SECRET COUNTRY by John Pilger

Award winning investigative journalist supreme John Pilger turns his sharp attention to his home country Australia in this hard hitting exposure of the secret history of a land that has been given an image of an idyll.
From the initial colonising and near wipeout of the indigenous population , the maltreatment of many penal convicts sent over in transportation trips and the post war treatment of European nationalities who had come over expecting a land of their dreams from a wasted Europe to the overtly whites only emigration policies the de and re-populating of Australia has been a nightmarish trauma for many generations.

A suggestion of just how tortuous the experience could be is the not unusual story of the fate of transport ship convicts arriving at port after many weeks of gruelling hardships at sea being taken directly to " the treadmill ( treadwheel) , a device for torture , was a revolving cylinder in which the prisoner had to keep to keep stepping upwards to keep the cylinder moving and not falling out" , that was only for Woman.

The Press and Media have played a fundamental role in shaping the image of Australia and extracting the History from the record " one has to only read Edwin R. Bayleys "Joe McCarthy and the Press" to appreciate how every lie becomes enshrined as "objective fact".

The shapers of Australias image understood very well Milan Kunderas observance " the struggle of People ( against power) , is the struggle of memory against forgetting." , The Press in Australia have been masterful in denying a history for the victims , and tracing a golden path for the image of the continent.

This brilliant documentary gives a taste of the history of Australia from the point of view of so many People who suffered from the experience , a history not recognised formally by the state to such an extent many indigenous victims still awaiting any meaningful restoration of even the most basic recognition and rights.




On page 49 we find one of the most famous son of modern Australia , Rupert Murdoch , who spent a lot of his time in University in England accompanied by the precious bust of his hero Lenin in his study , not an unusual accessory of many of todays ultra-neocons when they were stormtrooping sharpshooters of a different class of struggle.One could do a Pee-Aitch-Dee on the great about turns from Communist to neo-con and whether the sift involves that much of a shift in ideological perspective.

The symbiosis of the media and government in the grave venture of power was not started in Australia , but under Murdoch it was perfected to an astonishing degree , ultimately being rolled out to the UK and now the US.This model was set in trace because " Murdochs brilliance has been to understand the relationship between Governments and the movement of capital".

According to Pilger the functions of newspapers should be " an inveterate opposer (rather) than a staunch parasite of government.".The days of mass mainstream news media being able to perform such a role has long gone.To such an extent one could argue in the new lobbyotimised democracy we now find ourselves with the Governments have become the staunch parasite of Media interest corporations.

The grand spectacle of this unhealthy fusion of media;capital and political power has been the War on Terror.In this documentary Pilger investigates the many facets , domestic and external , that this war has extracted in the form of lives and rights for all mankind.