So I recently attended the Melbourne opening of John Pilgers “Utopia”, a relatively modern revisiting of his previous documentary “Welcome to Australia”. The doco opens with some pretty graphic images of Indigenous police brutality that Australia has become accustom to, to whet us with a point he will reiterate throughout the movie: ‘what has changed?’.
I’m no documentary connoisseur (as I imagine the people who read this probably are) so I’ll start by saying John Pilger’s style of journalism is not the easiest style to watch, kind of like a British Paul Hogan looking guy who doesn’t let his interviewees finish their sentences. After you’ve digested this though, the documentary itself is simply brilliant. It really confronts the issues facing Indigenous Australians that so often get misrepresented in the media or simply ignored all together.
If you’ve ever really pondered why Indigenous people are represented negatively in every statistic from health to education to incarceration this documentary fills in a lot of blanks. It really questions what black and white relations really look like in Australia. We often see the same narrative in the media; stolen generation, apology, close the gap and reconciliation, and again, Pilger asks why, after so much policy and spending, are there no results? Are these just empty, symbolic catchphrases to fill the history books?
The doco covers a history of failed policy and confronts those liable with facts asking them who is accountable. From slaughters in colonial times to the stolen generation, Indigenous people have been treated as second-class citizens as deaths in custody go unprosecuted. Sometimes we feel ok knowing a Prime Minister gave an apology to Indigenous Australians and thinking we are moving forward. But this film demonstrates racist policy has created a division in 2014 Australia that incarcerates more Indigenous men than that of black South Africans under apartheid. The terms and newspaper headlines might be put in more politically correct language but the actions of our current governments differ in no way from the governments a century ago who thought they knew best for ‘the Aborigines’.
Pilger briefly touches on the NT intervention as when he asks Mal Brough how many pedophile rings and petrol drug lords he found when he spent $587 million on the NT intervention. This really makes you think how oblivious we all were to allow this to happen. According to Pilger, the Australian government sent the Army into rural communities with an estimated population of 67,000 indigenous people living in the NT under the pretense of rampant sexual abuse and didn’t prosecute one case.
The leading questions and assumptions based on anecdotal evidence of Pilger’s film-making style really rubs me the wrong way but when you look at the coverage of these issues out there you can’t really complain when at least one person had the guts to put this movie together. An interviewee jokingly brings up the idea that government mechanisms are so badly broken here that it would take foreign aid to help Indigenous people as they suffer from preventable diseases that developing countries have overcome. Ironically, the film itself was entirely internationally funded which really makes you think he might be right.
When you sit down to listen to your hottest 100 next year and eat your canned beetroot, beef sausages and cold beer I definitely recommend you watch this movie before you consider how proud you are to call yourself Australian.
The MSA will be holding FREE screenings of Utopia during O-week on Wednesday the 26th of February at the Clayton Campus Cinema . Screening will be held at 12pm and 6pm send your RSVP’s for the later show to: Daniel.Carter1@monash.edu
Come visit the Indigenous Department at the O-week stalls for more info.
