‘When someone says something nice to me, I just burst into tears’: Inside the mind of Lidia Thorpe

This story is part of the April 12 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

I’m going for a ciggie, wanna come?” Lidia Thorpe is at her office door, slipping on heels. The senator normally goes barefoot in her parliamentary rooms. As we walk through the corridors of “Colonial HQ”, Thorpe, 51, greets the staff like long-lost siblings. “What’s going on, old mate?” she says to a maintenance guy heating his lunch, sunnies on his head. “They tried to sack me yesterday, did you hear about that?”

It’s late last year and the Senate has just censured Thorpe for her “disrespectful and disruptive” heckling of King Charles at an official reception. The censure was nowhere near a sacking, more a ticking-off, but Thorpe revels in being a rebel. A week later, in a pattern of escalating volatility, Thorpe throws papers at Pauline Hanson and flips her middle finger to her colleagues. The Senate suspends her for a day.

We leave the maintenance man to his lunch. “I can’t remember his name, I call him ‘old mate’,” she says, heels clacking down stairs. In the courtyard, Thorpe kicks off her shoes and sinks her toes into the spongy grass. She lights a rollie. “The ground staff, the cleaners, they are the real workers in this building.” She hates hierarchies. She talks about a parliamentary staffer, an “old whitefella”, who was treated shabbily in a desk move. “This is where whitefellas need to respect their elders,” she says.

After 40 minutes, one of her staffers finds us and approaches the senator gently, like one might a hibernating bear. He’s among a crop of earnest Thorpe staffers who, once they locate their boss, are constantly nudging the Greens-senator-turned-independent to the next meeting or vote. (“She’s actually impossible to corral,” one former staffer tells me.)

Thorpe was barred from the chamber after throwing papers towards One Nation leader Pauline Hanson last November.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Do you need me?” Thorpe asks him. “We’ve got a 1pm meeting with the Tamil refugees,” says the staffer. It’s 1pm. “Did this just happen?” Thorpe asks. “No,” he says calmly. “It was in the diary.” We quickly visit the parliamentary dining room – “Oi! You still ’ere?” she shouts to a long-serving security guard along the way – and return to the courtyard, where she listens to the refugees for one hour and 40 minutes. That’s a lot of time on a busy Senate sitting day. She farewells them, emotionally flattened by their stories of family fracture and visa limbo.

Just in these few hours in Canberra, the contradictions in Lidia Thorpe start to emerge. She styles herself as a champion of the battlers but tells me she loves her membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, probably the nation’s most elite club. She talks a big game about respect for elders, but she’s infamous in the Aboriginal community for her excoriating verbal attack on Victorian elder Geraldine Atkinson in a parliamentary meeting room in 2021. She can be empathetic and generous, as she was with the refugees, yet she’s taken to calling fellow Aboriginal senators “the native police”, a slur they consider extremely hurtful (native police were the Indigenous men who, in the 1800s and early 1900s, were recruited by colonial leaders to kill other Aboriginal people away from their own country).

Thorpe’s fiery spray at the King during his state visit last October made global headlinesCredit: Getty Images

In parts of Australia, specifically the inner-city parts, Thorpe’s a hero, her image, fist raised in defiance, painted two storeys high on a Melbourne street corner. Yet a Resolve poll released last December found she’s also the nation’s least liked politician, with a net rating of minus 41 per cent likeability (Barnaby Joyce was next, on minus 22). She’s gifted at parts of her job: she’s a gutsy master of the viral stunt and speaks a sort of protest poetry: “Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” she told the King. Yet she often seems to have the strategic nous of a wrecking ball. She’s raised the profile of historic injustices against Aboriginal people, yet some community leaders believe her antics, and broad unpopularity, now work against the cause.

She agreed to this profile because she wanted people to see there’s much more to her than being “an angry black woman”: “I am that, born and bred to be that. But I’ve also done a lot of good things in my life.” She’s certainly lived a life more varied and turbulent than most politicians (left school at 14, single mother at 17, bankrupt at 40), and one marred by violence and betrayal. But agreeing to the scrutiny of a profile was, I came to realise, crazy-brave for someone who lives with so many contradictions. “She’s a very complicated person,” says the former staffer. “She’s so lovely, warm, friendly and engaging until you have to spend extended time with her and this other side reveals itself. You never really know which Lidia you’re going to get.”

In the lap of Muhammad Ali

On his Australian tour in 1979, the champion boxer Muhammad Ali held a press conference in a Melbourne hotel. Several Aboriginal activists from the nearby suburb of Fitzroy stuck signs to their hats that said “Koori Press” and snuck in. Afterwards, they asked Ali – then possibly the world’s most famous black man – if he’d like to meet some Aboriginal people. Not long after, Ali turned up at Fitzroy’s Victorian Aboriginal Health Service. Inside was five-year-old Lidia Thorpe, who he put on his knee. “I got really scared, apparently,” she says.

The future senator was there that day because three generations of women in her family had worked hard to establish the Aboriginal community-controlled health service from scratch: her remarkable great-grandmother Edna Brown, an elegant lady who raised money to save her people from pauper graves; her grandmother Alma Thorpe, a Gunditjmara activist who helped set up Aboriginal health services across the country; and her mother Marjorie Thorpe, a strong community leader who ended up running the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency. “Lidia comes from a line of incredibly strong and very important Aboriginal matriarchs,” says Victoria University history professor Gary Foley.

When Ali visited Fitzroy, the suburb was the beating heart of the Victorian Aboriginal black power movement, the political crucible that shaped Lidia Thorpe. Black Power, a non-violent movement inspired by the fight for civil rights in America, bloomed in the 1960s and 1970s in Fitzroy, Sydney’s Redfern and South Brisbane. This more radical era in Aboriginal activism saw the Tent Embassy established, the set-up of Aboriginal community-controlled services and frequent street protests, many attended by a young Thorpe. Her grandmother Alma was in the thick of it and often talked politics in her lounge room with the likes of Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose. “Listening in that lounge room shaped my thinking and who I am,” Thorpe says. Later, she says: “First and foremost, I’m a protester.”

Thorpe with her grandmother, Alma Thorpe, one of her matriarch activist forebears.Credit: Courtesy of Lidia Thorpe

Alma Thorpe, now 90, was the first person Thorpe called after the King Charles protest. Two days later, Alma appeared on her son Robbie’s Melbourne community radio program on 3CR. “She’s doing what we taught her to do many moons ago,” said the proud grandmother. But the matriarch had a warning. The “family bloodline” must now stand behind Thorpe. I wondered then whether Thorpe was more isolated from her family than I first thought.

Back in her Canberra office, the senator is talking about her 2022 oath of allegiance to the Queen. A debate had erupted over whether it was said correctly because she’d clearly referred to the Queen’s “hairs”, not “heirs”. Thorpe tells me now it was part of “blackfella comedy”. She says she and her Aboriginal girlfriends say to each other, “How’s your hairs?” It’s a bit inappropriate, she adds. But what does it mean? “Um, hairs on a woman, privately,” she says. So Thorpe is saying that, in her mind, she swore allegiance to the Queen’s pubic hair? A new twist.

But what to make of it? It contradicts her last public statement that she thought “heirs” was pronounced “hairs” and “misspoke”. But that explanation had contradicted the previous one, in which she implied she deliberately swore allegiance to the Queen’s “hairs” (on her head, it was presumed). Mistake or deliberate transgressive joke? It’s impossible to know because, in Thorpe’s world, her story swings around like a weathervane in a storm.

Like in October 2022, when news broke that Thorpe had a relationship with Dean Martin, the former outlaw motorcycle club president. This was big news, as she’d sat on a parliamentary committee that sometimes received confidential information about bikie clubs. In the ensuing furore, Thorpe admitted she “briefly dated” Martin (who had no criminal record). A Senate investigation cleared her, but found she should have notified the committee about the relationship. When that report was released, in March 2023, a vindicated Thorpe stood up in the Senate and retracted her previous explanation. The Greens made her say she dated Martin, she said, but she only kissed him once. “I got mauled by all of you in here for something I did not do!” She didn’t just play the victim card that day, she played the whole deck.

But the former Thorpe staffer said the relationship was months-long and an “open secret”. Also, her then chief of staff, David Mejia-Canales, had mentioned the relationship to the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service, which had reported it to the Australian Federal Police (Mejia-Canales’ PWSS complaint centred on Thorpe’s chaotic office management and requested help for her). Yet to me, Thorpe again insists she kissed Martin once.

I asked the former staffer if they ever witnessed Thorpe change her story. “Every single day,” they said. She didn’t have a good recall of detail, which was understandable, the staffer said, because her memory was affected by her “complex trauma history”: “But at times she said wildly inconsistent or incredibly wrong or unethical things and would have to backtrack.”

We’ll come to the trauma, but the staffer raises a key question when it comes to Thorpe and the national stage. We want our politicians to come from a broad spectrum of life experience – to include, for example, survivors of racism and domestic violence. But how does Parliament accommodate the rough edges of those who haven’t had smooth-running lives? For this staffer, there was a line: only so much could be blamed on trauma. “There are actions that Lidia has taken that are purely her choice. And some of them – like attacking Aunty Geraldine – can’t be excused.”

A village in the city

It’s May 2022 and an elderly woman is taking the stand at the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a formal truth-telling inquiry established by the Victorian government into injustices against the state’s First Peoples. “I’m broken,” says Alma Thorpe, a white tissue folded into her fist.

She had spent the previous 90 minutes detailing an almost total loss of culture. The mob up north still have their culture, she says, but in Victoria, where the massacres and frontier wars were particularly brutal, all that’s left are possum skins and “pretty work”. Alma says her mother Edna – like many Gunditjmara people from the state’s west – was pushed off a mission in 1932 because she was a “half-caste”. She ended up in Fitzroy, the tight-knit Aboriginal “village” where Alma grew up.

Alma tells the commission that government policy encouraged “half-caste” women like her to marry a white man. But, defiantly, Alma searched for an Aboriginal man and found him in Alister Thorpe, a coal worker, logger and Gunnai man from Gippsland, in the state’s east. Lidia Thorpe’s mum Marjorie was the first of their seven children.

In 1973, when Marjorie gave birth to Lidia as a 19-year-old single mother, she was pressured at the hospital to give her up for adoption. But Marjorie refused and four years later married Thorpe’s father, a white carpenter called Roy Illingworth. They separated when Thorpe was in early primary school.

Thorpe at age 3, being examined at the Aboriginal Health Service, Fitzroy, in 1976.Credit: John Lamb

Illingworth spoke to Sky News about his daughter in 2023. He made it clear he still loved her, but said he didn’t trust her and she’d been cruel to him. She had not acknowledged her English and Irish heritage, he said. (Thorpe says she loves her white family but identifies as Aboriginal.)

Illingworth undermined Thorpe’s narrative of a hardscrabble childhood, saying she had been spoiled and didn’t live in public housing flats, as she’d claimed. (She says now that she lived in the flats when firstborn, then as a single mother.) “She got everything she wanted, and she knows that too,” he told Sky’s Andrew Bolt.

Coming from a family of prominent Aboriginal activists,Thorpe (centre) attended many protests as a child.Credit: Courtesy of Lidia Thorpe

If Thorpe felt betrayed by this televised paternal sledge, she doesn’t let on: “I felt sorry and embarrassed for him.”

When Thorpe was in high school in inner-city Melbourne, she punched a boy who called her an ABC (Aboriginal bum cleaner, a common ’80s-era playground taunt). By 14, she’d had enough of the racism and left to work at her Uncle Robbie’s Koori Information Centre. At this point, she’d already suffered from, and witnessed, a lot of violence. “I’ve seen the cuts, bruises and head injuries of these women I’ve been close to in my life. There are just very violent men who like punching women and they are black and white,” she says.

After leaving school, she soon left home in inner Melbourne’s Clifton Hill to escape her stepdad. She went to a homeless hostel and bounced around houses. Then, still 14, she started a relationship with a man twice her age, a 28-year-old butcher. “He took my childhood away, pretty much,” she says. His first blow was delivered when she was 16. She’d wanted to go to the Moomba festival. “I ended up in hospital with a split eye.” The tight-knit Fitzroy community wanted to get him. “But I was groomed, you know, I protected him.” At 17, she had her first child with this man, a son (who turned into a deeply impressive young man). Nine years later, they welcomed a daughter. “I’d had little relationships in between some of those times and it was like, ‘Urgh, might as well go back to what I know.’ ”

Thorpe with her baby son in a 1990 pamphlet encouraging Aboriginal women to breastfeed. With her are (from left) her mum Marjorie, her grandmother Alma, and greatgrandmother Edna Brown.

In her early 20s, she was drugged and raped at a Coburg nightclub in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. “Apparently they just picked which women that they wanted, and then they’d send someone down, chat them up, give them a drug in their drink … I don’t know if they filmed it or what they did with it.” She remembers waking and running from an unfamiliar house. “I walked barefoot, in that dress, through Coburg.”

“Lid”, as her friends and family call her, tells me this at a park near her house, not far from Coburg. At home she does many of her favourite things (apart from op shopping). She loves her tomato plants, weeding, and cleaning pavers with the high-pressure hose. But her house is off-limits. “It’s my queendom … [and] the only safe space my children and I have amongst all the madness.” (Her partner lives separately.) She catalogues a series of bodily trespasses: gropes on the street, on dance floors, in cafes. She says she wasn’t even safe at Parliament House (her sexual harassment and assault allegation against Senator David Van, which he denies, was only taken seriously by Liberal leader Peter Dutton after a white senator complained. The allegations are still under investigation). “I’ve been absolutely violated by men all my life.”

Pushed to bankruptcy

“I just thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s, like, perfect.’ ” I’m talking to Alex Bhathal, the social worker and former Greens candidate probably most responsible for shepherding Lidia Thorpe into politics. Bhathal had heard Thorpe, then chair of NAIDOC Victoria, deliver an impressive speech at a rally and their kids went to the same school. In April 2017, Bhathal, on a talent-recruitment mission, met Thorpe at a cafe. Bhathal thought she was just the person to diversify Australia’s political mix: a strong Aboriginal woman with deep community networks; a teenage mum and early school-leaver. Bhathal believed Thorpe would appeal to conservative voters. “My Liberal-voting dad absolutely adored Lidia.”

Alex Bhathal helped recruit Thorpe – then chair of NAIDOC Victoria – as a candidate for the Greens in 2017.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Thorpe also had a track record as an activist and community worker. She’d worked for various Aboriginal-run outfits, including years driving the mourning car for the funeral service. Around 1998, Thorpe bought her first house – “It was basically a shack. A horse lived in it” – in the East Gippsland town of Nowa Nowa, her grandfather’s country. A few years later, Thorpe turned up with her pram to a meeting of Nowa Nowa townsfolk. Duke Energy planned to blast a local gorge, sacred to the Gunnai, for a gas pipeline. “We heard nothing more from her, then Aboriginal people, either local or from Melbourne, turned up and blockaded the route of the pipeline,” says then Nowa Nowa resident Brian Blakeman, who says Thorpe’s campaign saved the gorge.

After moving to East Gippsland, Thorpe was a Jobs Network receptionist and a Centrelink Indigenous services manager. She met her husband, a glazier, and in 2008 had another daughter. In 2009, she established an events company, organising Welcome to Country ceremonies at childcare centres, and in 2011 worked on a community development project at Lakes Entrance for the local council.

Thorpe, who had moved to Lakes Entrance, put her house there up as surety for her husband’s glazing business. But, she says, he turned out to be an alcoholic. “If I’d asked about [the business] it would just cause a blue, so it was safer for me not to ask.” In 2013, the business failed and Thorpe had racked up a debt of almost $740,000, including $55,277 in tax and $296,392 for a loan from federal government agency Indigenous Business Australia. She went bankrupt, the bank sold her house, she left her husband and moved back to Melbourne. “I lost it all except my car,” she says. (Thorpe says she gets on well with her now ex-husband. “He’s very sorry about it. He’s a good person.”)

About five months after Bhathal and Thorpe met to discuss her political ambitions, a by-election was announced in the state seat of Northcote, close to Thorpe’s home. With Bhathal’s backing, the Greens endorsed Thorpe and she won, becoming the first Aboriginal woman elected to the state’s parliament. Did the Greens know what they were in for? “Absolutely,” one former Greens politician told me. The party, they said, knew such a firebrand was risky, but the payoff was Thorpe’s ability to boost the party’s profile. But problems soon arose. Thorpe was often missing from her electorate office. “It quickly became apparent Lidia was not interested in constituency work,” this person says. In the 2018 state election, Thorpe lost Northcote to Labor.

But by 2020, Thorpe was back in politics, beating human rights lawyer Julian Burnside in the preselection contest to replace Greens leader Richard Di Natale in the Senate. The ex-Greens politician describes this party vote as a fight between “a seasoned barrister who wanted to deploy his lauded cross-examination skills in the Senate and someone who wanted to just blow things up”.

One day, on Thorpe’s suggestion, I call her friend Sissy Austin. Thorpe, Austin says, is the kind of person who donates a clothes dryer to a domestic violence victim and sits for hours with you in the hospital after a violent attack. “The country doesn’t see the really generous, kind and caring person she is.”

A few weeks later, a different perspective arrives via my phone. One of Thorpe’s many enemies among the Victorian Aboriginal leaders sends screenshots of 2021 Facebook posts written by a close relative of Thorpe’s. This reveals two things: that Thorpe’s behind-the-scenes family life has been extremely fraught and that the ill-feeling towards her among the Aboriginal leadership runs deep. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Thorpe doesn’t want me to speak to any of her immediate family. So I go and see Uncle Robbie.

Thorpe’s Uncle Robbie is a lifelong activist for Aboriginal rights.Credit: Daniel Pockett

On the 17th floor of a public-housing tower in Melbourne’s inner-city Richmond, Robbie Thorpe sits in his dimly lit living room at a small desk with a young Danish woman. As I will soon learn, this little scene is black sovereignty in action. On his desk Robbie, 67, has everything lined up just so: there’s a boomerang and some feathers, a nod to the ancestral wedge-tailed eagle Bunjil. The Danish woman, a volunteer at Robbie’s Camp Sovereignty, a sort of Tent Embassy space near Melbourne’s botanic gardens, hands over her red passport to Robbie, who stamps it. In this little exchange, which is filmed for a documentary she’s making about him, Robbie is acting as the sovereign authority of the Gunnai and Gunditjmara lands in Victoria and she’s acknowledging his claim. “Thank you so much,” she says, taking her passport back.

In February 2023, with five years left of her term, Lidia Thorpe announced her resignation from the Greens. She went, overnight, from representing Greens voters as a Victorian senator to a much narrower constituency: the Blak Sovereign Movement (BSM). “I want to represent that movement fully in this parliament. It has become clear to me that I can’t do that from within the Greens,” she said. (The Greens had also just declared support for the Voice to parliament, at odds with where Thorpe was headed.)

But what exactly is the Blak Sovereign Movement and how big is it? (The spelling of Blak with no “c” was first coined by the late Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon to subvert the insult “black c–--”.) Broadly speaking, these activists say that because Australia’s First Nations people never agreed to a takeover of their land, everything afterwards – parliament, land titles, mining profits – is illegitimate and stolen. Some want a treaty with the government or King. Others don’t recognise the government and want international law to intervene. Some believe a treaty can only be negotiated by each Aboriginal nation.

Thorpe describes herself as the movement’s “facilitator” and says it has about 150 members. She takes directions from people such as Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell and lawyer Michael Anderson, an Aboriginal Tent Embassy co-founder. “I have, oh, Aunty … can’t think, I’ve got aunties in Queensland and NSW,” she adds.

But Thorpe’s 2023 announcement surprised the original black sovereignty movement centred on the Tent Embassy. The embassy’s Gwenda Stanley says a reporter informed her that the senator was now the movement’s leader. “Suddenly Lidia’s calling me Aunty in parliament. There was no consultation.” Stanley supports Thorpe’s goals but says her actions undermined the embassy. “Who are these 150 members? We don’t know what the Blak Sovereign Movement is actually doing.”

Mebbingarri Cindy Roberts, a Widjabul and Yorta Yorta woman of the Bundjalung people, says Thorpe has “hijacked” the issue of sovereignty. “She’s caused more harm to our people since she’s spoken out about sovereignty. B-L-A-K means nothing, it’s just a slogan,” says Roberts, a grassroots community activist from the North Coast of NSW. “She came with a heart full of hate … Our elders are not like that. They come in love. Lidia just loves the limelight.”

Other activists, like Jagera woman Regina Bonner Moran, granddaughter of legendary Aboriginal politician Neville Bonner, believe Thorpe has the whole idea of sovereignty wrong. Bonner Moran runs a popular Instagram account called @stopblackdeathsincustody, which is full of searing anti-Thorpe posts and memes. “[Thorpe] needs to follow the protocol of each tribe and nation’s lore and elders,” she says.

‘I’m just so hard and hardened, so when someone says something nice to me, I just burst into tears.’

During debate over the Voice referendum, it struck me that Thorpe never articulated a clear alternative. What would Australia look like, I ask, if her movement succeeds? She says all Crown land goes back to Aboriginal people, including golf courses and public housing, and the federal government would acknowledge First Nations’ sovereignty. She also backs the Michael Mansell model of six designated Senate seats for Indigenous Australians to vote for Indigenous senators (who, unlike Thorpe’s six current Indigenous Senate colleagues, would be directly accountable to Indigenous people, rather than political parties). With treaty, she wants a federal framework and local agreements addressing specifics: do the Gunditjmara, for example, want a new coal power station on their country or not? I say that treaty seems further away, post-Voice vote. “I know it does. But I tried to run a campaign on treaty. I just didn’t have the capacity as an independent.”

Threats and hate

Back at Robbie’s house, I ask who his niece resembles most in the family. He pauses, then grins. “Probably me?” When I ask about the personal costs of his niece’s activism, his answer is blunt. “Her mental health.”

Whatever you think of Thorpe, her daily reality is no picnic. In 2023, neo-Nazis filmed themselves burning the Aboriginal flag against a backdrop that she says read: “Lidia Thorpe is an Abo whore”. Last year, despite Thorpe’s AFP protection, a man known to authorities as a potential threat yelled and pushed his way through the crowd towards the senator at a pro-Palestine event. “I bolted,” she says. Meanwhile, the internet is full of online hate. The most disgusting, vile human being alive. Fit in, or f--- off, reads a typical example on X. She’s taken to putting on a disguise to go shopping. Also, post-referendum, several family members no longer speak to her over the Voice (Nan Alma backed her in).

All of this requires, as she says, “a protective shield like no other”. In our interviews, Thorpe softens only twice. Once was when I asked about her image being on street murals. “I’m just so hard and hardened, so when someone says something nice to me, I just burst into tears.” In 2023, Thorpe left home for four months because of a threatening, sexualised letter. Then, one day, the AFP told her the letter’s author had died and, it turned out, was an elderly invalid. This is the second time she cries: she had a weird empathy for him, but felt robbed because she could never know why he did it. “It was like, ‘Why did you have so much hate in your heart?’ ”

A two-storey mural in inner-city Melbourne; Thorpe’s support is strongest in core parts of the capital cities.Credit: Justin McManus

Robbie Thorpe, a lifelong, staunch activist who is trying to sue King Charles for genocide, says he’s proud of his niece and loves her but also has issues with her. “Some of the things she’s grabbed hold of is my work. And she can’t really explain the idea of genocide. That’s my issue.” He adds his daughter “blues” with Thorpe. “I’m on the side of my kids and I know what Lidia did,” he says, though he refuses to elaborate on that. “Some people are opportunists.” Who do you mean? I ask.

“Lidia.”

Meanwhile, back in Canberra, the afternoon Senate session is underway and Lidia Thorpe is, well, being Lidia Thorpe. It’s become clear the censure motion also bans her from any Senate delegation “during the life of this parliament”. Senator Ralph Babet, censured in the same session for a social media post that read “In my house we say phaggot [sic], retard and n----r” had no such punishment. But Thorpe must cancel a Pacific-island delegation to Tuvalu and Fiji. She banters with Matt Canavan, one of the few colleagues she gets along with. Like the naughty kid at the back of the bus, her energy is jokey with a shot of menace. “Because I told the fricken King off I’m not allowed to go!” she shouts across the chamber.

Thorpe believes that the Senate leaders treat her unfairly and the public never sees it. There’s some truth to that. You could argue Babet’s actions were far worse than Thorpe’s, yet she cops the delegation ban. Also, when senators such as Thorpe, the Greens’ Mehreen Faruqi, and independent Muslim senator Fatima Payman call out the racism of a senator such as Pauline Hanson, they are asked to withdraw for using unparliamentary language. “It feels like you are being silenced, it’s very limiting,” says Payman, who describes Thorpe as a courageous and friendly colleague.

There’s also the question of whether Thorpe has had the support she needed. The former staffer said they worried whether Thorpe, as someone who left school at 14, was able to read to the level she needed to. “Getting across the details of legislation, the votes, her speeches, she never did any of that,” they said. But this staffer said the senator didn’t get enough help, particularly from Greens leader Adam Bandt’s office.

Thorpe denies she was, or is, out of her depth, but due to her limited education prefers to listen to books rather than read them. She also struggles with speeches if the language isn’t plain. “Some people might say [it needs to be] dumbed down. But that’s the way most people in this country understand plain English.” The staffer says: “I do think that she acts out a lot, but that comes from a position of feeling in over her head, more than wanting to be deliberately aggressive.”

But to depict Thorpe as simply a victim of “Colonial HQ” would be wrong. Many of Thorpe’s missteps are due to her cavalier attitude to facts, such as when she accused a former Northern Territory attorney-general, an Indigenous woman, of being a white male (the occasional factual error is OK, she tells me; it’s about “getting people’s attention on what’s going on”.)

Other incidents tend to be so attention-seeking, they distract from her message, such as angering crowds by laying in front of a Mardi Gras float in 2023; shouting “small penis” to men outside a nightclub; or throwing papers at Hanson and stealing the limelight from a barnstorming speech by Senator Payman.

In terms of her performance as a boss, former staff have told Good Weekend that she would sometimes yell at them and was rarely in the office. “Some days we’d look at Facebook and realise she was at the beach,” said one. (“Anyone who thinks I am lying on a beach while my people are dying has real issues,” Thorpe says. “My life is committed to my people.”)

In 2022, SBS’s Living Black program asked Thorpe to rate her performance so far. Five out of 10, she answered, taking into account “some of my behaviours”. She added, “I am a bit quick to jump … I have to work on how to deliver in a way that brings people in rather than moves people out.” But she tells me that beyond telling Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes “at least I keep my legs shut”, she regrets little. Instead, she blames the media for depicting her as a “crazy mental-health case”. (Thorpe now rates herself seven out of 10, the extra points for the King protest’s global coverage.)

‘If you are in a Senate position, you don’t have to be angry. Just go and do your job.’

Uncle Robbie

How do others rate her? Celeste Liddle, Arrernte woman, writer and former Greens candidate, says Thorpe reflects many Aboriginal people’s beliefs and makes “white people, particularly men and the polite political establishment, deeply uncomfortable”. Retired Greens senator Janet Rice says her former colleague has made Australians more aware of the nation’s past injustices. “Lidia can destroy relationships, which isn’t the way I work. But I come from a position of white privilege. If you think about the trauma and injustice Lidia is carrying on her shoulders, I understand why she’s angry.”

Others, particularly some Aboriginal leaders, consider Thorpe a net negative for the Indigenous cause. Marcus Stewart, the former First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria co-chair and husband of Labor senator Jana Stewart, says Thorpe has done nothing to advance her people’s plight. “With her style, she could’ve been one of the most influential politicians, but Lidia’s unique ability to demonstrate enormous confidence is matched only by her enormous incompetence.” Many leaders were reluctant to speak on the record, citing a fear of Thorpe’s retribution. Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy declined to be interviewed by Good Weekend. (In a fiery 2023 Senate hearing, McCarthy told Thorpe: “You are a disgrace to the Senate and you’re a disgrace to your people”.)

Another senior Aboriginal leader says Thorpe is from a group of activists who didn’t grow up on country, are relatively middle-class and whose grandparents weren’t on missions. “Sure, she’s angry. But it didn’t happen to her. Most blackfellas don’t run around in that bubble of anger, only the Blak Sovereignty mob. In America they call it the commodification of rage, a fake rage that is performative to white audiences. But it does nothing for blacks.” Even her Uncle Robbie counsels Thorpe to temper her anger. “If you are in a Senate position, you don’t have to be angry. Just go and do your job.”

Later that day in Canberra, I chat to a Labor Indigenous policy adviser, who was lamenting Thorpe’s latest stunts. “And yet in everything she says, there’s a kernel of truth,” she says. This is not your land. You are not my King, Thorpe told our head of state, who lives on the other side of the world. Perhaps her role is to physically be the uncomfortable truth, a reminder that something very wrong has happened and is happening. Either way, Lidia Thorpe isn’t going anywhere: she has another three years left in her term, and while she says she won’t run again, she’s considering starting her own political party for the battlers of Australia, black and white. “It will be a kind of ‘school of hard knocks’ party.”

Meanwhile, Thorpe emerges from the Senate session. “Did you hear me shouting in the chamber?” she asks me. “That’s just my way of telling the whole chamber at once what happened [with the trip ban].”

We walk across the courtyard, where she notices the tree roots have been corralled into straight lines and right angles between the gaps in the square concrete pavers. “Poor little roots,” she says, looking down at them.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.