This is the fourth film I’ve made on this subject and in the past there has been quite a powerful reaction, including quite a hostile reaction from sections of the media, which you’d expect. I suppose the aim of the film is not to give anyone watching it in Australia a way out, thereby almost forcing them to engage with the subject and think anew about their own attitudes to Aboriginal people. “I’ve never subscribed to the idea that as journalists or filmmakers, we’re immune to what we see or report. But the treatment of indigenous people has always been a disgrace that people prefer not to talk about. From memory, the quote is something like, ‘Australia is a lucky country because it’s a first-rate country run by second-rate people.’ In many ways Australia is a lucky country – a relatively small population in a country of natural riches. And because Australia has projected itself as this ‘lucky country’ – even though the term was coined ironically by (author) Donald Horne. The opprobrium heaped upon white South Africa only came very late in the day. John Pilger: I think it’s because Australia is regarded in Britain as family – as indeed South Africa was for a very long time. It was not the kind of intervention that should’ve happened years ago: providing indigenous people with the same rights and services most Australians take for granted. It was a punitive operation that sought to smear them, a means of continuing a historic land-grab and socially engineering Aboriginal communities in the spirit, if not the letter, of apartheid society.ĭD: Yet Australia largely seems to avoid the global condemnation other nations endure.
Especially the way the media was used to ignite a bogus emergency. John Pilger: It was the so-called ‘intervention’ in 2006-7 that really made me think I had to do another film.
What shocked me again once I investigated was the enduring political cynicism on the matter.ĭD: What convinced you to revisit this topic again? John Pilger: I’ve kept in touch with the situation over many years so I knew all the indicators were pretty bad. Dazed Digital: Were you shocked to see how bad things still are for Australia’s indigenous population?
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