The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney were universally recognised as an overwhelming success. The Australian heroine from start, when she carried the Olympic torch into the stadium, to finish, as she crossed the line to take 400m gold, was the indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman. Against the will of many of her still oppressed people, she came to represent the symbol, albeit shallow, of reconciliation between White Australia and Aboriginal Australia.
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Welcome to Australia. Video hosted on Google. But the frenzy of flames and fireworks surrounding the Games blinded the rest of the world to the darker side of a land down under. In 1999, John Pilger returned home to find that the elaborate preparations for the Games overshadowed a hidden world where Aborigines continue to live in Third World conditions. He revealed that some of the greatest sportsmen and women in the world were in fact Aboriginal. Many of them, like blacks in South Africa under Apartheid, were until recently denied a place in their country's Olympic teams.
He also found that the Australian Government was in the process of overturning the landmark legislation of 1992 which finally recognised Aborigines as people with common law rights before the English colonised the country. 'Welcome to Australia: The Secret Shame Behind the Sydney Olympics' was the third film Pilger made on the Aboriginal struggle alongside fellow Australian, Alan Lowery. Their first investigation, the award-winning 'The Secret Country - The First Australians Fight Back', transmitted in 1985, is now widely used in schools and Aboriginal communities. This film was followed by the trilogy, 'The Last Dream', in 1988.
John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. One of only two to win Britain's Journalist of the Year Award twice, his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. Based in London, he is known for his polemical campaigning style: "Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job, who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour."
Pilger is a supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. In May 2007 he co-signed and put forward a letter supporting the refusal of the government of Venezuela to renew the broadcasting licence of Venezuela's largest television network Radio Caracas Televisión, as they openly supported a 2002 coup attempt against the democratically elected government. Pilger and other signatories suggest that if the BBC or ITV used their news broadcasts to publicly support a coup against the British government, they would suffer similar consequences. Other groups, such as Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have described the RCTV decision as an effort to stifle freedom of expression.
He has been subjected to much criticism, with Auberon Waugh in Britain coining the verb 'to pilger' to denote 'to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion'. Noam Chomsky however, has claimed that the reason the term was invented is that faced with the uncomfortable truths Pilger presents, ridicule is the only response his critics are capable of.
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