It has been a while since Australia has been confronted with its own angry Aboriginal face, but this week it was back.

When an image of Julia Gillard’s fearful face, wedged beside her bodyguard, flashed around the globe, indigenous issues were at the centre of Australian politics again. Almost always, indigenous politics must touch the Canberra powerful somehow to get a hold.

Despite the hopes of the moderates who have been working inside the government tent for years, the protesters’ rapid follow-up, whipping a flag out of a backpack to burn on the Parliament House steps, shows that it is likely we are going to see more anger.

Dangerous as it is for race relations, because it is bound to bring out old hatreds as surely as did the rise of One Nation, keeping this volatility alive is too tempting to pass up, for radicals and media alike.

The anger is visible again and it is about native title laws and land rights acts delivering much less than had been hoped for, about the Northern Territory intervention continuing and about the lack of recognition of these first people in the nation’s fabric, such as the constitution.

It is an anger which has turned on itself, as expressed at a media conference, packed beyond the wildest dreams of the tent embassy radicals. The Alice Springs activist Barb Shaw turned on the moderate indigenous leaders, describing them as ‘‘jackie jackies’’.

Michael Anderson, the only man living of the four who founded the tent embassy in 1972, displayed stop-start anger, defending the fury of the restaurant scene at first, then announcing that elders would weed out agents provocateurs and stop any violence recurring.

For years, from a cattle station at Goodooga, Anderson has conducted a campaign by email pushing for recognition of indigenous sovereignty.

He has been pivotal in welding together a coalition of grassroots activists from different parts of the nation whose grab-bag of concerns includes the limitations of land rights laws, the continuing Northern Territory intervention and  sovereignty.

Enter Paul Coe, who once fought an unsuccessful legal battle for recognition that sovereignty was never lost. A struck-off barrister who had gone comparatively quiet, he was back campaigning for sovereignty at the tent embassy yesterday.

But attacks by Anderson and his embassy cohorts on the newborn National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and other leaders do not mean the indigenous movement is split.

Mick Gooda, the Indigenous social justice commissioner, and Tom Calma, the co-chairman of Reconciliation Australia, both regretted the escalation of Thursday’s protest from peaceful march to physical fury.

‘‘Obviously they feel frustration and I feel frustration and anger with what is happening,’’ says  Gooda. He points out that the nation is six years into its bipartisan, all-state commitment to ‘‘close the gap’’ in indigenous health. Yesterday, thanks to renewed media interest in matters Aboriginal, he talked publicly about it to exhaustion point.

Calma repeated that central indigenous beef: that report after report says policy will fail unless Aborigines are given the power to determine their own future in every sphere.

Like Les Malezer, the National Congress co-chairman who was at the tent embassy yesterday mingling with the grassroots, he believes  native title legislation has failed to deliver on its promises and that it is time for  politicians to re-examine the high burden of proof which makes it so hard for indigenous people to win back land.

It is all there in years of reports. If other Australians could see through the anger, they would see so many of the grievances are well based.

They might learn about that brilliant Aboriginal humour evident in the chant ‘‘we want Cinderella’’ outside Parliament House yesterday. And they would not be afraid.

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU