Beneath The Sky 2025: Claire G. Coleman

Videography by James Henry

This performance was a part of Beneath the Sky: Resist. Reveal. Reclaim. It was filmed at Peppercorn Lawn along the Birrarung in the heart of Naarm, and was proudly supported by Aboriginal Melbourne at City of Melbourne.

Photography by Tiffany Garvie

‘No Crown Land’ by Claire G. Coleman

I know this city, on the banks of the Birrarung, well – even though it is not my Country. My country is thousands of kilometres away in Noongar Boodjar but I have lived here for a generation, over 25 years.  Even when I left to travel or to briefly move down the coast closer to but not at all close to my ancestral country I kept my connections here. This is my home in a manner of speaking even though I have a real forever home and if I ever leave here with no intention of coming back I will still have the decades here to connect me.  This city will always be part of me.  

At one point I knew these streets better than I knew myself, I knew every nook, every place you could go in secret and not be noticed, every cheap place to find food. I knew where there was a heater that kept a public area warm all night, where the police would let you sleep through the night without bothering you and where a convenience store threw out milk the moment it went out of date but before it tasted sour; and what time they did it.

I lived on these streets, homeless right here, in Naarm, sleeping in the train station and in the old roofed tram shelters that do not exist anymore those that existed are fenced off.  I look back then and I can barely believe it myself, I can scarcely believe that, the person talking to you from a stage, was once homeless, sleeping on the streets under little more than a blanket.  Strange isn’t it that despite being homeless on the street I never once considered going home to my ancestral country, there to be safe.

Perhaps it’s because I felt at home here or perhaps I just knew … I would have been homeless there too.

One rarely or at least barely spoken about … thing … in this nation is the existence of homeless Indigenous people, some of them homeless in their homeland, others displaced and unable to return home.  Some like me know were we belong but there is no community or housing or Aboriginal land there.  I have been told by racist idiots, who do not like that I dare to be “uppity” in their presence, to go home to community, to go back to the bush when in reality there is nowhere for me to go, if I went to an Aboriginal community it would be on someone else’s land, I would not, in fact, be going home.

I have nowhere to go and if I want to go home I have to buy land there myself.

My ancestral country is mostly crown land, there are a couple of mining sites, a national park, which is also a UNESCO biosphere reserve, some farms where nobody has ever made any money a couple of small towns that are trying hard to become ghost towns and a lot of unallocated crown land, a lot of land that nobody really wants.  Yet when the Noongar people, my nation, won our land rights the government resisted, they fought us in court and promised to do so until all our Elders returned to the dreaming never seeing our land back, to protect, in my Country at least, crown land.

Thing is...

There should be no such thing as crown land; there should be no such thing as crown land in Australia.  None, at all, never existed never will; it’s not even accurate to say “there should be no such thing as crown land” because legally there is no such thing as crown land, Crown Land is a legal fiction reliant for its existence on the legal fiction or Terra Nullius.

Here’s the thing, the important thing.

After Mabo and after Wik, and after the legal changes Howard instituted to protect private land after Mabo and Wik, Native Title exists over all land that had not been allocated before 1992.  Native title means the land does not belong to the Crown, it belongs to the traditional owners.

It’s not accurate to say there should be no such thing as crown land, it’s more accurate to say there already is no such thing as crown land, there always was no such thing as crown land, crown land is an illusion, a fiction, handing back all crown land to the traditional owners is not an aspiration or a nice idea it’s acceptance of a fundamental truth, Indigenous People already own every square centimetre of land that has not been sold or put to use, that is, we already own all the so-called crown land yet we are not given free use of it.

I stand here in Naarm, on Wurundjeri land, under sky country, if I touch the water of the river I touch water that will flow to the sea that also connects to my Boodjar, if I look to the sky above the sky, the sky Country, connects also to the sky of my Boodjar, my homeland, Wirlomin Boodjar, were the hakeas bloom and where the banksia woodlands meet the sea.  The sky Country and Sea Country also connects to where the bones of your ancestors lay, Sky and Sea connects all humanity.

But if I go home right now, if the sky could teleport me to my homeland, across the desert country, across the treeless plains, I would still not have a homeland on which to live. I am no longer homeless, on wurundjeri country, I rent a house up the river, but I have no home in my homeland and after the agreement my land council signed with the government, giving up our rights to all the crown land so the fighting can just stop, I never will unless I buy it.

And that’s what Australia is, a cleptocracy, the way the colony treats us is like stealing our car and offering to sell it back to us, or rent it back to us. 

There is no such thing as crown land.  Giving it back, acknowledging crown land belongs to the traditional owners won’t solve all our problems.

But it would be a fucking good start.