Utopia, Australia's black joke
Daniel Nelson
Campaigning journalist John Pilger is not known for his humour, but the title of his latest film, Utopia, is a grim joke.
Utopia is the name for a perfect community. It is also the name of a region, 200 miles from Alice Springs, “the red heart of Australia”, where in 1975 Australian Prime Minister presented a handful of earth to the Gurindji people and said, “I put into your hands this piece of the earth itself as a sign that we restore [these lands] to you and your children forever.”
His promise might indeed have sounded like utopia to Australia’s indigenous communities who had been hounded and hunted – literally – by white settlers, racially abused, unjustly imprisoned, subjected to slave labour and had over 100,000 of their children seized to “breed out the black”. But utopia, as ever, proved an unrealisable ideal: Whitlam’s government was overthrown by the use of imperial “reserve powers” and since then the white-controlled state, in cahoots with big corporations, has been fighting and scheming to win back the land rights accidentally accorded the country’s original inhabitants.
The reason, argues Pilger in this scorching polemic, is to ensure access to the vast supplies of minerals.
The problem for Pilger is that words such as genocide and apartheid are up against the image of the endlessly sunny, smiling, matey, sports-loving, Bondi-bathing, blunt-speaking Lucky Country. All he can do is keep plugging away at the appalling truth.
This is his fourth film about Australia, in which he returns to the scene of his first – Utopia. He also returns to the national Parliament in the suburb of Barton, named after the country’s first prime minister who declared: “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to those who weren’t British and white-skinned.”
That legacy has not been lost. Aborigine-hunting has stopped, but less than a decade ago a state of emergency was declared, anti-racism laws were suspended and the army was sent in to the Northern Territory to halt “paedophilia” in indigenous communities. (“It doesn’t happen to white people, does it?” asks Pilger in one of his carefully set up but devastating interviews. “Of course not” comes the revealing reply.)
It’s all so shocking it’s scarcely credible, and successive governments seem to get away with it because of worldwide disdain of indigenous peoples (not least by developing country governments), widespread racism and economic self-interest.
Britain, for example, provided many of the white colonisers, many of us have relatives there and it’s still a top spot for British migrants. Consideration for the welfare of the black fellers might be a tad embarrassing.
There are other interests, too. Whitlam’s earthy gesture came in the wake of the longest strike in Australian history, in which the Gurindgi stockmen and their families walked off the world’s largest cattle station – run by British beef baron Lord Vestey.
I could go on. Luckily, Pilger does go on – and on, hammering away, and dividing viewers and readers, between those who admire his single-minded pursuit of truth and those who dismiss him as a boring, self-righteous, whinging left-winger.
It’s true he’s a one-man band – he’s writer, producer and presenter of Utopia – with a one-tune repertoire and some stodgy filming, but he tries to jazz it up with varied and often painfully mordant interviews, vivid characters, telling newsreel clips. Michael Moore he’s not: he’s too serious and dogged for Moorish antics.
But this is important film-making that you should see even if you have Aussie friends and relatives, love Shane Warne and have snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef.
For what’s truly amazing is not just that Australia has got away with it but that, as one interviewee says, the anger of the oppressed has not bubbled over.
· Utopia opens at the Curzon Soho in London on 15 November. On 18 November the Ritzy Brixton will screen the film and beam it, together with a Q&A with Pilger, to 20 cinemas around the country.
· ITV will broadcast the film on 17 December
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