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<div class="entry-date">November 06, 2013<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/06/australias-secret-war-on-aboriginal-people/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/06/australias-secret-war-on-aboriginal-people/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>A Brutal Past and Present</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Australia’s Secret War on Aboriginal People</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JOHN PILGER</div>
<div class="main-text"><big> </big>
<p><big><big>The corridors of the Australian parliament are so white
you squint. The sound is hushed; the smell is floor polish. The wooden
floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon portraits of prime
ministers and rows of Aboriginal paintings, suspended on white walls,
their blood and tears invisible.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The parliament stands in Barton, a suburb of Canberra
named after the first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, who
drew up the White Australia Policy in 1901. “The doctrine of the
equality of man,” said Barton, “was never intended to apply” to those
not British and white-skinned.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Barton’s concern was the Chinese, known as the Yellow
Peril; he made no mention of the oldest, most enduring human presence
on earth: the first Australians. They did not exist. Their
sophisticated care of a harsh land was of no interest. Their epic
resistance did not happen. Of those who fought the British invaders of
Australia, the <i>Sydney Monitor</i> reported in 1838: “It was
resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.”
Today, the survivors are a shaming national secret.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The town of Wilcannia, in New South Wales, is twice
distinguished. It is a winner of a national Tidy Town award and its
indigenous people have one of the lowest recorded life expectancies.
They are usually dead by the age of 35. The Cuban government runs a
literacy programme for them, as they do among the poorest of Africa.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the
richest place on earth.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens.
Their self-endowment is legendary. Last year, the then minister for
indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to
the taxpayer of $331,144.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Macklin recently claimed that, in government, she had made
a “huge difference”. This is true. During her tenure, the number of
Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third, and more
than half the money spent on indigenous housing was pocketed by white
contractors and a bureaucracy for which she was largely responsible. A
typical, dilapidated house in an outback indigenous community must
accommodate as many as 25 people. Families, the elderly and the
disabled wait years for sanitation that works.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>In 2009, Professor James Anaya, the respected UN
Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described as racist a
“state of emergency” that stripped indigenous communities of their
tenuous rights and services on the pretext that pedophile gangs were
present in “unthinkable” numbers – a claim dismissed as false by police
and the Australian Crime Commission.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The then opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony
Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old
victim brigade.” Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>I drove into the red heart of central Australia and asked
Dr. Janelle Trees about the “old victim brigade”. A GP whose indigenous
patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night resorts serving
Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, “There is asbestos in Aboriginal homes,
and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops
mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care. When the kids have chronic
infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of
indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world
record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself:
why not? Malnutrition is common. 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 at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>In Canberra, in ministerial offices displaying yet more
first-nation art, I was told repeatedly how “proud” politicians were of
what “we have done for indigenous Australians”. When I asked Warren
Snowdon — the minister for indigenous health in the Labor government
recently replaced by Abbott’s conservative coalition — why after almost
a quarter of a century representing the poorest, sickest Australians,
he had not come up with a solution, he said, “What a stupid question.
What a puerile question.”</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>At the end of Anzac Parade in Canberra rises the
Australian National War Memorial, which historian Henry Reynolds calls
“the sacred centre of white nationalism”. I was refused permission to
film in this great public place. I had made the mistake of expressing
an interest in the frontier wars in which black Australians fought the
British invasion without guns but with ingenuity and courage – the
epitome of the “Anzac tradition”. Yet, in a country littered with
cenotaphs not one officially commemorates those who fell resisting “one
of the greatest appropriations of land in world history”, wrote
Reynolds in his landmark book <i>Forgotten War</i>. More first
Australians were killed than Native Americans on the American frontier
and Maoris in New Zealand. The state of Queensland was a
slaughterhouse. An entire people became prisoners of war in their own
country, with settlers calling for their extinction. The cattle
industry prospered using indigenous men virtually as slave labour. The
mining industry today makes profits of a billion dollars a week on
indigenous land.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Suppressing these truths, while venerating Australia’s
servile role in the colonial wars of Britain and the US, has almost
cult status in Canberra today. Reynolds and the few who question it
have been smeared with abuse. Australia’s unique first people are its <i>Intermenschen</i>.
As you enter the National War Memorial, indigenous faces are depicted
as stone gargoyles alongside kangaroos, reptiles, birds and other
“native wildlife”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>When I began filming this <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2013/oct/22/john-pilger-utopia-watch-trailer-video?CMP=soc_568"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.theguardian.com']);">secret
Australia</a> 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end
apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was
struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance and
defensiveness of liberals. Yet no international opprobrium, no
boycotts, disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia. Watch security
guards expel Aboriginal people from shopping malls in Alice Springs;
drive the short distance from the suburban barbies of Cromwell Terrace
to Whitegate camp, where the tin shacks have no reliable power and
water. This is apartheid, or what Reynolds calls, “the whispering in
our hearts”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><i>John Pilger’s film, <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2013/oct/22/john-pilger-utopia-watch-trailer-video?CMP=soc_568"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.theguardian.com']);">Utopia,</a>
about Australia, is released in cinemas on 15 November and broadcast on
ITV in December. It is released in Australia in January.</i></big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><i><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.johnpilger.com">www.johnpilger.com</a></i></big></big></p>
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