ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the spatial politics of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. 1 It considers how a forty-year-long struggle for control over a patch of grass not much bigger than a football field relates to a struggle over sovereignty and the space of the nation itself. My aim is to show how the fight to establish and maintain the Tent Embassy is an ongoing fight to establish and maintain a genuinely political public space in a place that is meant to be the physical and symbolic ‘centre’ of politics in Australia. The making of the Embassy is the making of a stage upon which Aboriginal people have developed political identities, and made claims on each other, on the Australian nation-state, and indeed on the world beyond. Crucially, as we will see, political public spaces like this have to be made, to be taken – they are rarely granted.
