The Secret Country

Award-winning journalist and film-maker John Pilger writes about his homeland, Australia, with affection, humour, a passionately critical eye and, above all, a commitment to revealing the truth behind the misleading facade erected during the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations. Constantly drawn back to Australia's friendliness, warmth and diamond light, he nonetheless regards his own country as a secret, a land half-won, its epic and rapacious story half-told. A Secret Country investigates the nature of this unique immigrant society, one of the most culturally diverse on Earth, yet one which still practices a form of apartheid against the original Australians and often prefers to forget the black genocide on which it was built. Beneath Australia's glossy packaging so successfully marketed overseas, John Pilger uncovers a nation of battlers whose leaders have turned away from real independence and created a 'transnational economy' benefitting 31,000 millionaires. The secret country he describes is a place where, to achieve this, deprivation and homelessness have been sanctioned on a potentially massive scale.
In less than a decade Australia's tradition of visionary social reform and pride in its economic egalitarianism have been radically overturned by a new establishment, the Order of Mates. This is an almost Masonic alliance of leading politicians and their rich and powerful patrons, notably the Silver Bodgie (Prime Minister Bob Hawke) and Rupert, Bondy and the Goana. In a story of high political drama and subterfuge, John Pilger describes, in carefully researched detail, the overthrow of the last Australian Government to threaten to break the ties that still bind Australia to its colonial past and especially its 'great protector', the United States. Vivid and powerful, A Secret Country pays tribute to an Australia little known and rarely talked about. It serves also as a warning - of the consequences to a liberal society espousing new 'freedoms' when it retreats from real democracy into subservience and secrecy.