John Pilger as a younger man. Unimpressed with the state of public toilets in the nations’ capital.

Dear reader, another excellent piece from Ira, in which he casts a light fully upon the things that make John Pilger thoroughly ‘Un-Australian’. We must add a note of caution to the infirm, the faint-hearted, the emotionally taut and the hysterically minded, that things said in this piece may be quite true. And during an election year that is cause enough for deep shock… read on…

Re: (Guardian Weekly, 03.05.13. Page 20, Comment & Debate.‘Australia’s boom won’t help all of its people.’ A piece by John Pilger.)

Giordano Bruno, before he was burnt by a light sabre malfunction working as a stand-in for Obi Wan Kenobi, (Image courtesy Lucas Films)

If John Pilger had lived during the Renaissance, he, like Giordano Bruno, would surely have been burned at the stake. He would have been burned, not for his anti-establishment viewpoint, or being the Anti-Christ, or in league with the devil, but for simply telling the truth.

Giordano Bruno. No relation to Carla Bruni.

To tell the truth, in all of it’s unvarnished horror, is probably the greatest heresy of all. Some of the most reviled people in our communities nowadays are not, as you would expect, paedophiles, rapists and bombers. Extraordinarily, they are people who tell the truth. We call them ‘whistleblowers’.The Australian John Pilger has been telling the truth for a long time. Truth telling invites opprobrium and Mr Pilger has had lots of it. A lesser man would have packed up and gone home. Luckily he has remained, a talented thorn in the side of our rampant hypocrisy.

Rottnest Island Prison. c. 1893.

More Sunsets. More Dreaming, More Peace, and murder, rape and the occassional well -meant genocide.

In May he was in Perth to visit Rottnest Island, a ‘popular tourist destination’, a ten mile ferrytrip trip from the city. Through advertising, ‘five awesome reasons to visit’, As Pilger points out, the past is papered over, the sins of our fathers scrubbed clean. The truth is that for decades of the 19th century, troublesome Aborigines, including very young children, were taken by boat to Rottnest where they were commonly tortured, raped and murdered. According to Pilger this was still going on well into the 20th Century. What appalls Pilger is the massive blind eye we turn on all this.

Here in NE Victoria the same blindness prevails. There is absolutely no doubt we hunted Aborigines for sport here, riding them down ruthlessly and murdering them. It was something to do on your day off. It was fun. We also invited them to dinner and poisoned them. We commonly pack-raped their women and murdered their children.

We believed in evolution, in ‘the survival of the fittest’. The natives were a Stone Age people, a people who’d failed to evolve, who were doomed, because of this failure, to eventual extinction. White European scientific minds absolutely believed this to be true. Cynics might say that this belief system too curiously coincided with the needs of white settlers at the time. It certainly provided them, all over the world, with something to salve their conscience whilst they butchered the locals. If the natives were doomed,what did it matter if we hurried the process a little?.

When Truth really mattered! And politicians were prepared to make noble sacrifices!

The Pilger article quotes two eminent Australian historians from his (1960’s?) student days;‘It was quite useless to treat them fairly, since they were completely amoral, and incapable of sincere and prolonged gratitude’. Stephen Roberts, historian, on Australian Aborigines.‘We are civilised today, and they are not.’ Russel Ward, historian, on Australian Aborigines. Finally, if anything is to be rescued from this, we must begin by taking some responsibility for the horror we have inflicted on our original inhabitants. John Pilger is here to remind us ofthis duty. Only by accepting our white, Anglo-Saxon role in this butchery and doing something collectively decent and honourable by way of reparation, can we even begin to live with what we’ve done. Most certainly, without this, we will remain a hopelessly immature country, ridiculously touting ourselves as a ‘sporting nation’. I think it’s time we grew up.