I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who live in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia.
The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on Earth.
Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia, with a searing description of a discarded people: “We are not wanted in our own country.” She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia loathes and fears.
A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly Indigenous people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional council. “One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson’s received two small packets of mincemeat and white bread,” said Ngarla, “the elderly woman living nearby received nothing.” In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, “The whole community including children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis.” She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best they can.
This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart and met Dr. Janelle Trees. A general practitioner whose indigenous patients live within a few miles of AUS$1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, “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.
“There’s asbestos in many 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?”
When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said, “It’s not so much the physical starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities. We are duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures that offer the pretense of helping us, but it’s a pretense, no more. If we oppose it, it’s a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are everywhere. [She gave me details of the suffering in her own family.] They’re out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until there’s nothing there anymore.”
Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests that the council is “the poorest of the three tiers of government and is very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [Federal] governments for funds to provide such services to the bush.” Barbara Shaw, the council’s president, agreed that it was “totally unacceptable that people should be starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia” and that “it is disgusting and wrong that Indigenous people experience deep poverty such as this.”
The starvation and poverty and the division often sown among Indigenous people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large part from an extraordinary episode known as “the Intervention”. This is Australia’s dirty secret.
End of quote. I commend the rest of John’s eloquent article to you.
John has been writing and making films about this for perhaps 30 years. And not just Australia but suppressed and disenfranchised people across the globe. It’s a rich vein to mine, since there is no shortage of suppressed or war targeted people and it’s not going to change. A well-meaning journalist could make it a lifetime project, with endless hand wringing and bellicose protest. John has made it such a life’s project to be the champion of the oppressed and he does it well.
But what I don’t understand is why he doesn’t join the dots. As he says in his film “Utopia”, he struggled to be clear about whether the footage he was working with was recently shot or footage from 20 or more years ago when he last made a film on the plight of Australia’s aboriginals.
Either John fails to see the global plan behind the scenes to destroy all indigenous cultures across the globe, so we only have people who live inside the “Western”, mind controlled bubble, or he understands it would be life threatening – certainly career threatening – to expose it.
Maybe he doesn’t see the connection between the starving of Australia’s aboriginals, the complete disenfranchisement of the native Africans in their resource rich land or the current refugee crisis in Europe. I find that hard to believe, given how long he’s been at this.
They all arise from the same source. It’s well hidden, it’s satanic and it operates through the core of Judaism. It has controlled Britain since it funded Oliver Cromwell. Think about it. How much of what Britain has done since the time of Charles I that we have taken as being British, actually was not? And the very same is true of the United States today. Same game, different body that is hosting the parasite.
Until and unless we as a species join the dots and stop futile noisy, passionate protest – as Pilger does – at the outcomes, it won’t change. And it’s time my Jewish friends looked beyond their conditioning and see that they are just as manipulated in this as the goyim. Beliefs are very powerful things and most people take themselves to be their beliefs and when you threaten those beliefs, they feel like and behave like you are threatening them. This is ALSO part of the game they’ve set up. And while ever you take your beliefs to be you, you’ll NEVER pick this apart. You’ll continue to think I’m a nut case. John Pilger probably does – if he knows I exist.
Recent Comments