Chris Graham of New Matilda
SYDNEY (New Matilda / Pacific Media Watch / Pacific Media Centre Online): Sometimes in life, you can feel pretty helpless. That said, I’m a privileged white guy in a privileged white society. So for me at least, it doesn’t happen very often.
It happened last year.
At the time, I was the managing editor of Tracker magazine. The NSW Aboriginal Land Council, owner of Tracker, was generous enough to give me time to fulfill a childhood dream.
John Pilger is a journalist I grew up reading, and a large part of the reason why I entered journalism.
Pilger was back in Australia making his fourth film about the plight of Aboriginal Australians.
He asked me to work on it with him. I didn’t feel helpless, but I certainly felt daunted. The helplessness was to come.
One of the first major shoots was in Central Australia, and we spent the better part of a week filming in and around Ampilatwatja (pronounced Um-budder-watch), a small Aboriginal community 300 kilometres north east of Alice Springs on the edge of a vast region known as Utopia.
Most disadvantaged
I’d been to Ampilatwatja many times before. Previously I had written a news feature about research out of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), which had ranked the region as the most disadvantaged in the nation.
Strangely, only a few years earlier, the Menzies School of Health Research had also noted in a study that despite its poverty, Utopia also had a mortality rate around 50 percent lower than the rest of the Northern Territory.
That makes Utopia a very unique place – despite its grinding poverty, its people live longer than many of their countrymen throughout the Territory, due in large part to the fact Aboriginal people in the region still live a semi-traditional lifestyle.
Governance structures are largely in place, and people stave off their hunger with a semi-traditional diet.
[Abridged]
Full story on Pacific Media Centre Online
Chris Graham in New Matilda with pictures
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