Frankie Boyle and the Aborigines

If you enjoy laughing and have ever watched the British (knowing laugh) nihilistic comedian Frankie Boyle I very much doubt that you have never laughed at his jokes.

The joke about the Queen's vagina being haunted? If you heard it I would bet that something akin to laughter ensued.

Yet that and other comedic transgressions has resulted in transgressive Frankie being banished by the evil English establishment.

Except it hasn't.

Oh no. We have the BBC commissioning a show headed by Boyle after the Scottish referendum and then another commission for online after the UK General Election. Some banishment. The Boyle election show was on the BBC iplayer homepage for weeks.

In his election show Boyle had two female comedians to bounce off and a 'Grime' commentator - aka a black British bloke. All of whom polished his mantle.

Now I can think of a number of bitchy conservatives who could have been a perfect foil to Boyle. Were they even considered? It would have made for great TV.

But why I am even asking this? Multi millionaire Boyle needs his 'safe space', bless. He has no history of stepping outside of his comfort zone but let's try. Here we go Frankie. Here's me puncturing your safe space.

The treatment of Australia and Australians by Boyle and his 'Grime' commentator Akala was colonialist and racist.

Boyle cherry picked a brief extract from Australian morning TV to showcase how Australians are all stupid fucking colonials and so so racist. This was as bad as the treatment of the 'colonials' by the Brits going way back has ever been. Barry Humphries, Private Eye and Humphries' Barry McKenzie character were satirising this Brit attitude in the 1970s (the 70s FFS).

We recently had the Gallipoli hundredth anniversary. Gallipoli in the Australian imagination is all about how the Brits have traditionally treated Aussies as subaltern. This stuff has form.

After his cherrypick, Boyle, backed by Akala, then underlined by calling Australia, quote, "the most racist country in the world".

Worse than Mali? Worse than Russia? Worse than India? Worse than Brazil?

Akala cited the utter revelation, to much of the audience I would assume, that Australian Aborigines 'used to be ruled by the Flora and Fauna Act'. This is actually a myth (the Act is) but the bigger point is that nearly fifty years ago Australians voted to end that mythical status, change the  Constitution and grant Aborigines citizenship by 91% in favour. Right now Australians are 85% in favour of proposals to change the Constitution to recognise Aboriginal people.

Why does Akala mention the (non existent) Flora and Fauna Act? To back Boyle's claim that Australia remains "the most racist country in the world".

Boyle's claim, with Akala's backing, does two things: it denies that white Australia has moved one centimeter on from the 1960s; it denies that Aboriginal and progressive activism has had any impact.

Obviously both are wrong. Clearly they are wrong. But both Akala and Boyle have an investment in denying the reality in Australia: their British audience will love to hear Australia called "the most racist country in the world" - and Akala and Boyle know it.

In order to make that claim both have to behave exactly like colonialists. Racist, British colonialists. And they have to fail to listen to Aboriginal people.

I wrote about this a few years back. Listening involves understanding that Aboriginal people have different opinions on how to advance the interests of their communities. (Of course they effing do.) There are some who want sovereignty to be central. (If Akala knew anything he would mention the absence of treaties.) Then there are others working with capitalism to create Aboriginal owned business and create jobs. And then there's the mass in between, trying to get on.

Outside of this we have white people like leftie icon John Pilger and environmentalists like newly minted BBC star Professor Tim Flannery who also have opinions. And don't they ever have opinions - and the whites always know better than the bad blackfellas.

Who is going to get the attention of the likes of Boyle/Akala (and countless other Brits)? Short answer: the white people. They'll know and trust someone like Pilger (Akala's comment is a 'tell' here) and have never heard of the likes of Professor Marcia Langton.

Langton has slammed Flannery and the "racist assumption in the green movement about Aboriginal people being the enemies of the wilderness." She is a leading light in the national debate around Aboriginal advancement and particularly the role of mining and is one of the most well known Aboriginal people in Australia. Yet when Pilger covered the area of Australia she has focused on in a film he flat out ignored her because she was an inconvenient black woman. What would you call that?

It is not going to even vaguely occur to Boyle/Akala what they're doing, namely that Aboriginal people in their world view may as well be regarded as 'flora and fauna' - invisible, lacking any agency. They're just going to be led by presumptions and ignorance and what white leftie icons say, for that is what it is.

Invisible: Two examples

Australian Aboriginal community 'bombed': Australia shrugs

On Tuesday a report flickered across Twitter that an Aboriginal community in Western Australia had been "bombed". Wait, What!? The ABC report was that a bomb had been thrown at a group in the One Mile community outside Broome. Three had been injured, one very seriously.

This, one day after the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. An event whose relationship to this report is not fanciful.

I dug around. There was no further reporting. But others, a very few others, had noticed. Bree Blakeman, a Canberra based anthropologist, was tweeting background. There had been another attack, arson, on emergency housing used by Aboriginal people. Local Aboriginal people did believe that their people had been attacked and were scared, she wrote.

Shift forward one day and the event was still not being widely reported. The local ABC then reported that the local police were calling it not a 'bombing' involving "explosives" anymore but 'pyrotechnics'. A 'firework' had somehow caused spinal injuries, burn or blast injuries which exposed bone and a 43 year-old woman had lost the use of her hands. Among the others injured was a 13 year-old girl. They repeated a comment made the previous night, emphasising that it may all have been a "prank" and played down a possible racial motivation.

This comment from the initial report suggests serious police apathy (my emphasis):

I'm looking forward to catching up with the people responsible for this and bringing it to their attention, and also bringing them before the judicial system.

The local ABC radio ran a call-in asking listeners if there 'should be more measures in place to stop fireworks and crackers coming into WA [Western Australia]?'

The infrastructure of Aboriginal Australia is a legacy of colonialism and dispossession. Communities which are former missions, gulags originally built for Aboriginal people in the 19th and early 20th centuries where they were to be trained as a second-class workforce. Shanty towns on the fringes of rural towns, like Broome, where segregation existed just like in Dixie and led to 'freedom rides' by Aborigines and concerned whites inspired by the American civil rights movement. Continuing this tradition of segregation, in Broome some white locals still want the 'Aboriginal problem' to be 'out of sight'.

One Mile in Broome is a legacy of what came before. It is part of a impoverished local community, where up to a quarter are homeless, in one of the richest parts of the world, and where sub-standard housing is the norm and its development constantly stalled. A community made poorer by sky rocketing rents and living costs.

Western Australia is rich from mining. Broome is no longer just a very isolated tourist and fishing town but a service centre for vast mines, oil and gas.

Blakeman suggests that one place to look for possible suspects could be "rednecks" flown in from the rest of Australia to work in the nearby giant gas works. She notes that swastikas have been daubed at One Mile.

She also points out that Australian police have form on dismissing attacks, even killings, of Aboriginal people as 'non-suspicious'. It is not just police in rural Australia. Police in Melbourne were caught using racist beer holders and their failures around racist attacks on Indian students caused an international incident. In Sydney, police treatment of Aborigines caused riots in 2004 in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, whose impact continues in the claimed persecution of the family of one of the youth whose death caused the rioting.

That the local police would underline that the Broome attack could be a 'prank' sets off warning signs for many as so many other violent, racist attacks in the past have been thus dismissed.

I will note that what exactly happened in Broome, let alone why, is unclear. A local freelance, Chris Campey, has been reporting and has been careful to simply report and not speculate. It may turn out to be a 'fiework' and a 'prank', though one which definitely has caused serious injury.

But physical attacks on Aboriginal communities are not rare. What they never are is 'terrorism'. If a "bomb" had been reported being thrown at parishioners of Sydney's influential Hillsong church, or at people outside Melbourne's Stock Exchange, it would dominate local media, we would know the names of those hurt, and international media would descend.

Those attacked in One Mile are the most marginal people in Australia. These communities are raw with violence, abuse and death. This is often the only view both Australians and the rest of us see of Aboriginal Australia. That can be damaging, dispiriting and inaccurate. I have written about the other side: the magical collaboration with scientists on Australia's unique history; on the great work being done in building Aboriginal enterprise and economic opportunity; on the breakthrough into the media and artistic mainstream.

But that a "bomb" can be reported as going off in Australia and it simply be ignored because of who it targeted speaks volumes about how far Australia has to go to tackle its ingrained racism.

Update, September 10: Police have ruled out racial motive and describe an "ignited object".

As I wrote, this situation may well have not been racially motivated. This does not take away from the initial and total absence of any reaction to the initial reporting, which would have been different if those reports were coming from anywhere but an Aboriginal community.

Against Said on 'orientalism'

Margaret Katherine at Gabarnmung

After once more regretting going BTL (below the line) in a comments section of The Guardian I discover a fantastic demolition of Edward Said's 'Orientalism' on Jacobinism.

The lengthy, thorough post had lots which springs out. It quotes Ibn Warraq on practitioners "intellectual terrorism". It describes Said's hugely influential work as "an accusatory and deeply reactionary text" and describes the ill effects it has had, principally in the Arab world. Go read the whole thing.

But what most sprung out to me was this:

And while Said's work was a convenient cudgel with which to bash the West, it was often misleading and tendentious to the point of outright fraudulence. The Orientalists Said attacks in Orientalism were not the Imperialist stooges of his imagination. They were learned classicists and multi-lingual philologists motivated by a desire to know about and to understand cultures, traditions and peoples unlike their own. Their voluminous research and the translations of Arab texts they undertook have proven invaluable, not only to Western scholars but also - in spite of Said's claims to the contrary - to Middle Eastern scholars, who were grateful for the preservation of their own neglected pre-Islamic history.

I immediately thought of the scholars who documented Australian Aboriginal culture in C19th and early C20th. Who did this work at a time when the worst horrors were being inflicted on Aboriginal people.

Their records are now used by Aboriginal communities all over Australia to reconstruct or fill in the blanks about their ancient culture. They have been crucial to native title claims over land.

It also made me think of the four part series just finished on Australian TV, First Footprints, about how Aboriginal people transformed the environment. The series is a collaboration demonstrating this alive and wonderful connection between scientists and Aborigines.

Doug Anderson, the veteran TV critic now writing for Guardian Australia, describes one of the series' highlights, from a site which is at least 15,000 years older than Stonehenge:

The sight of Jawoyn elder, Margaret Katherine, learning factual details at an amazing rock art gallery near Kakadu from anthropologists and archeological experts is profoundly moving. You can feel her joy as she realises the stories she is custodian of not only have authenticity but are verified by tangible evidence thousands of years old. Her gratitude is as palpable as her dignity.

Indeed. Throughout the series we see a real exchange. In one highlight trackers from the central desert explain to scientists what is going on in ancient footprints found at Willandra Lakes. In another at the 'world's largest gallery' in the Kimberley, Western Australian, a scientist gives the date of rock art depicting a human face to an awestruck young Aboriginal local.

• The whole of First Footprints is on YouTube, part one here. (Timelapse photography short after the jump.)

Another of the things I learned from the series was that there are probably more trees now in Australia than at first contact because Aboriginal people systematically burnt to create grassland and open woodland. This so impressed the first white settlers and it is now thought that the pictures painted of pastoral scenes once thought misleadingly reminiscent of Britain are accurate.

HT: Harry's Place.

The Guardian's 'Avatar' view of Aboriginal people

Simplistic and out of touch could be one recent impression of The Guardian's publishing on Aboriginal people.

Take two current examples from the left presenting angry white, male and Western enviromentalist/socialist perspectives.

On the face of it, if you know nothing of the subject matter, Martin Lukacs 'View from the North' on land rights and mining/drilling in Canada is an odd bit of writing.

He describes a meeting with a Master of The Universe (MOTU) on Wall Street, accompanied by (natch) rape apologist Naomi Klein Wolf. The meeting's aim being to push indigenous land rights as having legal force and hence that they should be counted in consideration of a countries credit rating.

The MOTU, shock, agrees. Legally they may be right but "you and whose army" are going to enforce them.

Lukacs' subsequent argument (it's not really reporting) seems to be predicated on the idea that the battle over land rights in Canada will result in the end of mining/drilling. Literally, he seems to be arguing, Canada's First Nations (as they are known) will 'SAVE THE EARTH' from climate change because, y'know, Aboriginal people, like the inhabitants of Pandora, don't want 'land rape' ...

Not all 'Earth Warriors'

The other day I was watching 'Mabo', the ABC drama about the Murray Islander whose long legal battle ended the concept of 'Terra Nullius' -- empty land -- which meant that he had no legal claim to ancestral land.

Eddie Mabo had all sorts of issues to deal with and one of them was his own people. In one of the first scenes in the drama the elders police his behavior on behalf of the white 'protector'. Later fellows drop out of his legal claim and he is left alone.

The Aboriginal experience in Australia is not one experience and is not solely one of oppression by whites, the communities have their own internal problems, often ones experienced by lots of other communities and which come down to being human. Writers like Lukacs ignore all this grey.

Lukacs' hope for humanity's salvation via Aboriginal land rights is predicated on Aboriginal people not wanting any of that nasty mining/drilling. Now I don't follow First Nations' issues closely but a quick Google brings up negotiated settlements between nations and mining companies, here's one signed a few days ago by a community on Vancouver Island:

Elliott called the potential deal "huge" for his people."

"It's going to create jobs," he said.

Details on exactly how revenue would be shared between the company and the First nation have not been worked out yet, Elliot noted.

"I think any percentage is going to be significant," he said.

"We're going to have a big hand in how the whole project works."

Elliott pointed to an agreement his council signed with Fortis B.C. worth $6 million. The First Nation also has stakes in forestry, aquaculture, petroleum and commercial construction.

"This (new) partnership is going to be 10 times, 20 times larger in the sense of creating opportunities for our members," he said.

Now Canada may be having issues with such deals but clearly they exist and they sound, in terms of what Aboriginal leaders say, just like Aboriginal leaders elsewhere, just like those in Australia. They demand to be part of economic development.

Green/left Kryptonite

An Australia elder, Professor Marcia Langton, has caused consternation on the Green Left through her arguing that mining has been a massive economic plus for Aboriginal people:

When W.E.H. Stanner delivered the Boyer Lectures in 1968, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians - An Anthropologist's View, he gave credence, perhaps inadvertently, to the widely held assumption at that time that Aboriginal life was incompatible with modern economic life. Today, the expectation is quite the reverse.

The policies of federal governments for the past decade have made explicit the expectation that educational achievement and employability will be the key outcomes of spending in indigenous affairs portfolios. This is a view shared by most ordinary Australians.

But on the left, and among those opinion leaders who hang on to the idea of the new ''noble savage'', Aboriginal poverty is invisible, masked by their ''wilderness'' ideology. Their unspoken expectation is that no Aboriginal group should become engaged in any economic development.

In her Boyer lecture Langton goes further, asking whether legendary environmental campaigner Tim Flannery had written something he intended to be "provocative and racist". Langton has caused mass outrage of course as environmentalists and the left struggles to deal with her arguments (or resorts to claims that she must be in the pay of the mining companies). I've embedded Langton speaking at last year's Indigenous Business Enterprise and Corporations Conference after the jump.

It is of a pattern. Another Aboriginal elder, Noel Pearson, has faced similar exasperation from the left as he has worked on alternatives to welfare dependency.

So how does the Guardian, which is trying to expand its reach to Australia, deal with this issue of mining and Aboriginal people? It publishes an 'woe-is-us' essay by John Pilger which is entirely about mining and Aboriginal people and which ignores Langton, even though the area he focuses in on -- the Pilbara in Western Australia -- is her focus too.

Pilger silences the major Aboriginal voice contradicting him and ignores the huge debate in his supposed country that her Aboriginal elder's voice has caused. What would you call that if it was not Pilger, the great white exposer of Australia's historic sins, who was doing it? Dare I say racist?

Writes Russell Skelton in The Age:

The attacks on Langton could be filed away as nothing more than a monumental storm in a tiny teacup. But I believe there is something far more profound going on - given the level of vitriol, she has touched some exposed nerves.

What Langton is saying sits uncomfortably with the way the Aboriginal industry - activists, NGOs, Amnesty and anti-intervention groups - have stereotyped Aboriginal Australians as a powerless, downtrodden, oppressed minority living in a world of disadvantage fuelled by government neglect.

It's a view that has its roots in our shocking colonial history and in the landmark battles fought in the 1970s when Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser led the charge on land rights, native title, equal pay, access to welfare and unemployment benefits against a coalition of belligerent miners, ruthless pastoralists and recalcitrant state and territory governments. An essential part of Langton's thesis is that times have changed, old ways of seeing are no longer useful.

Skelton says something which is like Green Left Kryptonite:

[The mining corporation] Rio Tinto has a far superior track record when it comes to creating skills and jobs than any government or NGO.

Australia 'Closing the Gap'

What Pilger fails to tell the Guardian's left/liberal British audience is that there has been an incredible development in Australia over the past decade. As I reported when comparing it to Australia's sickening treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat, there is now near universal and definitely bipartisan commitment to both Aboriginal development and facing up to history.

Pilger is flat out wrong when he claims that Australia is still trying to bury the past.

All political parties are committed to changing the constitution. Australian TV, as I have also reported, now features Aboriginal stories written, produced and directed by Aboriginal people in prime time and getting hit ratings and awards.

When Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations in 2007 he also launched the bipartisan 'Closing The Gap' strategy of systematically meeting targets in education, housing and health. Five years on and one has been met, by the end of 2013 all Indigenous four-year-olds in remote communities will have access to early childhood education.

Australians are well aware of the problems -- the 'gap' -- which Pilger writes exclusively about. He is not telling any of them, that's any Australians, urban/rural, right or left wing, anything they are not both knowledgeable about or concerned about.

Pilger comes with no solutions, none. That is something Australians are sick of and if The Guardian is going to get any traction in Australia it had better start publishing some thinkers coming with solutions, ideas to end the horrors Pilger describes, and not just old white lefties that Brits still think are relevant whilst Australia has moved on.

Edited to add: Just noticed that for the Guardian's audio edition which features the Pilger article that they've picked a traditional, apparently stock, touristy image (pictured right) to illustrate rather than looked a bit harder for one of your average Aboriginal person.

Edited to add: I missed this excellent video report (not embeddable) via The Age about the Aboriginal run multimillion dollar businesses proving themselves in the Pilbara. It interviews some of the owners and I'm left wondering if a photo of one of them could best illustrate a 'typical Aboriginal person' rather than a stock traditional one, eh Guardian? Also wondering if any of these businesses will make it into Pilger's film, supposedly about their area, for ITV?

Listen to Marcia Langton at the 2012 Indigenous Business Enterprise and Corporations Conference after the jump:

'White Australia' lives on

Image via Senthorun Raj

Four hundred years ago boats began arriving in Northern Australia looking for sea cucumber, an animal still prized in Chinese cooking and medicine.

Fishermen from what is now Indonesia would trade with the local Yolngu people. When the British arrived in the area a hundred years later they encouraged the lucrative trade.

Four hundred years on and similar fishing boats coming to Australia's northern shores are being presented in an entirely different light.

Cynical politics has led both major parties to pretend that the country's borders are 'under siege' and 'at risk of invasion'. That is the sort of language deployed against the arrival on those fishing boats of refugees from the world's major trouble spots. Year after year, politicians vie with unworkable plan after unworkable plan to 'stop the boats', the latest being to spend over A$2b on drones to someone find boats in millions of square kilometers of ocean, when it is illegal to 'turn boats back' on the high seas.

The demonisation of desperate and frightened people was already awful -- a grub fight -- but has now reached a new low. The conservative opposition, very likely to be the next government, has taken one case of alleged rape by an asylum seeker in order to propose that all asylum seekers living outside camps (where they all used to be kept until the outcry got too loud over the conditions, particularly the impact on children):

.. are not to be housed near ''vulnerable communities'' - presumably children and, in the context of the alleged assault which sparked the debate, female college students.

They will be subject to ''behaviour protocols'', breach of which will carry ''negative sanction'', which might mean a return to detention, or perhaps criminal charges - it is unclear. The police must be notified and consulted at every instance. And, of course, the neighbourhood must be ''alerted'' to their presence.

Matthew Zagor writes:

Apart from the unavoidable equating of refugees with child sex offenders, there is a clear assumption that they are not to be trusted close to our Australian women, a classic racist trope with its undertones of the sexually threatening foreigner.

There is also a remarkable inversion and appropriation of the rhetoric of vulnerability: it turns out ''we'' are the vulnerable ones, the ones under threat and in need of protection.

Bianca Hall writes in The Age that, asylum seekers on bridging visas, released from detention, are 45 times less likely to be charged with a crime than members of the general public. Almost all these people are genuine refugees, meaning that they will be accepted as asylum seekers, though, as with the UK, there is controversy over increased removals of Tamils.

Since a third wave of 'boat people' began arriving in 1999 Australian politics has been like this, Labour and Liberal alike have played footsie with 'dog whistles' that hark back to Australia's explicitly racist policy history of stoked-up fear of Asians from the North, 'yellow peril', the 'White Australia' immigration policy written into the constitution and finally ditched by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, with the last racist provision gone in 1978. Bahá'ís and Jews were amongst those also impacted by racist immigration policy.

When the first 'boat people' arrived from South-East Asia in the late seventies the reaction was "symptomatic of an insecure nation threatened by Asian penetration", writes Dr. Rachel Stevens. The numbers then, and in a second wave from the late eighties, were small but they remain small today.

In 2010 134 boats arrived unauthorised in Australia with a total of about 6,879 people on board (including crew). Most asylum seekers arrive by air. There are ten times as many people overstaying their visa, with the largest number of those being British.

Since the first boat with five Vietnamese men arrived in Darwin in 1976 Australia has spent countless billions and huge amounts of political focus on what, to outsiders, certainly to Europeans, is a non-issue. The numbers are tiny. In forty years there's been no 'terrorist threat'. There is no 'solution' to 'secure the border'.

Given how both elements of the media and some politicians have played up and played loose with the issue it's easy to think that Australians are merely reacting, like mushrooms in a cupboard being fed the proverbial. But this forgets the history, what is already out there.

'Atone for the hardness of heart'

It could change. A decade ago Indigenous issues divided the country with many accusing the then Prime Minister, conservative John Howard, of using division on issues like land rights and apologies for past treatment in much the same way that 'boat people' are being used now.

Now? Who said this?

One of the reasons why Aboriginal policy has been so unsuccessful, despite an abundance of official goodwill, is that few policy-makers have ever spent a night in an Aboriginal community or mixed with Aboriginal people except those who have made it into the middle class.

A hippie, liberal big city type? No, that was the extremely conservative likely next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

Indigenous issues now unite all the major parties, including the representatives of white and rural Australia, the Nationals. In February:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott put aside politics .. as the lower house passed legislation to create an Act of Recognition of indigenous people.

In a bipartisan process just like that which led up to the 1967 referendum which first recognised Aborigines in the national census the plan is to further recognise the first inhabitants in the constitution. This is difficult as most constitutional change proposed in Australia has failed.

Mr Abbott said he and Ms Gillard were partners on this matter.

He honoured her work and that of other leaders who paved the way over the years.

'Most of all I honour the millions of indigenous people, living and dead, who have loved this country yet maintained their identity, and who now ask only that their existence be recognised and their contributions be acknowledged,' he said.

Australia now had an opportunity to do what should have been done 200 or 100 years ago.

'We need to atone for the omissions and for the hardness of heart of our forebears to enable us all to embrace the future as a united people,' he said.

'We shouldn't feel guilty about our past, but we should be determined to rise above that which now makes us embarrassed,' he said.

Mr Abbott said Australia was a blessed country.

'Except for one thing - we have never fully made peace with the first Australians.'

Maybe, one day, Australia will come together to apply the same logic to their treatment of another marginalised, maligned and dehumanised minority?

• For more information visit the ASRC

Indigenous TV making Aussie strides

And now for some good news ....

Television about, produced by, staring and worked on by Indigenous Australians is making serious headway in Australia. This has been marked by wins at last night's Logies, Australia's serious TV awards, for two productions.

The wonderful actress Deborah Mailman won her third Logie for 'Mabo', the story of Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo's long fight for Native Title, which culminated in the landmark 1992 decision of the High Court of Australia which overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius ("land belonging to nothing, no one"). Mailman played Eddie's wife Bonita, who joined Mailman in a tearful moment on stage as she accepted her award.

Redfern Now, the first ever contemporary drama series written, directed and produced by Aborigines and which Mailman also starred in won two Logies.

One of the producers, Darren Dale, said that the wins highlighted the work of Indigenous people in the television industry. He said:

I'm so happy to stand here on this stage, with great Indigenous writers, actors and blackfellas suddenly on prime time.

That is what makes Redfern such a great show, that finally at 8:30 at night on the public broadcaster on the ABC you see black faces, and I'm so proud of that.

The six-part 'Redfern Now' was set in the inner-Sydney suburb usually associated in the public's mind with deprivation and depression. The individual stories, produced by Indigenous production company Blackfella Films, introduced all Australians to a far more rich, real and nuanced community living in the 21st century metropolis.

Most of the cast, directors and many production staff are Indigenous with many of Australia's most famous Indigenous actors participating, including Mailman and Leah Purcell. Well-known English television writer Jimmy McGovern was story producer.

Said Mailman:

When you have Indigenous writers, directors and actors, it means you can be uncompromising and complex with your stories and characters because you're giving it insight that doesn't often come from outside a community. We hope people will come away from it with much more understanding and insight into who we are and into our stories.

Sally Riley, from the ABC, told The Guardian:

We take the audience to a place they've never been before. People are saying to me they didn't even know this world existed.

It's a landmark because for so long we have had other people telling our stories and the government telling us what we should be doing to help ourselves. This is a chance for us to comment on our own stuff, our own problems, our own issues.

The show was part of an ABC strategy to get more Indigenous storytelling into prime time and drew an average of three quarters of a million viewers. It has been commissioned for a second series.

In 2013 the ABC is planning more prime time Indigenous drama as well as a comedy series set in an Alice Springs radio station and a sketch comedy series.

The show came on the 20th anniversary of a famous speech by then Prime Minister Paul Keating. In it, Keating, for the first time, gave state acknowledgment to the wrongs done to Aboriginal people, famously saying "we poisoned the waterholes ... we took the traditional land … we brought the diseases and murders... we took the children from their mothers … how would I feel if this was done to me?"

That speech is now seen as setting the path towards the 'reconciliation' process which has since been embraced by both sides of Australian politics and most ordinary Australians.

'Reconciliation' is explored in one of the shows. In 'Stand Up' sixteen year old Joel wins an Indigenous scholarship to an elite private school. At his first day's assembly he's not singing the national anthem, breaking the rules.

Joel's dad doesn't want his son to sing, his mum doesn't want him to lose his opportunity. The school's principal is shown as torn between her history of support for 'reconciliation' vs her role as the guardian of school tradition. How the show ends demonstrates how 'reconciliation' works in the real world.

This episode highlights the increase in the number of Indigenous success stories which has come from the efforts of white people in Australian professional bodies and organizations. Other episodes tell the other side of the story, which is shown in persistent poverty amongst Indigenous communities as well as newly recognized problems such as sexual abuse and drugs.

'Redfern Now' shows can be watched in their entirety (at the time of writing) on this YouTube channel.

Watch a preview clip of the "Stand Up" episode and two clips from 'Mabo' after the jump:

Canberra memories

The 100th birthday of Australia's capital Canberra has seen a lot of debate about the place. Not least on the BBC, after an article called it "dull and devoid of soul".

It's also seen a lot of history discussed, such as where its pronunciation came from (the Lady who pronounced it Can-berra at the opening ceremony), what the name means (much amusement about alleged 'tits' reference to local aboriginal names for mountains), how it was built for trams but, like most places of the era, got cars instead, how the building of it really only started in the 1960s and Malcolm Farr in Punch, who says it lacks "flesh and blood" because the humanity of those who built it has been deliberately removed:

There is a strange belief elsewhere in Australia that Canberra simply happened, as if it fell from the sky in final form, complete with clipped hedges and pampered inhabitants.

Thousands of people bent their backs to the task of carving Canberra from a group of farms. These people should be recognised because without them there would not be a centenary to celebrate.

Argues Martin McKenzie-Murray in The Age:

What was splendid in the vision was sterile in the living. [Canberra architect Walter Burley] Griffin had designed a city that pre-empted the primacy of the car, which was both prophetic and pathetic. Instead of a tightly knit centre, six (now seven) small districts emerged, separated by vast space and ill-connected by public transport. Between these centres lies mandated green space, which is pretty for tourists but pushes locals apart, limits land availability and drives up property prices.

All of which demonstrates the cruel irony of Griffin's vision of a ''humanised'' city - a vision that demands some of the lowest density living among our capital cities. Griffin applied to his canvas a vision that sought splendour in empty roads and monuments, rather than in the people that would inhabit it.

It's as if Griffin had unwittingly designed Superman's Fortress of Solitude for wonks and staffers.

My memories of Canberra are of a place exactly with humanity removed. There is not only no roadside advertising but shops and petrol stations are behind hedges, like something which needs to disguised. Everything is zoned to within an inch, Sim City on steroids. At that time it was the only place porn could be legally purchased in the country, but you had to go to the industrial zone near the airport, Fyshwick. The train station was nowhere near the city centre.

Getting around by car from my memory was stunningly quick, all the way across town in thirty minutes (though I read locals complaints now of traffic jams) and then there was the utter un-walkability of the central area where all the attractions lie. But also how amazing many of those attractions are, with particularly fond memories of the National Gallery.

The Gallery has Nolan, Streeton, Boyd, Roberts, Drysdale and Pollack, Matisse, Warhol, Rothko. But for my money its most striking work is the first thing you see as you walk in, the Aboriginal Memorial, a beautiful installation of 200 hollow log coffins from Central Arnhem Land. It was installed in the bicentennial year of 1988, a time of great anger and sorrow. 'Reconciliation' wasn't an idea then, Aboriginal art itself had yet to make much of a mark on the art world.

The Memorial was created by an Aboriginal man who was in part inspired by John Pilger's 1985 documentary 'The Secret Country', which covers the wars and massacres which came with the invasion. That history still lies largely buried, both in actuality as well as in the Australian psyche.

Canberra has a huge War Memorial and museum, Australia in general has almost nothing memorialising the tens of thousands who perished as their country was taken over.