John Pilger's Utopia Hits Home

John Pilger's extraordinary, jaw-dropping, heart-breaking but totally eye-opening documentary Utopia screened across Australia on SBS tonight. Utopia is one of the most important films ever made in Australia, about Australia, about its secret past, and its secret present.


Although mostly ignored by mainstream media, and unable to even get a distribution deal, initially, Utopia was still seen by more than 100,000 people in parks, churches, school halls and community halls across Australia, in dozens of communities.

The reaction on Twitter to Utopia airing on SBS was intense.

For a few minutes, a documentary about Aboriginals topped the Twitter trending topics for Australia. Shortly after, it locked in between AFL and NRL trending topics. If you know the volume of celebrity and sports and boy pop band related tweets that usually result in a subject trending, you will understand just how massive the public reaction to Utopia on SBS was. And it was on SBS, not on a commercial channel.

Tens of thousands of tweets were posted, quoting from the documentary, airing feels of shock, dismay, anger but almost overall a sense of betrayal. Not just betrayal by Aboriginals on social media still waiting for justice, but from people all over the country who had never been told most of the information in Utopia, by teachers, by the media, by history books. How did we not know all this? How can so much be hidden?



Films can change societies, and for now at least, it feels like Utopia will help Aboriginals in their fight for justice, and full recognition. It certainly got people talking. And that's a start, isn't it? At least people know more than they did a few years ago.




Here are photos from the first screening of John Pilger's Utopia, at 'The Block' in Redfern. More than 4000 people turned out to watch the documentary, and Aboriginals traveled from across Australia to be there, and to speak, passionately, about the stories of Aboriginal heroes and their battles for justice featured in the film. I'm haunted to this day by the cries of pain and anguish from some of the Aboriginal men and women in the crowd, when they saw images of dead friends, or relatives, or stolen children from their ancestral lands. I doubt I will ever go to another film screening where emotions were so raw, and the joy at truth finally being told was so overwhelming.

You can buy a DVD of Utopia here. It's archival footage, alone, is worth keeping a permanent copy of, but the story in total is something you should share with people who don't know, including your children, or your grandchildren. It is the truth of Australia.

Some Of The Most Nutritious Food In The World Is Right In Our Own Backyards, So Why Aren't We Eating It?


Bush tomato grows near Uluru

The drought-led destruction of Australian farming may hopefully force a rethink on how we view the incredible variety of "bush foods" that grow wild across our scrublands and deserts and jungles and have kept Aboriginal people alive, and healthy, for more than 60,000 years.

If you've never marinated a steak in bush tomato and lemon myrtle before throwing it on the barbecue, you have no idea what you're missing out on. An explosion of so many new flavour sensations you will be left mind-boggled as to why these herbs and fruits are not for sale in every supermarket in the country.

Australians have embraced just every kind of "ethnic" food in the world, but most of us would still turn our noses up at the herbs, fruits and meat that are found across our wide brown lands.

Maybe we just need to hear more about the new recipes that chefs, across the world, are experimenting with and embracing. Like these :

...turtle broth, dugong steaks with bush fruits, pan-fried magpie goose breast with a bush peach glaze, chargrilled crocodile tail with bush tomato chutney, bush-meat pie with kangaroo, bush-turkey and emu, goanna and vegetable stew, waterlily salad with red claw yabbies, kangaroo bourgignon and wattle seeds pancakes with sugarbag caramel.

A nationwide rethink on the food we eat and grow would create new farming industries across the country, and provide much-needed jobs and income to isolated Aboriginal communities.

A fascinating story on all this :

Steve Sunk, a senior lecturer in hospitality and cookery at Charles Darwin University, is showing (Aboriginal people) innovative ways to cook the animals they traditionally hunt, and their wild fruit and vegetables.

He started his courses because he was concerned about health problems caused to a large extent by poor diet. Indigenous people suffer from high rates of diabetes, obesity, renal failure and heart disease.

Their traditional diet was healthy, combining low-fat meat (kangaroo, emu, crocodile, goanna) with a wide variety of fruit and vegetables: bush tomatoes, water lilies, wild limes, yams, quandongs (native peach), Kakadu plums and wild spinach, to name but a few.

After white settlement, though, Aborigines abandoned their nomadic lifestyle. Forced to live on missions and reserves, they stripped the surrounding vegetation. They were also introduced to Western processed food, and nowadays many of them live off fried chicken and potato chips, washed down with Coke and other sugary drinks.

Mr Sunk wants indigenous people to return to their millennia-old supermarket: the desert, the rivers, the sea. To encourage that, he shows them how to cook their traditional produce more creatively and healthily.

While Mr Sunk spreads the message in Aboriginal communities, mainstream Australia is belatedly waking up to the rich flavours – and nutritional value – of "bush tucker". The Kakadu plum contains five times the volume of antioxidants found in blueberries, well known for their antioxidant qualities.

Other wild fruit and vegetables have been found to have extraordinary qualities. A government study published last month found that fruits such as brush cherries, finger limes and riberries are a rich source of phytochemicals, which help protect against disease and ageing.

While Australians pride themselves on their adventurous palates, and their multicultural dining scene, they have always resisted eating the produce of their own backyards. For many people, bush tucker evoked visions of squirming witchetty grubs – fat white insects found in the desert, which Mr Sunk swears are delectable fried in garlic butter. Previous attempts to popularise bush cuisine, particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, were unsuccessful.

Public perceptions are now changing, thanks to new restaurants devoted to "native Australian food", as bush tucker has been rebranded, and the appearance of products such as bush tomato chutney and lemon myrtle-infused fruit juice on supermarket shelves.

Tjanabi, an Aboriginal-owned restaurant in Melbourne, features starters such as tempura battered crocodile on its menu, and main courses that include emu fillet wrapped in proscuitto on a saltbush and potato tart with a red wine and quandong peach sauce.

However, mainstream chefs are increasingly using native ingredients such as wild lime and river mint. They are adding saltbush to their olive tapenades, garnishing meat with lilly pilly berries, and serving fish and chips with lemon myrtle mayonnaise. Ice cream made with wattle seed – a nutty, coffee-flavoured berry – is popular.

The trend is benefiting Aboriginal communities, where people are employed or paid to supply specialist companies, supermarkets and restaurants. It might be on a small scale, with enterprising individuals digging under acacia trees for witchetty grubs, or using their knowledge of local geography and the seasons to hunt out bush tomatoes. Or it might be on a larger scale, with thriving businesses engaged in growing and harvesting ingredients whose popularity is soaring. Lemon myrtle, wattle seed and quandongs are among the products now being grown on big plantations. Mr Christie's business partner, Vic Cherikoff, sources Kakadu plums from a plantation in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, run by a company uniting five communities. Such enterprises give indigenous people a degree of economic independence, while enabling them to retain their connection with the land. Some have called this serendipitous meeting of demand and supply "edible reconciliation".

At Nauiyu, the former Daly River Mission, children are eating fruit and yoghurt instead of salty, high-fat snacks. They drink watered-down fruit juices; Coke and lemonade are just an occasional treat. The health kick has extended beyond food. Children at Miriam Bauman's school regularly take long walks, and enjoy exercise classes.

Ms Bauman says: "It makes the kids feel important too. It reinforces the culture. We still have all the skills and knowledge surrounding bush food. We just have to start using them again."

And on a national scale, and soon. There's not much time left. The Howard government-led "intervention" into Aboriginal communities is starting to sound like a deal has been done to allow the largest supermarket chains to move into once closed off communities and stock the shelves of the local stores with their own products, presumably more junk food and ultra-processed rubbish, when it is clear that "bush foods" will provide more nutrition and income to Aboriginal communities.

We need to embrace the bounty of amazing food our own bush produces, and teach the next generations that "bush tucker" means a whole lot more than eating raw witchery grubs and throwing a snake into the coals of a fire.

Diners in top restaurants in New York City, London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai know all about the incredible variety of new flavours to be found in the Australian bush.

So why don't we?

Howard : "Racist Bastard"

New Zealand MP Scours Howard Over Aboriginal Intervention

Sacred Arnhem Could Become Backpackers Paradise

A New Zealand member of parliament has cut loose on Australian prime minister John Howard over his logistically, ideologically challenged plan to seize control of more than 60 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Hone Harawira, of the New Zealand Maori Party, claims that comments by John Howard, his ministers, and the one-sided media blitz over shocking child abuse, alcoholism and societal breakdown in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities has defamed and ostracised indigenous men :

"If I was an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory I would feel like absolute s**t right now," the Maori Party MP said today.

"I would have the leader of my country saying I am an alcoholic, I am into pornography, I am into sexual abuse. All I would want to do is go out and smash someone."

Howard last month announced radical measures to tackle problems including abuse against children and women, and poverty in remote Aboriginal communities.

They include bans on alcohol and pornography, quarantining welfare payments, abolishing a permit system that limits access to remote communities, and mobilising extra police and troops to help address abuse and other problems.

"All Howard has done is generate more anger and bitterness in the Aboriginal community, a lot of which is going to be internalised," Mr Harawira said.

"I said John Howard is a racist bastard trying to impose racist policies on a people who can't fight back," he said, adding that he stood by those comments to air tonight.

Mr Harawira slammed Howard for ignoring reports issued ten years ago that revealed similar problems in Aboriginal towns and camps. Harawira, like the majority of Australians, views the intervention as an insidious publicity stunt related to the forthcoming federal election, which current polls show the Howard government is expected to lose.

The report into child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory that John Howard used to launch his intervention claimed that many of the sexual assaults on Aboriginal children were by white miners, a fact Howard himself acknowledged in an interview on Lateline, announcing the intervention.

That fact that so many white men are involved in the abuse of Aboriginal children barely surfaced amongst the hammerhard media coverage of indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in the past few weeks.

Only a few days ago, a report was published on how white men were buying sex from young Aboriginal girls in Darwin in exchange for cigarettes and beer. It received minimal media coverage.

Aboriginal men from all over Australia have been heard on talk back radio in the past two weeks talking of the glaring looks and verbal abuse they are now getting from white Australians since the child sexual assault report, championed by Howard, hit the headlines.

While government ministers and officials have been seen entering at least ten Aboriginal towns and camps in the past two weeks, we are yet to see any of them turn up in white mining camps, awash with alcohol and hard core pornography, to tell them to leave the Aboriginal children alone.


Meanwhile, the Northern Territory government has announced it will back the Northern Land Council in a legal challenge to Howard's intervention :

The Chief Minister, Clare Martin, led growing criticism of the intervention yesterday, saying seizing control of townships and scrapping the permit system did not make sense and would not stop child sexual abuse.

"So while we're working broadly with the Federal Government on the important issues of health, of tackling alcohol abuse, of tackling pornography, we will not support the removal of permits," Ms Martin said.

"It does not make sense, it is not supported by this Government and by Aboriginal Territorians, and we do not support five-year leases."

The Federal Government will seize control of 73 remote indigenous communities and introduce the most radical measures in decades to end indigenous neglect.

The Northern Land Council's chief executive, Norman Fry, said the compulsory acquisition of private property without consultation was discriminatory and could not be justified. He predicted that removing the permit system would subject tribal Aborigines to rampant tourism or rampant journalism.

"Removing the permit system will mean a free-for-all, with Arnhem Land instantly becoming the world's most sought-after backpacker destination, an exotic must, with busloads of tourists leaving Darwin for remote communities every day."

White Men Buy Sex From Teenage Aboriginal Girls For A Beer At 'Lollipop Corner'

Local Northern Territory Police Claim The Permit System Is Essential

Census Shows Indigenous Populations On The Rise

Indigenous Fears Over 'Military Occupation'

Canberra Ready To Seize Town Camps

Aboriginal Poverty And Neglect Is Rife In Sydney's Backyard