John Pilger marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of A Secret Country, his best-selling history of Australia, with a description of Aboriginal Australia and its relationship with white authority following Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the “stolen generations” last year.
Breaking the great Australian silence
In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”.
Cover-up: a film’s travesty of omissions
John Pilger recalls his undercover reporting from East Timor and reveals that a major new movie, Balibo, perpetuates the cover-up of the role played western governments in the genocial invasion of East Timor by Indonesia and the Australian government’s part in the murder of its own journalists.
Welcome to Australia
An examination of the exclusion of Australia’s Aborigines. “It was fitting that Sydney, a sporting paradise, should be given the Olympic Games in the millennium year, 2000… When it came to the vote, no one mentioned those Australians excluded from Paradise and who were until recently its invisible people. This film is about that other […]
The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back
The shameful history of persecution of the Aborigines in Australia. “As children, we were given to understand that we were merely innocent bystanders to the slow and natural death of an ancient people, the First Australians, rather than the inheritors of a history every bit as rapacious as that of the United States, Latin America, […]
