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More on John Pilger's documentary - some people have asked if it will be shown outside Melbourne - the review below says
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<div><font size="2"><b><span style="font-family: Arial;">The film opened in the United Kingdom in mid-November and screens in Sydney on January 17. Subsequent limited dates include Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Alice Springs.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Details
at </span><a href="http://utopiajohnpilger.co.uk" target="_blank" style="font-family: Arial;">utopiajohnpilger.co.uk</a></b></font><br>
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<p><font face="Verdana"><strong>Heather Gridley</strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Honorary Fellow</font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">College of Arts</font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Victoria University</font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Melbourne, Australia</font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana"></font> </p>
<p><font face="Verdana">E: <a tabindex="0" href="mailto:heather.gridley@vu.edu.au" target="">
heather.gridley@vu.edu.au</a> </font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Ph: +61 419113731</font><span style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>
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<div><font size="3">John Pilger's damning new film about indigenous Australia</font></div>
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<dl><dd>Julian Drape<u></u></dd></dl>
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<div><font size="3"><span style="height: 87px;"><img alt="Journalist and film-maker John Pilger returns to outback Australia in <i>Utopia</i>." src="http://images.theage.com.au/2013/12/31/5043876/mf-wide-pilger3-20131231120657428653-620x349.jpg" originalwidth="620" originalheight="349" rszimgcmd="25" style="width: 155px; height: 87px;"></span></font>
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<p><font size="2">Journalist and film-maker John Pilger returns to outback Australia in
<i>Utopia</i>. <em>Photo: Supplied</em></font></p>
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<p><font size="2">"It's so degrading," says Noongar elder Noel Nannup in John Pilger's latest film about indigenous disadvantage in Australia.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The Aboriginal man is standing in a $240-a-night hotel room on Rottnest Island which used to be divided into three prison cells in which more than 50 indigenous people died.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"They don't have any idea what happened in here," Nannup tells Pilger of the hotel's paying guests.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"No one tells them. No one lets them know."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">It's perhaps the most poignant moment in <em>Utopia</em>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">London-based Pilger returns to outback Australia for this documentary film to find little has changed since his 1985 work
<em>The Secret Country</em>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The Utopia of the title refers to the Northern Territory region north of Alice Springs.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">There are the same shacks, the same lack of basic services and the same diseases.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"I was shocked all over again," Pilger tells AAP.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"It's not that I expected a great deal of change. But to fly from a rich metropolis like Sydney, in what is now one of the richest countries on the planet, and drive into impoverished communities deprived of the basic services that the majority
of Australians take for granted, is shocking."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Pilger, 74, sees a treaty and genuine land rights as the key to improving the position of the original owners of Australia.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Anything less, including the current talk of constitutional recognition, is simply a "distraction", he says.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The film opened in the United Kingdom in mid-November and screens in Sydney on January 17. Subsequent limited dates include Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Alice Springs.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Pilger would have been delighted to show <em>Utopia</em> in Australia first but no local distributor offered a cinema run.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"One Australian distributor refused to take the film because he said it was 'too dark' and 'it might upset people with its myth-busting'," the veteran journalist says.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The film was commissioned by ITV in Britain and funded entirely in the UK.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Pilger doesn't pull any punches in <em>Utopia</em>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">He asks Warren Snowden, then indigenous health minister and a Labor MP in the Northern Territory for 23 years, "Why haven't you fixed it?"</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Snowden, who has already admitted government policy has failed for at least 50 years, hits back stating: "What a stupid question. What a puerile question."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">But Pilger doesn't apologise for taking such an uncompromising view.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, no treaty was ever negotiated between the lawful owners of Australia and those who took their land," he says. "International law is clear - there has to be a treaty.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"If the Australian political establishment believes it can continue to look the other way and deny the first Australians their basic rights they are seriously mistaken."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper found that watching Utopia "was like being smacked about with a sledgehammer".</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Pilger certainly can't be accused of being too nuanced. For example, he criticises tourists staying at the Alice Springs resort even though it provides some employment to indigenous people. Asked whether such ventures can't play a role in
improving living conditions, Pilger shoots back: "Then why hasn't it?"</font></p>
<p><font size="2">There's not a lot that is genuinely new in this film but it provides a thorough overview, from the Gurindji strike through to the NT intervention and Kevin Rudd's apology which Pilger describes as "largely a media event".</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Pilger reminds the viewer that Bob Hawke in the 1980s walked away from genuine land rights in the face of a racist scare campaign from the mining industry.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">He draws parallels with Julia Gillard's decision to fold on Labor's mining tax in 2010.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"The revenue lost is estimated at $60 billion," the director says in the film. "Enough to fund land rights and to end Aboriginal poverty."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Utopia also documents a new stolen generation with the ongoing removal of Aboriginal babies from their mothers.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"This was one of the film's major investigations," Pilger tells AAP. "The theft is now higher than at any time in the last century."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">In mid-1997 there were 2785 Aboriginal children in out-of-home care across Australia. By mid-2012 there were 13,299 - almost a five-fold increase.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The filmmaker notes the NT government spent $80 million in one year removing children but just $500,000 supporting impoverished families.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Child abuse is one of the rationales for taking children away, yet the NT has one of the lowest rates of reported child abuse in Australia, Pilger says.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">He argues Australians shouldn't still need educating about the plight of indigenous Australia, but if they do he hopes
<em>Utopia</em> helps.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"<em>Utopia</em> tells them the truth," he says.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"If people choose to ignore the research and evidence in this film then their prejudice is unshakeable."</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Nannup is bewildered that tourists visiting Rottnest Island can stay in a former prison - the entire island was a Aboriginal penal colony for almost a century from 1838 - and know nothing of its black history.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">But a white tour guide at the Australian War Memorial provides a succinct analysis of what might really be going on.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"I don't know why we don't embrace that history," he says when Pilger asks why the frontier wars aren't commemorated in Canberra.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">"Maybe we're not overly proud of that history."</font></p>
<p><font size="2"><em>Utopia</em> is on limited released in Australia from January 17. Details at
<a href="http://utopiajohnpilger.co.uk" target="_blank">utopiajohnpilger.co.uk</a></font></p>
<p><strong><font size="2">AAP </font></strong></p>
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