Invasion Day rally in Perth: a Noongar view

Roxy Moore is a Noongar lawyer and community organiser from Boorloo Perth. She published a piece in Overland, 'From invasion to terror: white supremacy and the “Australian” state', which described the Perth Invasion Day rally, the attempted massacre there, and the implications. The Australian Parliamentary inquiry into racism against First Nations people is one response to the event in Boorloo Perth.

Extracts follow from Moore's article:

I know there are lots of learnings, on all sides [among police and rally organisers], about how we deal with this. But it never should have got to the point where, allegedly, a terrorist threw a live bomb into the crowd at the Invasion Day rally Boorloo on 26 January 2026, and we must make sure it never happens again. This starts with immediate Government action ...

In Parliament, we heard support from all political parties assuring Aboriginal people that they “stand with us” and our right to protest on Invasion Day. Honestly, it’s quite bizarre hearing this support given the many years politicians and the media have spent demonising Invasion Day protestors and even refusing to call it an Invasion Day protest. It makes me wonder how demonstrating this support serves their individual political agendas. Are we being used as pawns in a much bigger political scheme, or is this country finally ready to reckon with its racism problem? ...

We need to address racism at its very roots. Truth-telling and accountability are the antidotes to racism and hate and are steps towards valuing Black lives. Relationship building between each other, and across difference, is another ...

White supremacists, generally speaking, see us — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — as a threat to them, to their property, to their identity, to their way of life. That is why they are so repulsed by Invasion Day rallies — where we gather to tell the truth of the unspoken and unrecognised violent, colonial history and ongoing injustices that our people experience daily.

“Australia” is founded on white supremacy: from terra nullius, to the Frontier Wars, to slavery and dispossession from our lands, to the White Australia policy, to the Stolen Generations, to current day Black deaths in custody and the destruction of country and sacred sites by mining companies ...

The root cause of racism and hatred towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — and all Black, brown and people of colour in the colony — is built into the very bones of settler-colonial “Australia”.

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Picture credit: Australia Day protest, Brisbane, 2007 (David Jackmanson/Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons)