![]() To film Utopia he flew to Western Australia to compare the living conditions of Aboriginal communities with the riches of the mining boom, commenting that "barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited Aboriginal communities, whose poverty is an enduring shock". ![]() While acknowledging that Australia "has changed" since he left the country, 73-year-old Pilger quotes from a history text he studied at school which described Aborigines as "completely amoral" and which said "we are civilised and they are not". In this latest film Pilger says that "more than any other colonial society, Australia consigns its dirtiest secrets, past and present, to willful ignorance or indifference". Pilger, an award-winning television journalist who has lived in Britain since 1962, is a long time critic of Australia's "racist" treatment of the Aboriginal population. What's new is their lives are under the spotlight in a film, Utopia, due for international release by controversial expatriate Australian John Pilger. ![]() Living in squalor on the doorstep of Western Australia's multi-billion-dollar resources rush where "fly-in fly-out" workers earn six-figure salaries is nothing new for these fringe dwellers. They have been waiting for up to a decade for public housing. While boomtown Port Hedland boasts $1 million bungalows and apartment blocks with "green credentials" and "specially designed to best capture solar access", communities like South Hedland have all the solar access they want. In South Hedland, as the Sunday Times recently discovered on a tour of the region, residents are dying of kidney and liver failure, and their children are inhaling petrol and aerosols. A 20-MINUTE drive from where real estate agents are touting a "new breed of luxury modernist apartments" to cashed-up employees of Port Hedland's mining boom, members of Joanne Polly's indigenous community sleep in the fields.
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