![]() Utopia describes how Australia’s multi-billion-dollar mining industry has often ruled politically by ensuring that Aboriginal land claims are scuppered by governments. The real issue, of course, is race, on whose myths and bigoted exploitation Australia was settled.’ ‘Whether it is Indigenous people or refugees,’ says Pilger, ‘the desperation of voiceless people has been long regarded by Australian politicians as an electorally valuable issue. Pilger reports that the National Crime Authority, the Northern Territory Police and an investigation by doctors found no evidence to back the hysteria, which happened on the eve of an election. Howard and his Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough justified this with lurid allegations of Indigenous paedophile gangs.Ĭommunities that refused to hand over the leases of their land were denied basic services such as housing and sanitation, a government job scheme was virtually eliminated and legitimate benefits and pensions were restricted. Beneath it are the dates of Arthur's life – he died shortly after the filming, having promised to ‘keep going long enough, so I can speak up again’.Ī centrepiece of the film is an analysis of ‘the intervention’, declared as a ‘national emergency’ in 2007 by Prime Minister John Howard, who sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. This sequence ends poignantly with a still photograph of Arthur Murray and John Pilger taken on the riverbank at Wee Waa, where the family grew up. Pilger accompanies Arthur to Eddie’s graveside, where Arthur speaks about his sadness and anger – and justice, which, it seems, is a utopian dream for Australia's first people. Arthur recalls a royal commission’s damning verdict on the police officers who arrested Eddie, yet none was prosecuted. Eddie's parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, became close friends, but Leila is now dead, knowing no justice for her son. Pilger returns to the 1981 death of Eddie Murray in custody featured in two of his previous documentaries. Utopia also reveals, shockingly, a new ‘stolen generation’ of children taken from their mothers. A shadow Labor Party minister becomes abusive when Pilger asks him why, after 30 years in Parliament, he has not alleviated the poverty of his black constituents. A former prisons minister unselfconsciously describes 'racking and stacking' Aboriginal prisoners. In Darwin, he shows shocking footage of police routinely mistreating a seriously ill Aboriginal man who is left to die in a cell, his cries for help unheeded. Pilger takes a road journey from million-dollar properties in Sydney and Canberra to the ironically named Northern Territory region of Utopia, where communities are without basic services, such as fresh running water. The state of Western Australia, the richest in the nation, has the highest incarceration rate of juveniles in the world – most of them Indigenous. This Australian Tale of Two Cities contrasts the material comfort of the majority with the First Australians who die from Dickensian diseases in their 40s and are imprisoned at a rate six times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa. The point is made that little has changed for many of those excluded from white Australia's wealth, regardless of an official apology for 'wrongs past and present'. New footage is juxtaposed with that of his earlier films. ![]() One of the film's striking elements is the trust given to Pilger by so many indigenous Australians to ‘voice their voices’. Released in 2013 and filmed over two years, Utopia breaks what amounts to a recurring national silence about the brutalising of Indigenous people. ![]() It is his fourth film about Indigenous Australia, the oldest, most enduring human presence on Earth. Epic in its production, scope and revelations, Utopia represents a long journey through the ‘secret country’ of John Pilger’s homeland. ![]()
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