UTOPIA - A film by John Pilger with his article on the Aboriginal People of Australia (UPDATED - NEW BOOK ON PILGER)
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By John Pilger. JohnPilger.com. Book by Anthony Hayward
JohnPilger.com. Axis of Logic
Thursday, Nov 7, 2013
UPDATE WITH NEW BOOK ON PILGER AT BOTTOM OF THE PAGE
Utopia, a new, epic film on Australia by John Pilger, will be released in cinemas in the UK in November and shown on ITV in December. Tickets are on sale at www.picturehouses.co.uk
In an article for the Guardian, John Pilger describes the suppression of Australia's bloodied history while veneration for its colonial wars and the rise of militarism excludes the true story of the 'the greatest expropriation of land in world history'.
Utopia will be launched in Australia at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, with screenings from January 21-23 and on Australia Day, January 26. A cinema release and SBS broadcast will follow.
UTOPIA - THE TRAILER
The corridors of the Australian parliament are so white you squint. The sound is hushed; the smell is floor polish. The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon portraits of prime ministers and rows of Aboriginal paintings, suspended on white walls, their blood and tears invisible.
The parliament stands in Barton, a suburb of Canberra named after the first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, who drew up the White Australia Policy in 1901. “The doctrine of the equality of man,” said Barton, “was never intended to apply” to those not British and white-skinned.
Barton’s concern was the Chinese, known as the Yellow Peril; he made no mention of the oldest, most enduring human presence on earth: the first Australians. They did not exist. Their sophisticated care of a harsh land was of no interest. Their epic resistance did not happen. Of those who fought the British invaders of Australia, the Sydney Monitor reported in 1838: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” Today, the survivors are a shaming national secret.
The town of Wilcannia, in New South Wales, is twice distinguished. It is a winner of a national Tidy Town award and its indigenous people have one of the lowest recorded life expectancies. They are usually dead by the age of 35. The Cuban government runs a literacy programme for them, as they do among the poorest of Africa. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the richest place on earth.
Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens. Their self-endowment is legendary. Last year, the then minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of $331,144.
Macklin recently claimed that, in government, she had made a “huge difference”. This is true. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third, and more than half the money spent on indigenous housing was pocketed by white contractors and a bureaucracy for which she was largely responsible. A typical, dilapidated house in an outback indigenous community must accommodate as many as 25 people. Families, the elderly and the disabled wait years for sanitation that works.
In 2009, Professor James Anaya, the respected UN Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described as racist a “state of emergency” that stripped indigenous communities of their tenuous rights and services on the pretext that pedophile gangs were present in “unthinkable” numbers – a claim dismissed as false by police and the Australian Crime Commission.
The then opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old victim brigade.” Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.
I drove into the red heart of central Australia and asked Dr. Janelle Trees about the “old victim brigade”. A GP whose indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, “There is asbestos in Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: why not? Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”
In Canberra, in ministerial offices displaying yet more first-nation art, I was told repeatedly how “proud” politicians were of what “we have done for indigenous Australians”. When I asked Warren Snowdon — the minister for indigenous health in the Labor government recently replaced by Abbott’s conservative coalition — why after almost a quarter of a century representing the poorest, sickest Australians, he had not come up with a solution, he said, “What a stupid question. What a puerile question.”
At the end of Anzac Parade in Canberra rises the Australian National War Memorial, which historian Henry Reynolds calls “the sacred centre of white nationalism”. I was refused permission to film in this great public place. I had made the mistake of expressing an interest in the frontier wars in which black Australians fought the British invasion without guns but with ingenuity and courage – the epitome of the “Anzac tradition”. Yet, in a country littered with cenotaphs not one officially commemorates those who fell resisting “one of the greatest appropriations of land in world history”, wrote Reynolds in his landmark book Forgotten War. More first Australians were killed than Native Americans on the American frontier and Maoris in New Zealand. The state of Queensland was a slaughterhouse. An entire people became prisoners of war in their own country, with settlers calling for their extinction. The cattle industry prospered using indigenous men virtually as slave labour. The mining industry today makes profits of a billion dollars a week on indigenous land.
Suppressing these truths, while venerating Australia’s servile role in the colonial wars of Britain and the US, has almost cult status in Canberra today. Reynolds and the few who question it have been smeared with abuse. Australia’s unique first people are its Intermenschen. As you enter the National War Memorial, indigenous faces are depicted as stone gargoyles alongside kangaroos, reptiles, birds and other “native wildlife”.
When I began filming this secret Australia 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance and defensiveness of liberals. Yet no international opprobrium, no boycotts, disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia. Watch security guards expel Aboriginal people from shopping malls in Alice Springs; drive the short distance from the suburban barbies of Cromwell Terrace to Whitegate camp, where the tin shacks have no reliable power and water. This is apartheid, or what Reynolds calls, “the whispering in our hearts”.
John Pilger’s film, Utopia, about Australia, is released in cinemas on 15 November and broadcast on ITV in December. It is released in Australia in January.
Source: JohnPilger.com
UPDATE
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, an updated edition of Anthony Hayward's book about the journalist and documentary-maker's work, is published by Profiles International Media in November 2013 as an e-book, price £3.99. It ties in with the cinema, television and DVD release of Pilger's latest film, Utopia.
For five decades, John Pilger's documentaries have been exposing injustices around the world and bringing to account those in power who make decisions that affect the lives of others, often in faraway countries. From his first film, The Quiet Mutiny, Pilger made waves, revealing the shocking truth about American troop rebellions in the Vietnam War. More recently, in the wake of September 11th, he has been a rare media voice in questioning the United States's foreign policy and its imperial ambitions.
Scenes of the starving in his landmark documentary Year Zero − The Silent Death of Cambodia, filmed in the aftermath of Pol Pot's genocide, helped to trigger $45 million in aid for that country. Pilger has highlighted repression in Czechoslovakia, East Timor and Burma, the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine and, with his first film for both television and the cinema, the attempts by small countries to carve out their own democracies, without interference from the United States. The British-based journalist has also subjected his own home country of Australia to affectionate but critical examinations over the years, culminating in his 2013 film Utopia.
His dedication to uncovering unpalatable truths and his disregard for traditional journalistic concepts of 'impartiality' and 'balance' have sometimes brought him into conflict with both the political and broadcasting establishments. In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward traces Pilger's screen career, details the documentaries, their effects and controversies, and compares them with other factual output on TV and in the cinema. It is published to tie in with the release of Pilger's epic film Utopia.
Anthony Hayward is author of the acclaimed books Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films and In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger, as well as the biographies Julie Christie and Phantom: Michael Crawford Unmasked. He has written many books about television and film, and contributed to The Independent since 1993 and The Guardian since 2009.
REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL
2001 EDITION
‘An excellent introduction to abuses of power around the world.’
– Far Eastern Economic Review
‘Anthony Hayward’s excellent account of Pilger’s work shows how [his] sensibility [to justice and injustice] has driven Pilger to create 50 British television documentaries over the last 30 years, programs that have changed public policy and saved lives… Pilger’s professional life has been dedicated to exploring tragic situations, and Hayward stares unblinkingly into these horrors.’
– Variety
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‘Hayward takes a step back to examine not just Pilger’s reporting, but the powerful and lasting impact it has had on flashpoint chunks of the world map…
This is a fitting tribute and a fine work.’
– Manchester Evening News
‘A remarkably thorough account of the work of John Pilger, performing a valuable function simply by documenting the sheer extent of the journalist’s television work… a fascinating account of the changing nature of censorship on British television.’
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