World News Aboriginal squalor among Australias dirtiest secrets says expat Minutes from the mining boom: South Hedland, WAs indigenous community still waiting for housing Source: The Australian A 20-MINUTE drive from where real estate agents are touting a new breed of luxury modernist apartments to cashed-up employees of Port Hedlands mining boom, members of Joanne Pollys indigenous community sleep in the fields. In South Hedland, as the Sunday Times recently discovered on a tour of the region, residents are dying of kidney and liver failure, and their children are inhaling petrol and aerosols. While boomtown Port Hedland boasts $1 million bungalows and apartment blocks with green credentials and specially designed to best capture solar access, communities like South Hedland have all the solar access they want. They have been waiting for up to a decade for public housing. Living in squalor on the doorstep of Western Australias multi-billion-dollar resources rush where fly-in fly-out workers earn six-figure salaries is nothing new for these fringe dwellers. Whats new is their lives are under the spotlight in a film, Utopia, due for international release by controversial expatriate Australian John Pilger. Pilger, an award-winning television journalist who has lived in Britain since 1962, is a long time critic of Australias racist treatment of the Aboriginal population. In this latest film Pilger says that more than any other colonial society, Australia consigns its dirtiest secrets, past and present, to willful ignorance or indifference. While acknowledging that Australia has changed since he left the country, 73-year-old Pilger quotes from a history text he studied at school which described Aborigines as completely amoral and which said we are civilised and they are not. To film Utopia he flew to Western Australia to compare the living conditions of Aboriginal communities with the riches of the mining boom, commenting that barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited Aboriginal communities, whose poverty is an enduring shock. Pilger says mining companies waged a propaganda campaign in cahoots with media mates to defeat former prime minister Kevin Rudds mining tax, and he ridicules claims that the boom has benefited black Australians. Accompanied by elders of Perths Nyoongar community, he travelled to Rottnest Island, WAs premier tourist destination where the first Australians endured starving, torture, humiliation and murder. Rottnest was an Aboriginal prison between 1838 and 1931, but Pilger insists Rotto is not the past and quotes recent incarceration rates of indigenous children in WA. Pilgers spotlight on our international shame over Aboriginal welfare coincides with controversy in Western Australia over indigenous incarceration.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:26:56 +0000