Australia’s
Day for Secrets, Flags and Cowards
By John Pilger
January 22,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- - On 26 January, one of the saddest days in
human history will be celebrated in Australia. It
will be "a day for families", say the newspapers
owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at
street corners and displayed on funny hats. People
will say incessantly how proud they are.
For many,
there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime,
non-indigenous Australia has changed from an
Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically
diverse on earth. Those we used to call "New
Australians" often choose 26 January, "Australia
Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can
be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East
and understand why they clench their new flag.
It was
sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood
with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and
threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed
down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others
had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of
Britain's "First Fleet" dropped anchor on 26
January, 1788. This was the moment the only island
continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants;
the euphemism was "settled". It was, wrote Henry
Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians,
one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He
described the slaughter that followed as "a
whispering in our hearts".
The
original Australians are the oldest human presence.
To the European invaders, they did not exist because
their continent had been declared terra nullius:
empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was
ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: "It
was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks
in that quarter." This referred to the Darug people
who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far
from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without
guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains
almost a national secret. In a land littered with
cenotaphs honouring Australia's settler dead in
mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those
warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.
This truth
has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among
settler nations with indigenous populations, apart
from a facile "apology" in 2008, only Australia has
refused to come to terms with the shame of its
colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in
1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave
Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own
mythical "settlement". Almost half a century later,
it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be
made in Australia.
In 2014,
when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of
the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor,
I was advised by a luminary in the business: "No way
I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn't
accept it."
He was
wrong - up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney
a few days before 26 January, under the stars on
vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known
as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the
majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from
right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who
had appeared in the film stood in front of the
screen and spoke in "language": their own. Nothing
like it had happened before. Yet, there was no
press. For the wider community, it did not happen.
Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos
of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox
Network in the US.
The star
Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly
to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that "the
silence is broken". "Imagine," he wrote, "watching a
film that tells the truth about the terrible
injustices committed against your people, a film
that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that
have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen
from your people for their own benefit.
"Now
imagine how it feels when the people who benefited
most from those rapes, those killings and that theft
- the people in whose name the oppression was done -
turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose
it."
Goodes
himself had already broken a silence when he stood
against racist abuse thrown at him and other
Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented
man retired from football last year as if under a
cloud - with, wrote one commentator, "the sporting
nation divided about him". In Australia, it is
respectable to be "divided" on opposing racism.
On
Australia Day 2016 - Indigenous people prefer
Invasion Day or Survival Day - there will be no
acknowledgement that Australia's uniqueness is its
first people, along with an ingrained colonial
mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment
in an independent nation. This mentality is
expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting
political grovelling at the knee of a rapacious
United States to an almost casual contempt for
Indigenous Australians, an echo of "kaffir" -
abusing South Africans.
Apartheid
runs through Australian society. Within a short
flight from Sydney, Indigenous people live the
shortest of lives. Men are often dead before they
reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as
rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from
trachoma, and deaf from otitis media, diseases of
poverty. A doctor told me, "I wanted to give a
patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that
would have been preventable if living conditions
were better, but I couldn't treat her because she
didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest
the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I'm dealing with
similar conditions as the English working class of
the beginning of the industrial revolution."
The racism
that allows this in one of the most privileged
societies on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a
"Protector of Aborigines" oversaw the theft of mixed
race children with the justification of "breeding
out the colour". Today, record numbers of Indigenous
children are removed from their homes and many never
see their families again. On 11 February, an
inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals
will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra,
demanding the return of the stolen children.
Australia
is the envy of European governments now fencing in
their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as
in Hungary. Refugees who dare set sail for Australia
in overcrowded boats have long been treated as
criminals, along with the "smugglers" whose hyped
notoriety is used by the Australian media to
distract from the immorality and criminality of
their own government. The refugees are confined
behind barbed wire on average for well over a year,
some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions that have
led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental
illness. Children have not been spared. An
Australian Gulag run by sinister private security
firms includes concentration camps on the remote
Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often
have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.
The
Australian military - whose derring-do is the
subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of
airport bookstalls - has played an important part in
"turning back the boats" of refugees fleeing wars,
such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the
Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No
irony, let alone responsibility, is acknowledged in
this cowardly role.
On this
Australia Day, the "pride of the services" will be
on display. This pride extends to the Australian
Immigration Department, which commits people to its
Gulag for "offshore processing", often arbitrarily,
leaving them to grieve and despair and rot. Last
week it was announced that Immigration officials had
spent $400,000 on medals which they will award their
heroic selves. Put out more flags.
Follow John Pilger on Twitter
@johnpilger & on Facebook at
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-http://johnpilger.com
- On
January 26, Indigenous Australians and their
supporters will march from The Block in Redfern,
Sydney, to the Sydney Town Hall. The march will
begin at 10am.
- On
Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against Removals
will address a rally in Canberra. This will start at
12 noon at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march
to Parliament House. |