Welcome to Australia
Welcome to Australia is a 1999 Carlton Television documentary, written and presented by John Pilger and directed and produced by Alan Lowery that demonstrates the injustices endured by Aboriginal Australian sportsmen and women who were, until recently, denied a place on Australia's olympic teams.
Synopsis
In the build-up to the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics, Pilger finds that the elaborate preparations for the Olympics are overshadowing the reality of many Australia's Aborigines, who he argues continue to remain excluded, impoverished and mistreated in Australia. The film uses sport as a mechanism to draw attention to and tell the story of the injustices endured by Aboriginal Australians while also arguing that Aboriginal Australians could have had a much more significant impact on Australian sport if they had not been deliberately prevented from doing so.The documentary mentions the official recognition of the stolen generations with the release of the Human Rights Commission report Bringing Them Home. It reports on the ongoing prevalence of the eye disease trachoma within the Aboriginal community and the fact that Aboriginal life expectancy is 25 years less than for whites. Pilger says: "Civilisations are judged by how they treat all their people, especially the most vulnerable, who are often the bravest... Why is it not possible for a nation’s leaders to behave honourably towards less than 2 per cent of the population?"