‘Making space public’ through occupation: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra

Abstract

Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect. These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for ‘making space public’. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the critical geographical literatures on occupation and public space, through analysis of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – a politically motivated occupation of a patch of land in the Australian capital that is now entering its 45th year. The Embassy activists mobillised occupation in the process of making and sustaining a counterpublic. Counterpublic participants face a distinct set of geographical challenges in making space for both withdrawal and representation in the face of spatial subordination. Occupations like the Embassy seek to resolve these challenges by combining both of these activities in a single site. The Embassy draws our attention to two important sets of issues in relation to the counterpublic geography of occupations. First, it has much to teach about how space is made public through occupation, including dynamics related to the location, duration, reproduction and relations of occupation. Second, the Embassy issues a challenge about whose space is made public through occupation – as an embodied enactment of indigenous sovereignty, the Embassy reminds us that democratic politics in settler colonial nations like Australia is premised on a violent dispossession that has yet to be fully acknowledged or addressed.