Maxine’s Gentlemen’s Club is a large but somewhat dingy ‘erotic lounge’ on the main road through Brunswick, a traditionally working-class area of Melbourne that is in the process of being gentrified by the city’s burgeoning hipster community.
Outside the venue, oddly situated a few doors from the local mosque, a sign advertises weekend ‘lunches and dinners’ along with a ‘male revue’ troupe called Toyboys who appear alongside more traditional female hostesses on Saturday nights.
Inside, you’ll find booths filled with red velvet chairs, a stage adorned with metal poles, plus notices informing patrons of the house’s ‘lap dance rules’, the most printable of which stipulate ‘no open mouth contact’ and explain that ‘touching is permitted in dances over $80 only’.
It’s a seedy establishment, all told, where men are men and women are commodities. The very last place you’d expect to be patronised by one of Australia’s ultra-progressive elite. Yet that is exactly what happened last year, in an incident that spawned a small but nonetheless amusing political scandal.
At its centre was Lidia Thorpe, a hard-Left member of the Senate, this country’s upper house of Parliament.
Lidia Thorpe, a hard-Left member of the Senate, heckled Kind Charles at the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra and told him: ‘You are not our king’
The King and Queen Camilla at the Australian Parliament House for Ceremonial Welcome in Canberra earlier this week
Shortly after 3 o’clock one Sunday morning in April, this proud feminist stumbled out of Maxine’s and became embroiled in a drunken pavement dispute with several male patrons.
‘You’ve got a small penis,’ she told one. ‘You’re marked,’ she threatened another, calling him a ‘little dog’ before screaming ‘youse [sic] can all get f***ed too!’
After video footage leaked online, the venue’s manager told reporters that Thorpe, who is half Aboriginal and has long campaigned for indigenous rights, had spent a portion of the evening ‘going up to white men in the crowd and telling them they’d stolen her land’.
Calling her inebriated behaviour ‘just unacceptable’, he announced that the politician would henceforth be banned from his strip club.
This week, headline-prone Senator Thorpe found herself back in the news after a very different altercation.
Once more, it involved her publicly admonishing a bemused white man for having somehow ‘stolen’ her land.
The victim this time was, of course, His Majesty the King. The venue was the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra. As Charles delivered a speech, Senator Thorpe, who was wearing a possum-fur coat, leapt to her feet and started hectoring him about ‘genocide’.
‘You are not our king,’ she shrieked. ‘You are not our king. You are not sovereign. You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land.’
While being ushered out by security, she threw in a farewell: ‘F*** the colony.’
If the aim was to create publicity, Thorpe certainly succeeded: the incident made news around the world. But if its purpose was to win hearts and minds, the outcome was distinctly mixed.
Fellow politicians were largely critical, including Anthony Albanese, Australia’s Left-wing premier, who called her outburst ‘disrespectful’.
Several indigenous leaders took to the airwaves saying they were deeply uncomfortable with her attack on a King who had largely used the royal tour to build bridges with what he called ‘First Nations peoples who have loved and cared for this continent for 65,000 years’.
Aunty Violet Sheridan, a prominent Aboriginal leader who met Charles during his trip, said Thorpe ‘does not speak for me and my people’.
Yet not everyone was condemnatory. Melbourne’s Left-wing Age newspaper, the local equivalent of the Guardian, published a remarkable editorial declaring that Thorpe had a ‘right to speak up’ adding that since the British empire had ‘presided over generations of destruction’ she was correct to call for the King ‘on behalf of the Monarchy, to say sorry to the living and the dead’.
The mixed reaction to Thorpe’s posturing is worth examining because it speaks to an important fact: that Australia, which for most of its modern history has been a proud and largely united nation, has in recent times become catastrophically divided over the thorny issue of race.
As this week’s incident shows, the political correctness and cancel culture gripping most Western nations is manifesting itself Down Under in a messy and hugely polarising debate over colonialism and its legacy. It’s hard to spend any time at all in Australia without noticing the fallout.
For King Charles, the whole thing has been a minefield. He appeared to spend most of his week seeking to avoid causing offence to indigenous communities, with the Palace even removing a reference to a ‘walkabout’ from his agenda to avoid upsetting language police: in Aboriginal culture, to ‘go walkabout’ is to wander into the bush alone.
Senator Thorpe outside Maxine’s Gentlemen’s Club last year where she became embroiled in a drunken pavement dispute with several male patrons. She was later banned from the strip club by the manager
What his father would think of such sensitivity is anyone’s guess. During the Golden Jubilee tour of 2002, Prince Philip famously asked an Aborigine businessman: ‘Do you still throw spears at each other?’
For ordinary tourists, including this ‘Pom’, Australia’s culture wars become evident the moment one touches down at the airport.
If you’re flying via Qantas, the national carrier, a member of cabin crew will come on to the intercom and read a lengthy script that begins: ‘We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we work, live and fly.’
Passengers are then told they are on the lands of a specific group of tribal people, depending on the location and that the airline staff ‘acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging’. This ‘acknowledgement of country’ has become an unavoidable feature of day-to-day life in modern Australia.
To some, making these statements provides a harmless way for right-thinking citizens to express solidarity with marginalised indigenous communities. To others, they amount to trite virtue-signalling that widens, rather than narrows, social and racial divides.
Either way, ‘acknowledgement of country’ can be found in the most incongruous places.
After touching down in Melbourne, signs on the way to baggage claim inform you that ‘Australia Pacific Airports (Melbourne) acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung as… traditional owners of the land’ the runway sits on. A pamphlet in my hotel room declared that the multinational corporation that runs it ‘respects all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’.
At a restaurant in the city, I was presented with a menu stating, next to the dishes of the day, that the owners of the establishment ‘acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community’.
On television, similar messages are ubiquitous. As the Mail has previously reported, viewers of the cult sitcom Colin From Accounts, a hit in the UK, may have noticed a version expressing respect for the ‘traditional owners and custodians of the land on which this programme was produced’.
Live sports events go one further, with groups of indigenous people often hired to perform a ‘welcome to country’ ceremony before kick-off, often involving chanting and the burning of leaves to smoke out evil spirits.
Ceremonies of this sort are often staged – for a price – during corporate conferences, or prior to business meetings, where participants respond by offering an ‘acknowledgement of country’ before speaking.
And a range of laws, which vary from state to state, require schoolchildren to chant ‘acknowledgement mantras’ during morning assembly. One is delivered at the start of each day in the Australian parliament.
At times, it verges on the surreal. The other day, Loren Barry, a female producer on Triple M, a Melbourne radio station, told listeners that her morning Pilates class now begins with ‘an acknowledgement to country’.
‘If you’ve got a special gathering happening, sure, go right ahead, do the welcome. But we don’t need every speech to have one, we don’t need a welcome at the start of a Zoom meeting, and having the welcome to country at the start of Pilates? Well, that’s just bizarre.’ With grim predictability, the station was accused of racism for broadcasting that sentiment.
Maxine’s Gentlemen’s Club is a large but somewhat dingy ‘erotic lounge’ where you’ll find booths filled with red velvet chairs, a stage adorned with metal poles, plus notices informing patrons of the house’s ‘lap dance rules’
Elsewhere, Centrelink, the Australian government agency that hands out social security payments, sparked ridicule a couple of years back for requiring users of its app to tick a box acknowledging Aboriginal people as ‘traditional custodians of the land’ before they can claim benefits.
This week, a teenage delinquent of indigenous heritage, who had been convicted of burglary and up for sentencing in a New South Wales court, was invited to perform a ‘welcome to country’ before proceedings commenced, effectively welcoming the judge to her own court.
It all feels very peculiar, given Australia’s rugged heritage. Only a generation ago, the country existed in the popular imagination as the rugged land of Mick Dundee and beer-swilling blokes who wouldn’t have given a Castlemaine XXXX for the trappings of wokery and cancel culture.
Now even Australia Day, the public holiday in January celebrating the anniversary of the 1788 landing of the First Fleet and raising of the Union Flag by Arthur Phillip at Sydney Cove, has become a source of heated conflict, providing an occasion for raucous protests by demonstrators wanting to rename it ‘invasion day’.
Of course, few modern Australians would argue that the country’s colonial past, during which many indigenous communities were displaced and members killed, is entirely wholesome.
For a large portion of the 1900s, thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their parents and re-settled into white society in a grotesque initiative that later saw them dubbed the Stolen Generation.
It wasn’t until the height of the civil rights era in 1967 that indigenous people were effectively given equal rights as Australian citizens, via a referendum in which 90.7 per cent of voters said they ought to be represented in the census.
Yet there is legitimate disquiet about whether the country is today confronting its past in a healthy manner. Some critics point out that ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies, which were invented in the 1970s and only became popular in the 2000s, treat non-Aboriginal Australians as foreigners in their own land.
Others worry about the psychological implications of children being repeatedly taught to feel ‘inherited guilt’ – a problematic concept that involves telling them they are responsible for misdeeds of their ancestors.
Charles greets fans during a visit to St Thomas’s Anglican Church in Sydney earlier this week
In many prosperous middle- class households, teenagers are encouraged to take DNA tests to establish whether they have a trace of indigenous heritage. If so, they can use it to gain entry to elite universities, and access to grants and fast-track employment opportunities.
‘It’s a hoax, a sham, a fraud,’ is how Sam Newman, a former Australian Rules Football star turned broadcaster, puts it when we talk. He was once a top sports presenter of Australian television but found himself summarily cancelled for criticising ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies at major fixtures.
‘We are supposed to be one country, one people, but that idea is under constant attack. I think of the great boxer Lionel Rose, who when he became world champion in the 1960s was asked whether he’d done it for the Aboriginal people and immediately replied, ‘I just think of myself as Australian. I don’t go in for all this black and white thing; to me we’re all Australians.’ That’s how it should be but, instead, we are being driven apart.’
Last year, this debate came to a head when the Albanese government staged a referendum to introduce a measure called ‘The Voice’, which would have established a separate house of parliament for indigenous people. The ballot proved deeply divisive. It was supported by most politicians, a swathe of corporate Australia, celebrities and inhabitants of the nation’s metropolitan city centres.
Sporting bodies including the Australian Olympic Committee and Tennis Australia backed the bill, as did almost every blue-chip company and an array of public institutions. At one university, medical students were emailed by a professor saying: ‘If you feel you are unable to vote Yes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s rights, you might want to reflect deeply on whether a career in allied health in Australia is really for you.’
Yet as the campaign wore on, voters became increasingly sceptical, with opponents worrying the measure would create a sort of two-tier democracy, with extra rights for citizens based on ethnicity. While initial polls registered 80 per cent support for the bill, it ended up being soundly defeated, by a 60-40 majority.
That was more than a year ago. Yet, much like Brexit, the nation’s political establishment has since sought to ignore the result.
In major cities (which, unlike rural parts of Australia, vigorously supported The Voice) indigenous assemblies have been established by local politicians anyway, while huge amounts of public cash are being splurged on employing prominent activists to public roles.
Perhaps the most high-profile is Justin Mohamed, who in March 2023 was appointed Australia’s official ‘First Nations ambassador’ by the government. A former civil servant who lives in a $2.4 million (£1.2 million) mansion in south Melbourne, he’s being paid £166,000-a-year to tour the world representing indigenous communities at international conventions and gatherings. In his first year, he racked up a bill of £74,000 on business-class air tickets alone.
No one seems entirely sure what he’s actually achieved, or how his globe-trotting is helping Australia’s marginalised communities.
But as King Charles discovered this week, Australia’s misguided reckoning with its history, which empowers hypocritical politicians to preach equality while visiting ‘erotic lounges’, has created a booming industry out of grievance. The national soul-searching about colonial legacy is, as so often happens, doing far more to divide people than to unite them.