A Secret Country Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Pilger

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. On the Beach

  2. A Whispering in Our Hearts

  3. Heroes Unsung

  4. The Struggle for Independence

  5. The Coup

  6. Mates

  7. Battlers

  8. Breaking Free

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Expatriate journalist and film-maker John Pilger writes about his homeland with life-long affection and a passionately critical eye. In this fully updated edition of A Secret Country, he pays tribute to a little known Australia and tells a story of high political drama.

  About the Author

  John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Vietnam and Cambodia. Among a number of other awards, he has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. For his broadcasting, he has won France’s Reporter sans Frontières, an American television Academy Award, an ‘Emmy’, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He lives in London.

  ALSO BY JOHN PILGER

  The Last Day

  Aftermath: The Struggle of Cambodia and Vietnam (with Anthony Barnett)

  The Outsiders (with Michael Coren)

  Heroes

  Distant Voices

  Hidden Agendas

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Aboriginal fathers and sons who fought in the Second World War

  2. Eddie Murray, who was killed in police custody, Wee Waa, 1981

  3. Aboriginal artist, Albert Namatjira

  4. Joyce Hall, Northern Territory, 1982

  5. Alice Springs, 1987

  6. Freda Glynn, Chairperson of Imparja Television

  7. Clara Inkamala explains how to catch and cook a goanna

  8 –9. Denis O’Hoy in Bendigo, 1946; and in 1987

  10. Maria and Carlo Calcagno’s wedding, Sicily, 1954

  11. The Calcagnos in Sydney, 1955

  12. The Atlas football team, Sydney, 1940

  13. Tom Stratton, with Greek ‘New Australians’, Athens, 1958

  14 –15. The author’s parents: Elsie Pilger née Marheine in 1907; Claude Pilger in 1947

  16. Valentina Makeev and her pet kangaroo, Snowy Mountains, 1940s

  17. ‘The Basher Gang’ used by the New South Wales Government in the 1930s to break the coal-miners’ strikes

  18. The miners’ last stand at Rothbury colliery, 1929

  19. Robert Menzies when he was Prime Minister

  20. A symbol of all that remains at the Maralinga test site, 1987

  21. Vietnam veterans’ ‘welcome home’ parade, Sydney, 1987

  22. Harold Holt welcomes President Lyndon Johnson to Australia, 1966

  23-4. Brian Day in the late 1950s; and with fellow Vietnam veteran and ‘Agent Orange’ victim Barry Wright, Blue Mountains, 1987

  25. Christopher Boyce, who described CIA operations in Australia

  26. The Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, who dismissed the Whitlam Government in 1975

  27-9. Alan Bond with Neville Wran; Bondy with Bob Hawke; Hawke with Kerry Packer

  30. Sir Peter Abeles

  31. Tom Domican

  32. Paul Keating

  33. Rupert Murdoch

  34. ‘How the Rich Live’

  35. Mates. George Shultz and Bob Hawke, 1987

  36. The top-secret American base at Nurrungar, South Australia

  37. Jack Platt, the Bondi Beach shark catcher, 1952

  38. ‘The Sunbaker’

  39. Bronte Beach, Sydney, 1985

  40. Thelma Thompson, nurse, Broken Hill, 1920

  41. Harry King, wheat farmer, Mollerin, 1987

  42. Working at home on poverty rates, Melbourne, 1987

  43. King’s Cross, Sydney, 1986

  44-5. The ‘new suburbia’, western Sydney, 1987

  46. John Pilger with the parrot that won’t drink Bondy’s XXXX beer

  47. John and Sam Pilger, Ayers Rock, 1987

  FIGURES

  1 ‘The John Pilger version’

  2 The Dead Heart

  3 The Compact

  4 Mary Palmer’s conditional pardon, 1838 97

  5 Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer’s petition to the Governor of New South Wales

  6 Repelling the ‘Asiatic Hordes’

  7 A typical caricature of the ‘yellow peril’

  8 The Melbourne Age, February 23, 1988

  9 ‘But . . . that’s what friends are for . . .’

  10 ‘No one could be more Australian than I . . .’

  11 ‘There I was innocently driving home . . .’

  12 ‘Whaddawewant’

  To the memory of my great-great grandparents, Francis

  McCarthy and Mary Palmer, who came to Australia in

  chains, and to the Aboriginal people who fought back.

  A Secret Country

  John Pilger

  INTRODUCTION

  AS A YOUNG reporter on the Sydney Daily Telegraph, assigned to cover the wharves and the airport, I was obliged to ask ‘visiting celebrities’ what they thought of Australia. Although they might have seen only those unique Australian officials who spray arriving passengers with disinfectant, they were expected to play a game and make a statement affirming all that was good and sublime about ‘Godzone’. Exhausted by a seemingly endless journey, and broiling or shivering in the corrugated iron sheds that stood at the nation’s gates, they were prompted about the delights of ‘our beer, beaches and way of life’. Compliance ensured them generous space in the next day’s papers; resistance risked public opprobrium. When the actress Elizabeth Taylor loudly and accurately described the question as ‘dumb as shit’, the size of the bags under her eyes was reported and it was noted that her latest husband was ‘dwarf-like and grizzled’.

  At other times the question would be welcomed, as in the case of Henry Wiley Fancher, a wealthy Texas rancher. Arriving to do business with the Premier of the State of Queensland, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, Fancher described Australia as ‘truly wunnerful’ because he liked ‘a nigra in a nigra’s place’ and in Australia his son would not be ‘seduced by coloured girls’. When told there were Aborigines in Queensland, he said, ‘I’ve heard you treat them like our injuns. You’ve put them on reservations and they’re no problem. Is that so?’ It was so.

  The game was not confined to the rich and famous. When a newly arrived Turkish immigrant was asked what he thought of Australia, his response was, ‘Where the hell am I?’ ‘He wants to know’, said an interpreter, ‘why it took so long to get to Austria.’ According to one version of this story, the Turkish Government, anxious to be rid of large numbers of unemployed and politically troublesome young men, blurred the distinction between prospects for ‘guest work’ in Austria and Australia. Like so many others who have come to Australia by accident, against their will or seeking refuge, the Turk chose to stay. Perhaps a society which began with no grand design, except as a ‘living hell’ for those sent to it in ‘penal servitude’, whose expectations are entirely those of ordinary people and which has developed, by default, a cultural diversity greater than almost anywhere else, has an abiding strength denied to others, even if this at times is expressed as insecurity.

  I have long regard
ed my own country as secret, as a land half-won, its story half-told. It was as if the past was another country, mysterious and unexplained. ‘Australian history’ either was not taught or was not required for ‘higher learning’. Contemporary history was unheard of. Black history was ridiculed. Historians and politicians, more concerned with imperial propriety than truth, covered up and distorted. Wars were fought against invading British armies, whole Aboriginal nations were wiped out and their land stolen, but no mention was made of them. The evidence was available; but as Henry Reynolds, one of the leading new-wave historians, has pointed out, ‘Black cries of anger and anguish were out of place in works that celebrated national achievement or catalogued peaceful progress in a quiet continent . . .’ In The Fatal Shore Robert Hughes described ‘a national pact of silence’; and although there have since been many changes, the ideology of the ‘pact’ and of its stereotypes remains.

  During the 1988 ‘celebration’ of the two-hundredth anniversary of Britain’s bloody dispossession of the Aboriginal people, the Australian Government and advertising industry strove to conjure a nation of white Anglo-Saxon Crocodile Dundees with the wit of the cast of Neighbours. One highlight of this endeavour was the spectacle of a number of fashionably dressed white people leaping up and down in front of the Aboriginal sacred site at Ayers Rock, singing ‘Celebration of a Nation’. But such illusions failed to disturb a nightmare and its secrets. ‘In the past’, wrote Woli Saunders, an Aborigine, ‘we died from ball and shot, poisoned flour, strychnined water-holes and smallpox. Today we are still dying. When will it stop?’ Black Australians have died in police and prison cells on average every fourteen days, a rate higher than that of the death of black people in South Africa.

  A Secret Country follows my book Heroes and a trilogy of documentary films, The Last Dream, which I made with Alan Lowery, Alec Morgan and others and were shown in a number of countries in the Bicentenary year. With the films as a starting point, I wrote this book so that it might be read dispassionately in the wake of the 1988 ‘celebrations’. It is not in any way definitive, but it is written in the belief – shared, I know, with many Australians – that our country deserves not old bromides and stereotypes, but the respect of critical appraisal and access to the widest range of views on its progress thus far.

  At the beginning of their remarkable work, A People’s History of Australia, Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee explain that their aim was ‘not merely to compensate for past neglect, but to assert that we can only understand Australia’s history by analysing the lives of the oppressed’. That has been my guide, too. A nation founded on the bloodshed and suffering of others eventually must make its peace with that one historical truth. Otherwise the best of what has been achieved is undermined and, as many Australians now say, ‘something is missing’.

  This book is not just about Australia. What is happening today in Australia is no more than a warning that liberal societies are being returned to passivity, obedience and secrecy and that the subjugation of people’s minds and pockets has a new set of managers and a new vocabulary. Chapter 6, ‘Mates’, is about this new world of the ‘transnational economy’ and ‘rational economics’, of which Australia is a microcosm. With its banks and much of its industry de-regulated and its currency ‘floated’, Australia is now compelled to sell off its resources and rely on tourism and the vagaries of the international money markets. The result is a Two-Thirds Society, a model for the deepening recession of the 1990s, with a majority embracing the ‘good life’ by getting deeper into debt and a large minority excluded and effectively disenfranchised. In 1992 unemployment in Australia stood at more than ten per cent, the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  One of our distinctions as Australians was that, unlike Britons with their walls of class and Americans with their vast disparities of wealth, we had struck a fine balance between the needs of the community and the individual. We measured social progress, it was said, not so much in terms of productivity and ‘consumption’ as by the well-being of the producers – all the producers, especially the providers of labour. In 1920 the silver and zinc miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, half a century ahead of Europe and the United States. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits, pensions and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in Australia. By the 1960s we Australians could boast that we had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Twenty years later this has been lost in the most spectacular redistribution of wealth since the Second World War.

  The new world economics order is represented in Australia by the Order of Mates, an arrangement of mutual benefit between leading politicians, notably of the Australian Labor Party, and their very rich and powerful patrons. This has spawned thousands of freshly minted millionaires, their fortunes built on easy borrowing, property deals, tax avoidance and, for some, Government contracts and laws tailored for them and laws set aside for them. Today this new breed of Australian ‘entrepreneur’ has a place in the ‘free market’ parthenon, remembered for their spectacular successes and spectacular failures. For most of the 1980s Alan Bond, a principal Mate, was almost everywhere, selling XXXX beer in Britain and mining gold in Chile. Bondy, whose worldwide empire has now collapsed, at one time had a debt that accounted for as much as 10 per cent of the Australian national debt. Along with other Mates, he is, at the time of writing, awaiting trial.

  The new order has meant poverty and homelessness on a scale unknown for two generations. The Minister for Social Security in the Hawke Government has warned of a new Australian poor ‘living in massive deprivation . . . like perhaps we’ve never seen . . . a time bomb’. On sublime Bondi Beach bonfires are lit for thousands of homeless children. In the letters columns of the Sydney Morning Herald a 17-year-old boy writes a lament for his friends who have died. Australia now can claim one of the highest suicide rates of teenage males in the world.

  Futurists seeking an example of the ‘global village’ need look no further than Australia. Nowhere else has the ‘communications revolution’ had such a profound effect. ‘If you’re not big, you’ll be swept aside,’ pronounced the New York media analyst Ed Atorino, whose dictum applies precisely to recent, dramatic changes in the Australian media. With Government support, a few Mates have controlled most of the information Australians watch and read. One Mate, Rupert Murdoch, controls almost two-thirds of all newspaper circulation, as well as the means of distribution. In one city, Adelaide, he owns the only morning paper, the only Sunday paper, all the local papers and all the printing presses. The Brave New World imagined by Aldous Huxley has clear echoes in these developments in the pleasant, vulnerable land of Rupert, Bondy and the Silver Bodgie, where the illusion of ‘saturation media’ masks censorship by omission and a growing intolerance to rival ideas. The essence of this ‘new democracy’ is an old idea; it was described by Edward Bernays, the leading figure in 1920s American corporate propaganda, as the ‘engineering of consent’. I hope A Secret Country will help to alert those whom this ‘new democracy’ betrays.

  Above all, I have written this book with affection. As one who has lived and reported from many countries, I am constantly drawn back to the friendship, warmth and diamond light of my homeland. In one sense, to be an Australian is to be an outsider. My Irish great-great grandparents, who arrived in leg irons, were certainly outsiders. The millions of people who have come from all over the world – the ‘displaced persons’ from post-war Germany, ‘Ten Pound Poms’, confused Turks, Vietnamese ‘boat people’ – have come as true outsiders. And like all of us they will remain outsiders until nationhood is restored to the first Australians.

  The American dissident Gore Vidal was once asked whether he still felt wholly American, spending most of his time in Europe as that other great American writer, Henry James, had done. He replied, ‘Henry James did not really like the United States. I do. James was deeply ashamed of his native land. I am certainly not ashamed of it
, just appalled by what our rulers do. James wanted to be a European. I don’t . . . I feel more and more American as the years pass.’ Change ‘American’ to ‘Australian’ and his sentiments are mine.

  Having said that, I declare a loyalty to another country once described eloquently by the great English internationalist Bruce Kent. ‘I have seen it’, he wrote, ‘while flying over the long red deserts of Australia, in the lakes and forests of northern Canada and in the night stars of Africa. I have known it in the tens of thousands of decent, caring, suffering, unpublicised people worldwide who struggle in their different ways toward a new kind of world community into which the old nationalisms do not fit. The framework for that new unity and the terms of our trusteeship we have yet to understand. But there is a new country . . .’

  Many Australians already belong to this new country. This book is a salute to them.

  John Pilger

  March 1992

  1

  ON THE BEACH

  After grey, wintry London Australia’s colour and light intoxicated . . . We flew for hours over Martian landscapes, reached the cobalt ocean and were stunned by Sydney’s brilliance. As thirsty men cannot help but gulp, so pale arrivals from the northern hemisphere revel and gorge in a surfeit of hot dazzle and fruit salad colours.

  Trevor Fishlock, Daily Telegraph, London

  Summer without the beach is like a love affair without the lover.

  Meg Stewart, Bondi

  This Drinking Fountain Must Be Used Only For That Purpose – Use The Toilet For Washing Feet!

  Sign in the Bondi Beach Pavilion

  THE ‘HOT DAZZLE’ casts a light of diamond incandescence, which has forged in the Australian face a permanent squint and lop-sided smile. This makes us look laconic when often we are not. Squinting, head at an angle, hands on hips: this is how we are on the beach.

  Waking soon after dawn, lying in my teenage bunk in Moore Street, Bondi, I used eagerly to await this light, which announced summer Saturdays. It beamed into my room, refracted from Mrs Esme Cook’s red iron roof next door; it lit every particle of dust that rose like a silver escalator from the Feltex floor covering; and it swept the wallpaper (circles on flowers) like a searchlight, highlighting a three-foot hair-oil stain, the consequence of a family ‘discussion’.