"We don't want to get into a battle about vilifying Asians or any other group in this country." Credit:Nic Walker There are two versions of what happened over the following decades. Either the AHC refused to repair their houses, so the locals refused to pay their rent. Or the locals refused to pay their rent, so the AHC refused to repair their houses. Mick Mundine, an Aboriginal man, has been the CEO of the AHC for three decades. He decided long ago that drugs and crime had destroyed The Block. He oversaw tearing down the houses and moving the residents elsewhere. Mick says he now needs to build apartments in the area for international students from the nearby university. He says income from this will bankroll low-cost Aboriginal housing at a later stage. This is the only viable plan, he says. Those international students will be mainly Asian. The taxi driver who has brought me to Redfern, a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan, tells me he doesn't like to come down this way because of an incident with a passenger. He points to his driver-side window. "When I open this to take the 10 dollar, he punch my face, ha ha! And he pick up my coin bag ... and run away, ha ha! After that, when I see the Aborigines, I don't like to pick them up."

Firm stance: Lani Tuitavake and Michael Mundine of the Aboriginal Housing Company Credit:Nic Walker Protesters have set up the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on The Block, and have erected big blocks of white wooden letters that spell out: "Sovereignty never ceded." A dozen or so tents are pitched on the grass. A small group of people lounge under a canopy. A sign spells out their position: "Low-cost housing for Aboriginal families should be first, not last." "G'day," I say from outside the perimeter of the grass. "Am I allowed to come on here?" I'd been warned to ask this. Don't treat The Block like a public space, I'd been told. Aunty Jenny Munro at the tent embassy. Credit:AAP "Well done. Good on you, darling, for asking," says a Maori woman.

"Hey, um," I begin. The AHC will have strict rules over who can live in the planned Aboriginal houses. No "undesirables", no one with a criminal record. Credit:Nic Walker "Hey, um," the Maori woman mocks. "You English? Of English descent?" she asks pointedly. I tell her I'm not. Alex Tuitavake at the Redfern Gym. Credit:Nic Walker

"Irish?" snaps an Aboriginal guy. I tell them I'm Jewish and they become more welcoming, now knowing I'm not "classic white". Party for Freedom chairman Nick Folkes. Credit:James Alcock "So good on you then," the Maori woman says, "for not using their bastardly language correctly and throwing that 'umm' in there." I ask about the poster. "We don't know who it is; person or persons unknown," says an older Aboriginal woman, squinting up, stretched out on a rug. Aunty Jenny Munro founded the tent embassy on May 26 last year, National Sorry Day, fearful that Mick Mundine was about to roll in the bulldozers.

"We don't want to get into a battle about vilifying Asians or any other group in this country," Aunty Jenny says. "We cop that every day ourselves. So we don't want to put that boot into anyone else." Aunty Jenny, a Wiradjuri elder, was a founding member of the AHC but she and the organisation have long since parted ways. Does she think Mick's motives are right, to help Aboriginal people in the long term, even if she disagrees with his ways? "If he was doing the right thing," she says, "he wouldn't be walking around weighed down with so much gold himself, on his neck." There is a theory that the poster is a dirty campaign by the AHC. To make the embassy cause look racist. "An interesting place to hang out," the Maori woman advises, "and perhaps stretch your ears, is Pride of Redfern." This cafe, she says, is where AHC employees take coffee breaks. Particularly, a Tongan family she feels are having an unhealthy influence on matters. Mick needs these Tongans because he can't get Aboriginal support for the redevelopment, she says.

"Just sit and listen," the Maori woman continues. "And come back and tell us what they talk about." Everyone laughs. "Will you? They're not easy to miss. A Tongan family. The father is a short man. Walks with a bit of a laboured left leg. Ugly. So if you found a good-looking one, you've got the wrong one." Everybody laughs. The Maori woman spots a white guy crossing The Block with his shopping. She lifts herself from her chair and bolts towards him. "You didn't actually ask," she snaps. "You just crossed without asking." She points at the private property sign. He argues back but eventually gives in and edges off the grass. "I've always been on their team," he says, sounding hurt, as the Maori woman marches off. Aunty Jenny points at me. "We have been subjected to a holocaust that your people could never have imagined! How many people do you think in this country have died trying to defend our land, our people? How many? Have you even got an idea?"

"No, no, no," I admit. "Well, that's the stuff you need to go and look at and come back!" I find the Tongan man with the laboured leg, Alex Tuitavake, at a gym and boxing centre just down from the embassy. He's the manager. His wife, Lani Tuitavake, is general manager of the AHC. "I've lived in the community here for 25 years now," Alex says. "We may be Tongan, but this is home. I've got eight kids and they were all born and raised here." He says it's a bit rich of the embassy to label "the Tongans" as outsiders. Many of the protesters are new arrivals, he says. "She's only just come in with the tent embassy," Alex says of the Maori woman. "She's never been in The Block here before."

Alex says he doesn't know anything about the poster. A two-story high photo of Alfred Cameron jnr, a "Black Anzac" who served at Gallipoli, is pasted on the building that houses the AHC. It's a one-minute walk up the hill from the embassy. Lani opens a coffee-table book with the redevelopment plans approved by the NSW Department of Planning. The illustrations look chic, a bit futuristic. There are 154 apartments for student accommodation. A childcare centre. Retail and commercial space. This is what has to come, says the AHC, before 62 houses are built for Aboriginal people. "It looks modern," I say. "Was there any pressure to try to make it more identifiable, so straight away you're going, 'This is like an Aboriginal place?' " "What? Have a boomerang or something?" Lani says sharply. "We're an urban community." Lani turns the page in the big book to photos of the multicultural AHC team. One woman is Sudanese, another South African and Maori. Lani says the redevelopment is a multicultural vision in itself, literally knocking down a wall that hides The Block from greater Redfern.

There is one particularly raw nerve between the AHC and the embassy. The AHC will have strict rules over who can live in the planned Aboriginal houses. No "undesirables", no one with a criminal record. "How high is that bar?" Aunty Jenny had said before. "Which blackfellas do you know that don't have a police record?" "We need to be able to get it off the ground," Lani says, unapologetically. "If people have had a history where there's drugs, antisocial behaviour, no one's gonna want that in any housing. We have an application that says, 'You've got a history of domestic violence?' There's no place for them, you know? And not for one moment should we be feeling sorry for those people." In mid-February, the people at the tent embassy were sent an eviction notice by the AHC, demanding they vacate by February 23. But by the time of Good Weekend going to print, the protesters had yet to budge, with tensions between the two parties intensifying. I think about my Facebook feed on Australia Day. My progressive friends rebadge it Survival Day or Invasion Day. They frame the divide in Australia as white yobbos and conservatives versus black Australians and their allies. But what happens when it's a rainbow coalition of multiculturalists in a battle with Aboriginal people?

Lani's no help with the poster. She says she has no idea who stuck it up. I poke around town. A local bar owner not only hasn't heard of the poster, he hasn't heard about the embassy just down the dip, a minute from his business. Chinese international students don't know what I'm talking about, either. They just look at me like I'm asking them for two bucks for the train. Finally, a white guy at the pub says he knows who's behind the poster: the Party for Freedom (PFF), an anti-immigration group, seen as racist by its enemies. It's particularly against Asian and Muslim immigration. Not long ago, the local council told the PFF it couldn't use a Redfern hall for a meeting. So, the white guy at the pub tells me, as revenge it's trying to stir up trouble by pitting Aboriginal and Asian people against each other. Over the phone, PFF chairman Nick Folkes denies he's behind the poster, but says he has successfully recruited Aboriginal members. "Because we had our meeting in a club at Redfern and got to speak to lots of Aboriginal people," he says. "They're being squeezed out economically. They're competing for jobs, housing, you know?" However, Nick is unable to connect me to any of these supposed Aboriginal members. Nick also says the PFF will soon be picketing suburbs where Chinese people are buying property. "Let them know they're not welcome. And, you know, my opposition to Third World immigration is not based on race. I'm married to an Asian. But I don't support further Asian immigration."

While I try to tease out the loophole that lets the head of an anti-Asian immigration party have an Asian immigrant wife, down the phone line I can hear a ruckus. Nick is in the car with some mates. "We're on our way to Canberra. Hopefully, it'll be on the news this afternoon. One of us is wearing a burqa, one's wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit and one's wearing a motorbike helmet. We're trying to get into Parliament House today." He says the "Klansman" and "motorcyclist" will be denied entry while the "Muslim woman" will be allowed - the stunt exposing what Nick sees as the hypocrisy of multicultural Australia. "Which one are you wearing?" I ask. "I'm wearing the burqa, mate."

The PFF is not the only far-right party having a finger pointed at it. A young Aboriginal guy at the tent embassy suspects the Australia First Party (AFP) created the poster. "I know the Australia First Party has self-admittedly got a guerrilla group that's actually, specifically designed to do this kind of stuff, or cause division on issues," he says. "They're just manipulating shit." At the very least, on its website, the AFP is taking the ball and running with it: "If some Aborigines take the path of struggle against the Asian property developers ... then this would be a major challenge to the hegemony of the Greens and the extreme-left over inner-city politics. It would signal a major rupture since up to now the Green-left alliance has pretended that it supported Aboriginal causes. Now they will condemn the Aborigines and they [Aboriginal people] will see in return how false the friendship of this gang really was." The AFP's chairman, long-time far-right activist Jim Saleam, shoos me away from the party's storefront HQ in Tempe, near Redfern. So, even though my intuition is drawing me to this place (why did the AFP's website cover this little-known story so thoroughly?), I'll never find out if the posters are from here. Anti-fascists have plastered different posters on the bus stop across the road from the AFP's HQ. Reads one: "Nationalism - it teaches you to take pride in shit you haven't done and hate people you've never met." Back at the tents, the Aboriginal guy who pointed the finger at the Australia First Party is throwing wood on a fire. He says a few Aboriginal people with "colonised minds" might fraternise with the far right, but not many. He says there is a long bond between blackfellas and Asian people. "Chinese people came before invasion, they had marriages up north," he says. "We traded with half the world. Like, we don't have issues with other people."

He says there's also a bond between Aboriginal people and Muslims, going all the way back to the Afghanis who came to Australia with their camels in the 1860s. "The general population of the Muslim people support our people and our fight, because they've understood dispossession. I've been to Bankstown. For the first time, I walked around without feeling like I'm being stared at. Cabbies have pulled over to give me lifts." I don't tell him that the Muslim taxi driver who dropped me off was unambiguous: "When I see the Aborigines, I don't like to pick them up." I admit to Aunty Jenny that I never found out how many Aboriginal people died defending their land. "Nobody knows," she says sadly. A black guy, born in Bermuda, has stopped by. Here on a holiday, he saw the Aboriginal flag flapping from Redfern station and wanted to know what was going on. A white girl, a British tourist, is also under the tent canopy, her eyes moistening: "It was my country that did this, not just here," she tells the Maori woman. "They've done this all over the world. It's absolutely disgusting."

I remember the local bar owner. He had no idea this embassy protest was going on just a minute away. Yet these tourists somehow found their way here. The Maori woman spots a young white couple strolling across the grass. "How are youse?" she shouts. "Come and have a chat. Have you got five minutes? Come on, guys, you're trespassing!" "Trespassing?" the young Aussie man says. "Look to your left. There's a sign. Private property." "Gee!" says the young man.

"Sorry!" shouts the young Aussie woman. "Sorry I stole your country," the Maori woman mutters. "Sorry, sorry." The young couple don't stop for a chat.