news | action | information | events | contact | search | news | action | information | events | contact | search |
key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lLondon, no place for sitting on the fence6 November 2002 - An Australian film that provoked strong opinions at home premieres in London to similar reactions. Pilita Clark reports.
Kylie Minogue is not known for lending her celebrity status to political events but she has made an exception for Rabbit-Proof Fence, the controversial film about Australia's stolen generations of Aboriginal children. Minogue attended a London screening of the film - hosted by human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC and the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights (ENIAR) on Sunday night, with the film's director, Phillip Noyce and activist Bianca Jagger. Noyce's film is just starting to be shown widely abroad and some members of the Federal Government, such as the Special Minister of State, Senator Eric Abetz, have worried about its impact on Australia's reputation overseas. If Sunday night's London screening is any guide, Abetz is right to be anxious. Several organisers of the event said privately they were surprised and pleased to see Minogue although, to the disappointment of waiting journalists, the diminutive singer escaped into the drizzling night without saying what she thought of the film. "She was just here as a friend of Phil and Geoffrey," said a publicist from the film's distributors, Buena Vista International UK. The publicist said author Salman Rushdie had attended, too, although his presence was also muted. However, others were keen to talk about the film in general - and Australia's treatment of non-white people in particular - during an occasionally impassioned discussion chaired by Robertson later in the evening. Robertson appeared on stage with Noyce and Doris Pilkington, the daughter of Molly Craig, whose real life story is the subject of Noyce's film. Craig was forcibly removed from her family and sent to a government camp in Western Australia in the 1930s. She escaped with her younger sister and cousin and trekked home more than 2400 kilometres through the outback, using the rabbit-proof fence as a guide. Pilkington was also put in a resettlement camp and did not reunite with her mother until she was 24. Robertson said the policy of removing half-caste Aboriginal children from their families was one "that we can now see is genocide". Jagger, sitting in the audience, asked how many children had been removed altogether (somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of the Aboriginal population at the time, said Noyce) and had any of the children been sexually or physically abused in the resettlement camps (not in my section, said Pilkington). Another audience member provoked applause when she said the film reminded her of Turkey's continued denial of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks. And another said Australia still had "concentration camps" holding illegal immigrants and asked: "Has anything actually improved? Is there going to be a movie about that?" Robertson said he hoped the child of an Iraqi refugee who had baked in the heat of the Woomera detention centre would one day make a film as moving as Rabbit-Proof Fence. One questioner asked if it was possible to bring "closure" after genocide. "That's a very difficult question," said Pilkington, who spoke movingly about being scared of her Aboriginal father when she finally met him after years of being conditioned by her white guardians to believe such people were evil "devil worshippers". Another man wanted to know why the Prime Minister, John Howard, still refused to apologise for the policy of removing Aboriginal children. "Because it's the only thing we will remember him for," said Noyce. Robertson said he was not sure such an apology would ever be accepted if it were made: "Can you ever apologise for genocide?" Most of the British media's coverage of Rabbit-Proof Fence so far has been sympathetic to the film's makers, even though conservative commentators and politicians in Australia have criticised it for exaggerating history. Britain's The Daily Telegraph newspaper published a lengthy piece saying the film had "stirred the nation's conscience and proved a triumph for its director". Clip from The Sydney Morning Herald Beat-ups give image a beatingBy Miranda Devine 7 November 2002 - The media are mostly to blame if the mood overseas moves against Australia. Australians are used to silly expats, from Germaine Greer to Robert Hughes and Phillip Knightley, criticising the land of their birth from afar as if it had never changed since they left, hoping to justify their desertion and bolster their sense of superiority. We have always laughed at the silly tossers, with their fragile egos and ready acceptance of the black armband view of Australia. But times are different, post-Bali, and suddenly it's not funny any more. Geoffrey Robertson, QC, among the most out-of-touch of all the expats, did his usual learned bash-Australia riff in London on Sunday night, at a London screening of Phillip Noyce's stolen generation film Rabbit-Proof Fence. "Can you ever apologise for genocide?" he rhetorically asked the audience while chairing a post-screening discussion, reported by Pilita Clark in the Herald yesterday. The London audience, which included Bianca Jagger, appeared more than willing to accept as fact that Australia was a genocidal racist nation, with comments about Australian "concentration camps" for illegal immigrants. Now, if a bunch of Amnesty International activists like Jagger go to a Robertson seminar and come out thinking Australia is the new Nazi Germany, who cares? But Sunday's Australia-bashing exercise in the nice suburbs of London is just the most obvious recent example of the black and distorted view of a racist, genocidal nation increasingly peddled to the world by our expats, our great thinkers and our media. And distorted self-flagellation does matter when the Indonesians, for instance, start believing that perfectly legal and properly conducted police operations in Australia are some sort of Australian Kristallnacht against Muslims, as one commentator put it. The story, which has been widely reported by the media here and overseas, is that brutal jackbooted agents of our Government, with submachine-guns and balaclavas, have been breaking down the doors of Indonesian Muslims in Australia in the middle of the night and pointing guns in the faces of terrified four-year-olds. That story is a beat-up of the ASIO raids last week of people alleged to be linked to the radical Muslim group Jemaah Islamiah, which has been declared a terrorist organisation by the United Nations. For one thing, it was only in Perth that balaclavas were worn and doors forced open. In the rest of the country, including Sydney, police and ASIO agents knocked on doors or rang bells. A look through news photographs taken that day of raids in Sydney and Melbourne finds teams of boring-looking detectives in business suits carrying items out of houses. But jackbooted Australian Nazis terrorising Muslims is a more dramatic story. It's not clear quite how the beat-up occurred in the first place. The Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs, Kevin Rudd, in Indonesia this week, told the ABC that live TV coverage of the raids in Perth didn't help and was being replayed over and over on Indonesian television. "It seems that the overall tempo of the Indonesian media reporting on Australia is becoming more negative by the day ... Certainly I suppose the manner in which the raids have been reported here has caused, I suppose, a number of newspaper outlets in particular to focus on anti-Australian sentiment. But when it comes to the Australian media coverage, in particular I think of the raids in Perth, I sometimes question whether live coverage by television outlets of a particular raid is operationally necessary from an ASIO point of view. Because it certainly translates here in an unnecessary way." Stephen Hopper, the lawyer of one of the men subjected to a raid, complained on ABC radio of "heavy-handed" tactics which he went on to outline. "He wasn't wearing a T-shirt or anything and he said, 'I'll just go and get a T-shirt.' They said, 'Open the door now.' He looked through the window and saw people armed with pistols and a sledgehammer so he opened the door and fully co-operated with the people who identified themselves as the police." A neighbour of one raided family in Perth got more than her fair share of air time criticising police tactics. Among the more curious of her observations was the fact police had arrived in "new four-wheel drives". A sure sign of baddies. You had the hapless Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, holding doorstop interviews to confirm the raids had taken place and finding after three questions he had to defend "heavy-handed tactics". "Do you regret that guns [were pointed at] the faces of four children, including a four-year-old? Do you regret that?" Williams tried to make the obvious point: "We are not targeting any community group, we are not targeting any religion and we are definitely not targeting the Islamic community." But it made no difference. It didn't matter how much the ASIO chief, the Prime Minister or the Premier explained that Australia was more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attack and that such raids were vital for national security. It was all too late. The consensus was in. There was an expectation within hours of the raids that somehow the Government was up to no good, living up to its racist reputation. The story ran in Indonesia, pretty much as the Australian media had reported it and relayed as evidence of Australian ill will towards Indonesia and Muslims. Soon enough the ABC was reporting the "worrying news from Jakarta" that "the mood in the Indonesian capital is moving decidedly against Australia if the local media is any guide ... the way the raids have been conducted has played badly in Indonesia." No wonder. If Australia's image overseas is mud, we only have ourselves to blame. Clip from The Sydney Morning Herald UK acclaims Rabbit-Proof Fence9 November 2002 - Australian stolen generation movie Rabbit-Proof Fence has been acclaimed as marvellous, memorable and moving by most critics in Britain - but lambasted as politically correct hooey by one. The story of three Aboriginal children escaping from a mission station and walking thousands of kilometres through the desert to find their mothers opened in Britain this week to rave reviews in most papers. The odd voice out was the Financial Times, which blasted it as "a piece of ingratiating PC hooey, so steeped in political hindsight and liberal sentimentality that the lack of craft, artistry or originality can easily go unnoticed". Source: AAP Daily Dish & GossipWith Suzanne Rozdeba and Ben Widdicombe November 18, 2002 - Kylie Minogue showed a rare flash of political consciousness the other night. The Aussie pop tart joined Bianca Jagger and Salman Rushdie at a London screening of "Rabbit-Proof Fence," the controversial film about Australia's stolen generations of Aboriginal children, sponsored by the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights. Source: New York Daily News
related links:
|
Urgent action ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ Music by The GetUp Mob! Kev Carmody and lots more
|
|
