"The cops are pulling down the tent embassy! We need help to stop them!" the student yelled.

About half the class, McQueen included, wasted no time leaping to action, piling into cars, jumping on the back of motorbikes and tearing down to the site of the recently erected Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns opposite Old Parliament House.

There they found a large contingent of police officers dismantling the site preparing to take down the tents that, since January 26, had been in place as a peaceful protest for Indigenous land rights.

The students joined the Aboriginal protesters in linking arms and trying to protect the scattered tents from police.

It was an exciting and memorable day, one that made the front page of The Canberra Times and would lead to disagreements within government about the role of political protest.

But it was also an event that was in keeping with the times.

Fifty years later, Humphrey McQueen, an eminent historian who recently turned 80, remembers the day as being part of a continuum; one minute he had been teaching students about 20th century Australian history, and the next they were all taking part in it.

"The class moved from thinking back on what had happened in this country, into playing our small part in shaping its future," he said.

"No one thought it odd that a university lecture should break up to support the Aborigines against the government. Two years earlier, the Vietnam Moratoria had closed down entire campuses in answer to the trade union movement's call to 'Stop Work to Stop the War'."

He recalled the Students Union providing a base for Embassy residents since the tents had first gone up on January 26.

"It was somewhere to eat, to shower and to get medical support. The VW Beetle of a history lecturer on study leave became the Embassy's diplomatic vehicle," he said.

Indeed, the student who had brought the call to action, Steve Padgham, had only recently served a seven-day jail sentence for draft resistance.

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Now a retired teacher in Canberra, he said the protest had come after a long period in which staff and students had been supporting the embassy.

"I actually disappeared almost immediately afterwards because they put another warrant out for my arrest for refusing to turn up at an army induction centre," he said.

There'd also been the anti-apartheid Springboks campaign the year before, and university life was in the grip of the women's rights and gay rights movements.

"Sadly, I don't think university life is anything like what it used to be, which I think is sad for the students there now, that they don't have this sort of association with some of the events going around," he said.

"I mean, here we have climate change that's going to threaten their lives, yet it's not that they acquiesce to it, but I suppose they feel that they can't do much about it."

The Canberra Times reported that eight police officers were injured, including one who broke his back, while several demonstrators suffered "minor injury".

The embassy - a word used in inverted commas in news reports of the day - was re-erected a few days later.

But on July 23, 1972, it was pulled down again by police in a "violent clash" with demonstrators.

More than half of the territory's police force were there this time - 250 of 415 officers - a number justified as a way of reducing the violence of the tents' removal.

Mr Padgham said the events of July 1972 had been something of a catalyst for the Indigenous land rights movement.

"It's a date that Aboriginal friends of mine still think it's really important - the Embassy was and still is a place for all Aboriginal people."

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