John Pilger's Australia: Documentaries that Changed the Wor...

WELCOME TO AUSTRALIA
Some of the greatest sportsmen and women in the world were Aboriginal - yet many of them were denied a place in Australia's Olympic teams. Pilger discovers that the Australian Government is overturning a landmark legislation of 1992 which recognised that Aborigines actually existed as a people with common law rights, before the English colonised the country.

OTHER PEOPLE'S WARS in OTHER PEOPLE'S WARS
John Pilger looks at how contemporary ‘colonial politicians' have positioned Australia on the front line of numerous wars; and wonders why a war in which Australians fought and died in their own country is hardly remembered at all. “Australians have a special relationship with war.” Says John Pilger in this episode: “We fight mostly against people with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat of invasion. Australians have paid a unique blood sacrifice in order to appease a great protector.”

HEROES UNSUNG
This film, says Pilger, “a glimpse of an epic story of a society sent to hell, then having the cheek and courage to call it Heaven.” Today Australia remains one of the most culturally diverse nations on earth - due to an extraordinary immigration programme based, ironically, on the racial fears of the ‘yellow peril', that swept the social conscious during the early 20th century.

SECRETS
“The history of my country.” Says John Pilger in Secrets, “has been an epic cover-up… hundreds of thousands of people, whole nations among them were wiped out while those who kept the record looked the other way”. On Imperial British maps just over 200 years ago Australia was marked “Terra Nullius' - empty land. But this was not true. Nor was much of Australia's ‘official history' which was presented as a simple, benign tale of Man against Nature - no war, no revolution, no woman, no Aborigines. SECRETS is not just about history; it is also about the past catching up with the present.

THE SECRET COUNTRY: THE FIRST AUSTRALIANS FIGHT BACK
In 1988 Australia celebrated its bicentenary. That celebration marked the 200th anniversary of the arrival of Captain Cook at Botany Bay. When he landed, he declared Australia empty, but in fact there were at least 300,000 people - the Aborigine people whose history stretches back not 200 years but 250,000 years. John Pilger reports on those first Australians and their fight for recognition. “The greatest island on earth, Australia, is a secret country with a secret history. There are few countries in which a historical conspiracy of silence has been so complete as in Australia”.