Thousands protest against aboriginal communities' shutdown in Melbourne
Xinhua, May 1, 2015 Adjust font size:
Thousands of people marched through the Melbourne's CBD in Australia on Friday protesting against the closure of aboriginal communities in West Australia.
Protestors rallied outside the city Town Hall at around 4 p.m. local time with a heavy police presence standing by. Carrying aboriginal flags and placards that reads "stop the genocide," they marched through the city and staged a sit-in outside Flinders Street Train Station.
"People are forced to leave their homeland. It's a shame that we have this kind of thing in our country. This kind of act is denying who we are," one of the protestors told Xinhua.
As dusk draws in, gum leaves were burned and people danced around it. Traffic was blocked and trams were delayed by the standstill.
According to the organizer of the protest, Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, the protest is about educating the public and the media about the shutdown of those remote communities.
The West Australia government had warned that some of the 274 remote communities would be forced to close due to limited funding. Endi