Antinuclear

John Pilger discusses his film “Utopia” on Australia’s land steal from Aborigines

John Pilger Interview: White Australians Would Like Aboriginal People to DisappearSunday, 18 January 2015 00:00By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview Noted journalist John Pilger directed and is the lead investigator in an extraordinary documentary, Utopia: An Epic Story of Struggle and Resistance.

Pilger incisively and tenaciously reveals the brutal conquest and continued racist treatment of the Aboriginal people in Australia. Against this appalling historical documentation of conquest, discriminating and neglect, Pilger also highlights the continued resistance of the original inhabitants of the land stolen by British settlers.

The following is a Truthout interview with John Pilger about Utopia.

John Pilger: The irony of Utopia isn’t mine. It’s the name given a vast, forbidding expanse of Australia’s north by the British. What did they imagine? Perhaps, demented by the ferocity of the heat and dust, they intended to turn it into an English garden. More realistically, they understood that great wealth lay beneath the land. Certainly, their disregard for the people who had lived there for thousands of years – arguably the longest continuous human community – was typical of the attitudes that came with the colonial invasion of Australia. The indigenous people were at one with the harshness of the land; they knew where to find water and food; this was their physical and cultural home.

For more than two centuries, white Australians have tried to expel them………..White Australia would like them to disappear; the First Australians not only refuse to disappear, they resist, often heroically………

Can you briefly describe the so-called “emergency ” government intervention that occurred in the “Northern Territory National Emergency Response” under the government of Prime Minister John Howard in 2007? It was so racist and such a cover for government control of Aboriginal land that might have minerals that it represented much of Canberra’s mistreatment of the people that they conquered.

Pilger: This was presented by John Howard as a vote-gaining crusade to “save” indigenous children from pedophiles in their communities, which were said to be operating in “unthinkable” numbers. It was a political con on such a scale that I suspect it could have happened only in Australia. The principal allegations were found to be baseless by the Northern Territory Police, the National Crime Commission, the Central Australian medical specialists’ association, even by the author of a report whose recommendations the government claimed it was acting upon. The media played a central, shameful role, as the film reveals……

There is another, insidious element. A very small but significant section of Indigenous Australia has been co-opted by white authority – rewarded with education and bureaucratic largesse. This has produced a “transmission” colonial class of the kind that Franz Fanon wrote about and which oversees a divide-and-rule policy that ensures the majority remain at or near the bottom…….

Australia remains a vivid expression of the way colonial power – from the 18th century to the present-day – regards and treats those whose land it steals. I made a film about the Native Americans, and the similarities are striking. My own belief is that until we, the colonizers and the immigrants, give back the nationhood of those whose lives our forebears so disrupted and destroyed, we can never claim our own. http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/28572-john-pilger-interview-white-australians-would-like-aboriginal-people-to-disappear

January 19, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | aboriginal issues, AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL