST)

Professor Ghillar, Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union and last surviving member of the founding four of the 1972 Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra has urged people to join the Commemorative March for the Frontier Wars and Conflicts on 25 April this year.

"It has been 15 years that we have marched up Anzac Parade on Anzac Day highlighting the need to recognise the frontier conflicts," he said.

Professor Anderson noted that atrocities perpetrated against First Nations Peoples in Australia are well recorded beginning with the Dutch in Western Australia, and that the British "embedded terrorism" with Governor Phillip's Orders to kill Aboriginal people, severe their heads and put the heads on stakes along the defined Limit of Location of the colony, with the words: "Instill in them a universal terror."

"What arose from the colonialists was the constant stealing and abuse of the local Aboriginal women, which in turn triggered an Aboriginal response of a military kind. To understand that response one only needs to read the colonial history associated with Pemulwuy, of the Bidjegal clan of the Dharug in Botany Bay and surrounds," Professor Anderson said.

The Indigenous rights legend pointed out that Governor Lachlan Macquarie's 1816 Proclamation created "a right for colonialists to kill Aboriginal people, including the elderly, women and children, whom he described as unavoidable collateral damage".

"Then in 1824 Martial Law was proclaimed by Governor Brisbane against the Wiradjuri because of Windradyne's attacks on the illegal squatters inside the Wiradjuri territories. As the colonies expanded history shows that there are significant Aboriginal leaders all over this continent who organised and fought against the illegal colonial regimes," he said.

Professor Anderson, the Head of State of the Euahlayi People's Republic, said the British unleashed the destructive elements of "gunpowder and brandy".

"As a consequence of our Old Ones fighting guerilla war campaigns, the squattocracy developed their policy – for one white person killed... 'kill as many of you as we can'. Those who survived the killings became political prisoners locked in chains far from their country, others were tied together by neck chains, walked out onto a small reef off the coast, tied to an anchor and drowned by the surging tides," he said.

Professor Anderson said excluding Frontier conflict commemorations from Anzac memorials "cannot be accepted".

"It is a story that has to be told and remembered. Our people did not have to leave these shores to fight in a war. The colonial administrators of England, who were governed by the British Admiralty, understood the need to avoid declaring war against the First Nations of Australia, because of future ramifications. The consequences of admitting that they were wars would mean that the English monarchs at the time would have been obligated to negotiate peace pacts and settlements with the conquered Peoples," he said.

"This would have made it impossible for the courts of today to ignore our legal rights that flow from being conquered Peoples. Nevertheless, as unconquered Nations and Peoples our unceded sovereign rights remain, and the laws of the ancient kingdom remain. Thus the Crown does not have any authority to alter our Laws and customs, nor to interfere with them, even under their own law. The High Court decision in Mabo did not address this question because it was not asked in the original application."

Professor Anderson said Macquarie's Proclamation of 1816 "posed a serious threat" against the British claims to dominion over Australia, because it "creates a legal dilemma for the monarch's right to claim dominion over what they were trying to call a land without any other occupants".

"The Proclamations of Governors Macquarie and Brisbane erode any pretences of an unoccupied country. Mabo also created more dilemmas for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples than any rights they espouse were given to us from the recognition of Native Title."

He said present day authorities are concerned that formal recognition of the Frontier conflicts and armed resistance by the First Nations Peoples in Australia will "have serious ramifications".

"They know it and I know it," he said.

"Their efforts to avoid recognition of the Frontier conflicts are significantly more important than the public realises.

"We will never let his country forget that our Peoples have suffered from great atrocities, which to this day cause enormous human suffering."

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