Watch the trailer for Emmy and Bafta winning film-maker and journalist John Pilger’s epic new documentary about Australia. Two years in the making, Utopia reveals a shocking national secret behind the postcard image of the “lucky country”. Utopia is released on 15 November in UK cinemas, and then will be broadcast on ITV in December and released on DVD on 16 December. It will be released in Australia on 26 January. www.johnpilger.com
Hazel Healy talks to the trailblazing documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist about heroes, home and a mostly silent apartheid. – Read the full interview >>
[…] Lately, I have been consumed by the making of Utopia, my film about the struggles and resistance of indigenous Australians. This is both an Australian story and a universal ‘issue’ – it’s about people defending a way of life against rapacious power, and having the right to share the riches and opportunities in their own country. It’s also about an apartheid that seldom speaks its name. – See more at: http://newint.org/columns/finally/2013/11/01/john-pilger/#sthash.0JzRRbSZ.dpuf
In the film you reveal that indigenous children are being removed from their families at twice the rate as during the 20th century. Is this the Stolen Generation, all over again?
Yes, but with one major difference. The children of the first Stolen Generation were removed by welfare officials and others in authority, often for openly racist reasons: to ‘save’ Aboriginal children from their own societies: as the Chief Protector himself remarked famously, to ‘breed out the black’. Although the undeclared policy today is assimilation, the reasons given for removing children are often a form of blame – blame of indigenous families for their impoverishment and blame for the legacies of discrimination against them.
What needs to happen for the lot of first peoples in Australia to be transformed for the better?
Aboriginal people first and foremost should decide how their ‘lot’ is changed. At present, they are barely consulted. There will be a transformation only when they can sit down with the non-indigenous population and negotiate, as equals, a charter of rights that share the resources and opportunities of one of the world’s richest countries. It would not be difficult to achieve if the political will was there in Canberra [the seat of government]. It would be a transforming start, because it would exemplify something that is utterly absent – goodwill on the part of the majority.
In a recent piece in The Guardian, you wrote that ‘only Aboriginal people are the true Australians. The rest of us – beginning with Captain Cook – are boat people.’ Do you come under attack for these views when you travel back to your native Australia?
Yes: by those who themselves are part of the problem. The truth can be upsetting. […]
