A desanitized view of Australia from a veteran Australian
journalist, ranging from its founding as a penal colony in 1788 to
the machinations of the "Old Mates," the powerful "dullards" who
threaten the nation's hard-won status as a working-class society of
equals. More than 160,000 came to Australia in chains, a practice
continuing into the 1880's. Later generations tried to suppress
their heritage, so Pilger had to do considerable work to unearth
his great-great-grandmother, a pregnant 16-year-old Irish girl when
she came over on one of the female slave ships. Such women were
passed out first to "officers, then to non-commissioned officers,
then privates, and lastly such ex-convict settlers as seemed
'respectable.'" Yet the offspring of convicts were more brutal
still to Aborigines, taking them as slaves quite as in the American
South. Aborigines were seen as animals; even into the 1950's babies
were taken away at birth and "adopted"; full rights are still not
accorded these people. Meanwhile, Australia, with its whites-only
immigration policy, remained aloof from its Asian neighbors. When
the UK's influence waned, the US stepped in, most notably with the
use of Australian conscripts in the Vietnam War. According to
Pilger, the CIA actually undertook a sort of coup by poisoning the
chances for reelection of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam through its
influences with powerful Governor General John Kerr. One of the
most extraordinary portraits here is of Kerr, a boilermakers's son
and rabid conservative whose weakness was booze; he lost his job
when he made a drunken pass at the Queen. A brooding, often angry
book. Pilger sees hope for this nation of battlers in the example
of New Zealand, a superficially similar country that noisily
rejected the US nuclear umbrella and has turned fully ten percent
of its land into a national park. A startling look, then, at a
country quite different from, and hauntingly similar to, the US.
(Kirkus Reviews)
A study which takes the reader beyond the euphemistic and romantic popular misconceptions to reveal the often invisible past and the present subterfuge of Australia. It portrays a country of stark contrasts, of visionaries and criminals whose secrets are exposed.
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