About 300 protesters from Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney converged on the National Press Club yesterday to protest against Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama's visit.

Waving placards that said ''Don't kill Tamils'' and ''Recognise our cry for freedom'', the crowd gathered from 11am.

As the delegation arrived, the crowd cried, ''We need press freedom'', ''Don't kill journalists'' and ''Tamils want democracy'' at the motorcade.

Although vocal, the crowd was well-behaved.

The protests were in part fuelled by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith's announcement on Monday that the Rudd Government would consider listing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, the organisation leading the fighting against the majority Sinhala government in Sri Lanka, as a terrorist organisation.

The Federal Government has also called on the Sri Lankan Government to do more to bring about a political solution to its decades-old civil war.

But the move to list the Tamil Tigers is not popular with Australia's 30,000-strong Tamil community.

The chairman of the Australian Federation of Tamil Associations and one of the protest's organisers, Raga Ragavan, said the crowd had gathered to send a message to the Federal Government and to tell the Australian people what was ''really going on'' in Sri Lanka.

He said the erosion of press freedoms and the murder of journalists meant the world did not have a clear picture of what the Sri Lankan Government had done to Tamils in the north of that country.

''There is war going on in Sri Lanka. The Tamils want to be recognised, have the right of self-determination... we should rule ourselves,'' he said.

''We want the Tamils to have their own nation, and to live in dignity...''

Mr Bogollagama has described the Tamil Tigers as a ''universal terrorist organisation''.

''It is to be banned in the United States of America, it is banned in Canada, it is banned in 27 countries in the European Union, it is banned in the United Kingdom and also it is banned in India,'' he said.