The chant of Jimmy Clements: I’ll do the honours on my ground, thanks

Jimmy Clements had a message for the people of Australia.

“I have opened your Parliament House on my own ground,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “Now you can go and look at it.”

It was May, 1927.

Jimmy Clements, known as “King Billy”, wasn’t about to obey police instructions to leave the opening of Australia’s parliament house.Credit: IDIDJ Aust

Clements, an Aboriginal man aged around 80, was asserting sovereignty over the land in Canberra on which white Australians had built their parliament house, a white wedding cake of a thing sitting in an empty paddock.

John Noble at the opening of Parliament House, May 1927.Credit: The Burgess Collection, Macleay Museum

As far as he was concerned, although British royals – the Duke and Duchess of York – had been invited to do the honours, he, Jimmy Clements, had done the job righteously by his mere presence. Now it was his pleasure to grant permission to latecomers to his country to visit the building.

The story of Jimmy Clements has been told in various forms ever since he and his fellow Wiradjuri elder John Noble turned up, uninvited, to the ceremonial opening of the parliament building on May 9, 1927.

Clements, real name Nangar but also known as King Billy, and Noble, named Ooloogan but known as Marvellous, have often enough been portrayed as curiosities at the grand event.

Nangar and Ooloogan, however, were initiated men; formidable representatives of their people.

Given events this week, their stand ought properly be seen as the earliest example of Aboriginal protest before royalty at Australia’s parliament house.

Barefoot and accompanied by Clements’ three dogs, the men attracted the attention of officious police who told them to clear off, apparently fearing for the sensibilities of the Duke and Duchess.

Clements and Noble stood their ground.

And glory be, the crowd of invited, handsomely dressed attendees, virtually all 30,000 of them shining examples of the White Australia policy, took the side of the roughly attired Aboriginal men and loudly demanded that the police back off.

“Immediately and instinctively the crowd in the stands rallied to his side,” reported The Argus, referring to Clements.

Jimmy Clements stood his ground at the opening of Australia’s parliament house, Canberra, 1927

“There were choruses of advice and encouragement for him to do as he pleased. A well-known clergyman stood up and called out that the Aborigine had a better right than any man present to a place on the steps of the house of parliament.

“The old man’s persistence and the sympathy of the crowd won him an excellent position and also a shower of small change that must have amounted to 30 or 40 [shillings].”

King Billy and Marvellous were granted prominent spots on the steps of parliament. The Duke and Duchess, far from being offended, later singled out Clements for a royal greeting.

You’d barely believe it.

Fortunately, reporters from newspapers of the day recorded with considerable attention to detail the attendance of Clements and Noble.

Those reports made clear that Clements regarded his attendance as serious business. The Argus described Clements as “an ancient Aborigine, who calls himself King Billy and who claims sovereign rights to the Federal Capital Territory”.

Sovereign rights? It’s a term that rings with political and often ferociously contested meaning in modern Australia.

Why, Senator Lidia Thorpe screamed it in her wildly impolite verbal attack on King Charles III in Australia’s current parliament house only this week.

No one today could misunderstand what Thorpe was on about when she cried “You are not my King. You are not sovereign,” and demanding “give us our land back”.

But in 1927 the very idea that an old Aboriginal man could stand in front of royalty – the Duke of York, King Charles’s grandfather, who later became King George VI – and lay claim to “sovereign rights” of the Australian Capital Territory must have seemed exotic and even shocking in the extreme.

Clements, however, was royalty himself in his world. He was a Wiradjuri “cleverman” – a status given to those invested in ancient lore, who deal in the business of healing both physical and spiritual ills.

He was an impressive figure with a wild tangle of hair and beard. He favoured a chimney pot hat, and he travelled barefoot accompanied by three dogs. He was born around 1848, his birthplace said to have been at the foot of an ancient volcano, Mount Canobolas – or Gaanha Bulla – near today’s NSW city of Orange.

Though a Wiradjuri man, whose vast lands stretch west from the Great Dividing Range in NSW, he was also the nephew of “Queen” Nellie Hamilton of the Canberra-Queanbeyan region, home of the Ngambri and Ngunnawal people.

The relationship invested Clements with the right to declare the new parliament house was on his country.

And so, when he and Noble heard of a Duke and Duchess about to open a new gathering place in Canberra, the two men set out from the Brungle Aboriginal Station, or mission, near Tumut, at the foot of the Australian alps.

They walked barefooted over the mountains for three days, only to find their effort misunderstood.

The Canberra Times thought Clements had come to honour British royalty, and patronisingly reported with surprise he’d carried it off with a measure of decorum.

“Where his dusky forebears have gathered in native ceremonial for centuries past, a lone representative of a fast diminishing race saluted visiting royalty,” the newspaper reported.

“Despite the grotesque garb and untamed mane, the Aborigine comported himself not without dignity.”

The report got right the bit about the ancient nature of the gathering ground. But it missed Jimmy Clements’ message.

He had opened Parliament House himself, whatever anyone thought. It was on his own ground.

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