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Film “Utopia” shows Australia’s history of oppression of Aboriginal people

John Pilger’s film Utopia, about Australia, is to be released in British cinemas on 15 November and in Australia in January

In the lucky country of Australia apartheid is alive and kicking John Pilger The Guardian, Wednesday 6 November 2013  “…….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…….

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. ……

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 paedophile 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……

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 and abused. Australia’s unique first people are its Untermenschen. 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. http://www.opednews.com/articles/In-The-Lucky-Country-Of-Au-by-John-Pilger-Apartheid_Australian-Politics_Health_Indigenous-131105-66.html

November 6, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, Resources -audiovicual