John Pilger Gives Sydney Peace Prize Lecture
Breaking the Australian Silence – Raising Awareness of Human Rights
Nov 11, 2009
Mr. Pilger’s speech ‘Breaking the Australian Silence’ was a mixture of writing from his novels and articles that had been adapted for his Peace Prize lecture on November 5.
John Pilger’s Career in Journalism
The Sydney Peace Prize jury chose Mr. Pilger for his commitment to justice and refusal to be censored where human rights are at stake.
He is now based in the U.K. and started journalistic life as a reporter on the Sydney Sunday Telegraph.
His articles have been published in worldwide newspapers such the Guardian, the New York Times, The South China Morning Post and the Sydney Morning Herald, and he has written a fortnightly column for the New Statesman since 1991.
His most noted work is his print and documentary coverage of the Vietnam war, Cambodia during the genocide of Pol Pot’s regime, East Timor and the realities of life for many Aboriginal tribes.
Silencing the Whites’ Convict History
The great silence permeates even white Australian history.
The Pilger family was from “bad stock”, or convict extraction, and growing up any mention of his Australian forebears was brushed aside.
Mr. Pilger’s research into his great-great grandparents’ origins while in Dublin and London led one of his aunts to say he was “no better than a damn communist”.
Treatment of Aboriginals Akin to Apartheid
From communism to racial segregation, he likened the way Aborigines were treated today to “apartheid”. He said near the end of apartheid in South Africa 851 blacks were being jailed for every 100,000 people in the country; today, Aborigines were being jailed at five times that rate, with West Australia jailing Aboriginal men at eight times that rate.
Indignant murmurs from the well-heeled audience accompanied examples of the ever-worsening situation in the Northern Territory and Kevin Rudd’s ‘intervention’, and calls of “shame” could be heard when he described the beating of an Aboriginal elder.
Arthur Murray was offered a lift home earlier this year by the Narrabri police, who instead took him on a violent ride in a bull wagon that put him in hospital.
Mr. Murray was the father of rising Aboriginal rugby league star Eddie Murray, who in 1983 was killed in a police cell. Arthur and his wife fought for years to have the culprits brought to justice, and Mr. Pilger described them both as Australian heroes for their tenacity and courage in standing up to authority.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination “distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa” in August, for the Northern Territory intervention that began with a smear campaign around high rates of child abuse in the area.
Statistics Abuse, Not Child Abuse
Government statistics released in May last year however, showed that of 7433 Aboriginal children who were examined by doctors, 39 were referred to authorities and only four cases of abuse were identified.
Mr. Pilger said the statistics showed what was already known, which was that Aboriginal children suffered not from overwhelming rates of sexual abuse but from extreme poverty and “the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries”.
He asked why, when child abuse existed in both black and white communities, it was only black people who had their welfare payments quarantined.
Propaganda Ensures Australian Silence
The only sign of dissent from the audience during the evening was when Mr. Pilger critiqued Australia’s reasons for involvement in the Afghanistan war; a heckler shouted twice that “women are mistreated in Afghanistan”.
Mr. Pilger said political propaganda aimed to “ensure our silent complicity” in war, helped by the media’s reluctance to call him or any other politician on detail such as whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or whether Afghanis were worldly terrorist-trainers, actually insular tribesmen.
Australians were trained to accept censorship by omission: “An invasion is not an invasion if ‘we’ do it. Terror is not terror if ‘we’ do it. A crime is not a crime if ‘we’ do it.”
Mr. Pilger called this “mind protection”, and the asylum seeker issue was a prime example of this.
The terms border protection and illegal immigration were “invisible boundaries” that kept out unacceptable facts and was essentially self-censorship, and labels such as “concentration camp” for the Christmas Island detention centre better described the situation.
Australia Must Acknowledge its First People to Gain Self-Respect
The solution to “our greatest silence” over the treatment of Aborigines and to become a truly independent nation was to give justice to the first Australians, by guaranteeing land rights and their share of Australia’s resources.
It was difficult though, because that would mean ordinary Australians would have to stop “looking from the side” in their own country.
Mr. Pilger also proposed an awakening, a Fifth Estate made up of ordinary people to monitor the other Four and counter the official line parroted by mainstream news outlets.
Only by accepting Aborigines and becoming more vocal about issues surrounding human rights within Australia did Mr. Pilger think the country could become a mature state with the moral authority to speak out on issues of justice.
He captured the essence of his point about Aborigines with a quote from historian Henry Reynolds: “they remain…the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.”
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