Failing Aboriginal Australians
June 23, 2014
The Great Silence
Failing Aboriginal Australians
by FIONA BROOM
Several recent events in Australia have served to again highlight how little the peoples and cultures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island nations feature on the national radar. Lack of formal education about Aborigines and a failure on the medias part to make up the shortfall are the prime culprits, along with a general apathy that pervades the national character.
Renowned journalist John Pilgers latest film, Utopia, about the state of affairs for Aboriginal Australians, is billed as an epic portrayal of the oldest continuous human culture and an investigation into a suppressed colonial past and rapacious present that follows three other films since 1983. Prominent Aboriginal footballer and Australian of the Year Adam Goodes said the film was the talk of Aboriginal Australia, but the Australian premiere, attended by 4000 people, barely made it into the mainstream media.
The Great Australian Silence over the history between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner talked of in 1968 still exists to this day.
Mainstream media ignores those outside the bell curve
Critics apparently offended by Pilgers film include The Australian columnist and the Sydney Institute executive director Gerard Henderson, who balks at his perception of an inference of inherent racism and carps there is no fresh material in Utopia. Henderson makes no complaint that massive discrepancies between the life expectancy, health, wealth and education of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have long been known, but not rectified.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/23/failing-aboriginal-australians/
littlemissmartypants
(22,418 posts)dougolat
(716 posts)by Marlo Morgan, ever read it?
It presents the idea that some of the "traditional" Abos had decided to stop reproducing and leave the planet to us despoiling mutants.