The Aboriginal activists in Canberra, who forced police and security personnel to behave as dramatically as they did on Australia Day, set their aspirations back for years.

Their tent embassy, near a grove of trees in front of the Old Parliament House, is a symbolic settlement, hardly noticed by commuters.

A few tents cluster around an Aboriginal flag, now an integral part of Australiana. One or two campfires lazily send smoke spiralling through the trees.

The tiny camp has been in Canberra and in our folklore for decades.

Occasionally police get a directive to clear the site, and soon after the occupants amble back.

It is one of Australia's most inoffensive but effective protests - far more effective than the mindless idiots who caused the security alert while Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott were at the nearby Lobby Restaurant for a function.

Greens leader Bob Brown and the conservation movement wrote the handbook for peaceful protest when they staged the internationally-acclaimed protests on the Gordon River, and effectively killed off the Gordon-below Franklin dam.

At other times the movement has gone too far and either caused, or incited, violent protests in the forests.

One of the most effective counter-protests in Australia happened in Canberra in 1988 at the inaugural meeting of Timber Communities Australia, then called the Forest Protection Society.

A group of conservationists turned up at the venue to protest against the meeting.

At morning tea forest workers and partners filed out of the venue, each carrying a tree sapling in a pot plant; and presented one to each of the green protesters.

It was a brilliant but peaceful strategy.

Violent protests turn off the community in droves.

Anti-global protests in cities, where some use marbles and other devices to spook police horses into a stampede, are designed with purely anarchistic motives, and no objective other than manufactured crisis and violent chaos.

Last Thursday this same self-defeating mindset was evident.

It simply undermined the understandable frustration Aboriginal people may experience with Australia Day.