The story of my country has been and remains an epic cover-up ... There have been almost one hundred Aboriginal deaths in police custody in recent years ... Australia’s imprisonment of black people is the highest in the world ... Deaths of this kind have been going on for two hundred years. John Pilger, The Last Dream: Secrets
Today it is estimated that more than half a million Aborigines died as the direct result of the British invasion. ibid.
One in five of all children live in poverty. Australia has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the developed world in a society that ought to offer so much. ibid.
In the middle of the nineteenth century there were some fifty independent newspapers in New South Wales alone. This is the Sydney Monitor, edited and published by Edward Smith Hall. With his eight-page shilling-a-copy paper Hall was the champion of convicts and freed prisoners. He exposed corruption in high places. Fought government censorship. And campaigned for the murderers of Aborigines to be brought to justice. Edward Smith Hall, a journalist, did more than any individual to bring free reforms to Australia – trial by jury, representative government and freedom of the press. ibid.
[Albert] Namatjira was deemed fit even to meet the Queen. Being an honorary white man, Namatjira could buy alcohol which was banned to his people. In 1959 the artist who had become fashionable in the art galleries was convicted of the crime of supplying liquor to an Aborigine. The dreadful irony of this didn’t stop them putting him away for three months in Alice Springs Jail. He died shortly afterwards a broken man. Thousands of Aborigines have died and are still dying in this way. Namatjira was one of the few we noticed. John Pilger, The Last Dream: Heroes Unsung
Just as white slavery was at the foundation of modern Australia, so too was black slavery ... Comparisons with South Africa are not popular these days. But the history of both nations has been marked by huge profits made from land worked with cheap bonded labour, and by racial phobias and fairy tales. ibid.
In Britain Australian officials presented a picture almost of paradise. And the response was extraordinary. Up to a third of the British population considered emigrating. And it all cost just £10 as long as you stayed two years. These we knew as the £10 poms. But for many the reality was this: corrugated Army huts in the bush where you boiled in summer and froze in winter. ibid.
Today all over Australia black children still die from preventable diseases and are still confined to the poverty of Australian apartheid ... We’ve never offered those we’ve stole it [land] from a share in the optimism that now distinguishes so much of our extraordinarily diverse society. We’ve never offered them justice. Not even fundamental humanity. And by their survival alone, the Aboriginal people are the real heroes unsung. That is our secret in 1998. And the world should know about it. ibid.
Just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. John Pilger, re plight of Aborigines
Black Australians may well have the highest prison population in the world. Convictions related to homelessness, alcoholism and unemployment have meant in effect that to be black is a crime. John Pilger, The Secret Country – The First Australians Fight Back, Central 1985
No British colony was born under so cruel a star as Australia. ibid.
By the 1920s the British invasion had caused the deaths of at least a quarter of a million black Australians. Genocide on a massive scale. But this fact remains suppressed except in the living memory of those who survive. ibid.
Viewed against the nightmare that had gone before, the Aboriginal renaissance in the 1970s was extraordinary. ibid.
Aborigines were commonly regarded as less than human. They were not citizens. They had no vote. Unlike the sheep they were not even counted. When I was at school history books either ignored them or compared them to half-wild dogs, animals of prey who devour their own species. While the Olympics provided a facade of triumph and civilisation, aboriginal families were being torn apart by deliberate government policies that led to a former slavery ... Most died in their thirties and forties. Their tragedy represents the epic suffering of the Aboriginal people whose living conditions are so bad that their life expectancy is among the lowest on Earth, worse than much of Africa. John Pilger, Welcome to Australia, Carlton 1999
In his book Obstacle Race Professor Colin Tatz names 1,200 outstanding black Australian athletes of whom only 5 had access to the training, access and facilities that white athletes take for granted. ibid.
I am a white Australian; if I was a black Australian I’d most likely be dead now. ibid.
At least 25,000 Aborigines died for their country. ibid.
Barbara Shaw is most definitely a hero. Barbara Shaw over many years has fought for her people. She is one of the leaders of these very very important submissions to the United Nations Committee on Discrimination, which to the shame of this government and to the elite in this country has to happen all over again ... The history of Aboriginal Australia in the colonial era has been the history of land grab. John Pilger, interview Melbourne 2009
The whole image of Aboriginal people is so distorted and providing them with yet another vivid image of dysfunction, and that’s what the intervention does, that allows the federal governments and state governments and various other vested interests to do as they’ve always done to the Aboriginal people ... The discrimination at almost all levels is set in stone, and this intervention is a massive distraction. ibid.
The likenesses between the Palestinians and the Aboriginal people are quite exact in many ways. And all the historical dishonesty that has been applied to negating them almost as a people to destroying their history is almost interchangeable. ibid.
I remember the boys dressed in army surplus, the girls in hessian, their silhouettes framed in beach shanties, staring across an abyss. You were not meant to talk about them. They were not counted in the census, unlike the sheep, and anyway were dirty and feckless and dying off.
You were not meant to disturb the surface of our great southern idyll, sun-kissed and God-blessed, in circumstances that might raise questions of race. At high school, I studied a celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: ‘We are civilized and they are not’. They were the first Australians. At least he mentioned them. Other text books simply left them out. John Pilger, New Statesman article, ‘Return to a Secret Country’
The Olympic Games are coming to Sydney in the millennium year 2000. While the official Olympic song celebrates Baron de Coubertin’s vision of ‘a festival of sports creating international respect and goodwill’, it is the smell of money that comes with the salt spray; for Arcadia is also Spiv City.
That is to say, the rich mates who run what they call the big end of town know that the Olympics have little to do with peace, goodwill etc. and everything to do with power, rivalry, status and the top dollar. The shock troops of the Sydney Olympic Committee understood this and left the bidders from Beijing and Manchester in their dust.
Every African delegate on the International Olympic Committee was offered two seven-year scholarships for their country’s athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport. A world youth soccer tournament costing A$35 million (£13.5 million?), much of it public money, was slipped under the table. That the president of the Federation of International Football Associations happened to be one of the most influential IOC brokers was an amazing coincidence. The fascist past of the IOC’s Spanish president, Juan Samaranch, rated hardly a word in the Sydney press; instead, his campaign for a Nobel peace prize was noted favourably. ‘Anyone who threatens Sydney’s Olympic bid had better watch out,’ bellowed a member of the Sydney committee ...
Behind the facade, nothing has changed for the first Australians. Their life expectancy is at least 25 years less than that of whites; walk through any Aboriginal cemetery and you see that most of the graves belong to the young. Australia is the only developed country on a World Health Organisation ‘shame list’ of countries where endemic trachoma still blinds children. Unlike Sri Lanka, rich Australia has yet to marshal its energies to beat this entirely preventable disease.
Although representing less than 3 per cent of the population, Aborigines fill the lock-ups and prisons. In the Northern Territory, one dies in custody every two weeks – a rate said to be higher than the death of imprisoned blacks in apartheid South Africa. This, as they say here, is ‘a tricky subject’. The newly appointed sports and tourism minister, a woman called Jackie Kelly with a reputed gift for public relations, refused to be interviewed on the subject. Rather, her media adviser refused. ‘The minister has to be protected,’ he said privately.
When the Olympics were last held in Australia, in Melbourne in 1956, no one looked behind the facade. While Australian athletes performed brilliantly, coming third in the tally of gold medals, Aboriginal children were being torn from their families and incarcerated in institutions, where they were prepared for a life of virtual slave labour. This year the Human Rights Commission described the theft of these children as genocide and demanded that the federal government apologise and pay reparations. The prime minister refused. When he presides over the Olympic opening ceremony, he ought to be reminded that the civilised world is watching. John Pilger article 11th December 1988, ‘When the Olympics Comes to Australia, It Will Provide a Facade For a Shameful Australia’
This Aboriginal man died three hours later. No police officer was prosecuted. John Pilger, Utopia ***** ITV 2013
The other Australia – a secret battleground where the first people of Australia fought the invading British. This was their land. ibid.