John Pilger: Australia's silent apartheid
John Pilger: Australia’s silent apartheid
Hazel Healy talks to the documentary filmmaker and journalist about heroes, home and a mostly silent apartheid.
John Pilger
What’s your earliest memory?
I remember someone taking a photo of me and my brother Graham at the age of three. We were playing on the cold sand at Patonga by the Hawkesbury River near Sydney. My brother, like all older brothers, was telling me to look at the camera and smile. I didn’t want to. I was happy as a child. Many years later, I learned that it was the place where the first Australians fought against the invading British. No-one talked about it – then and now.
Who inspires you?
I wrote a book called Heroes. The heroes were normal people who manage to survive and sometimes win against strong political forces. They inspire me.
What political issue are you most passionate about at the moment?
I’m not sure it’s possible to separate ‘political passions’. Politics are part of life. Recently, I have used all my energy to make Utopia, my film about the fight and resistance of indigenous Australians. This is an Australian story and a universal ‘problem’. It’s about people who are fighting to defend their way of life; people who have the right to share the riches and opportunities in their own country. It’s also about apartheid. But people do not use that word.
Utopia brings you back together with people you filmed in The Secret Country in 1985. What changed for them in the years between the two films?
Very little. A couple of examples: in the 1985 film I said that in New South Wales almost a quarter of Aboriginal males who survived to the age of 20 were dead by 40. The latest statistics show that almost a third of Aboriginal people are dead before the age of 45 and almost half don’t live past 55. In 1985, I said that many people in indigenous communities had trachoma, which makes people blind; this can be prevented. In Utopia, I say that Australia is still on an international ‘shame list’; it is the only first-world country that has not got rid of trachoma. Almost all the people who have it are indigenous. One thing has changed: many indigenous Australians now want to fight back.
This is your fourth film about indigenous Australia. What made you want to go back now?
I have been going back to Australia since I left. I’ve made seven films from Australia and about Australia; I’ve probably seen more of Australia than most Australians. They sometimes seem like they are not doing anything, just looking in their own country. What made me want to go back? Because there are two unique things in Australia: the ancient land and the original people. I am lucky that I was born there and that I grew up there. But I did not know how lucky I until I returned from the other side of the world to ‘discover’ my own country.
In the film you show that twice as many indigenous children are being taken from their families as during the 20th century. Is this the Stolen Generation again?
Yes, but with one very big difference. The children of the first Stolen Generation were taken by welfare officials and other people in authority, often for openly racist reasons: to ‘save’ Aboriginal children from their own societies: as the Chief Protector himself said famously, to ‘breed out the black’. Today, the policy is assimilation (but they do not state this openly), but the reasons they give for taking the children away are often a form of blame. They are blaming the indigenous families for being poor. They are blaming them all the discrimination against them.
What needs to happen to make the lives of first peoples in Australia better?
Aboriginal people should decide how their lives are changed. No-one asks them now. Things will change when they can sit down with the non-indigenous population and negotiate, as equals, how they can share the resources and opportunities of one of the world’s richest countries. This would not be difficult if the government in Canberra wanted this.
In The Guardian recently, you wrote that ‘only Aboriginal people are the true Australians. The rest of us – beginning with Captain Cook – are boat people.’ Do people attack you for saying this when you travel back to your native Australia?
Yes: but only the people who are part of the problem. They are upset because it is the truth.
Where do you feel most at home?
I feel most at home in Australia, and most at home in London, and most at home in other parts of the world that I know. I suppose I am an internationalist, but I am also very sentimental about those places where I ‘feel’ at home.
Utopia is in UK cinemas from 15 November (Australia, January 2014) and available on DVD from 16 December and will be on ITV in December. johnpilger.com
As this article has been simplified, the words, text structure and quotes may have been changed. For the original, please see http://newint.org/columns/finally/2013/11/01/john-pilger/
