Welcome to the world's first murdochracy
11 Mar 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger goes back to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch launched his worldwide media empire, and describes how his and Murdoch's homeland has become a murdochracy - a country where important media, issues and perception are influenced if not dominated by Murdochism: "an inspiration to his choir on seven continents".

Return to a secret country
27 Nov 2009
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of A Secret Country, his best-selling history of Australia, with a description of Aboriginal Australia and its relationship with white authority following Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the "stolen generations" last year.

Breaking the great Australian silence
5 Nov 2009
In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

Cover-up: a film's travesty of omissions
20 Aug 2009
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger recalls his undercover reporting from East Timor and reveals that a major new movie, Balibo, perpetuates the cover-up of the role played western governments in the genocial invasion of East Timor by Indonesia and the Australian government's part in the murder of its own journalists.

Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia
24 Oct 2008
In a report for the Guardian, John Pilger describes the deception behind the pretext for a "national emergency" declared by the Australian government in Aboriginal areas. A political cry of "save the children" can also mean the profits of uranium and toxic waste.

The people's sporting star who had 'the grace'
9 Oct 2008
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger celebrates the life of Sep Prosser, one of Australia's great swimmers and swimming coaches, whose celebrity was based on an ingredient now missing from so much sport: grace.

Australia's hidden Empire
5 Mar 2008
In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger reports from his homeland on Australia's hidden empire - a 'sphere of influence' that stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to East Timor and Afghanistan. The arrival of a new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, offers important continuity.

Catching the last tram home
20 Feb 2008
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger catches a ghostly tram to returns to where he grew up in Australia, the scene of his first encounter with the brutal, though enjoyable world of newspapers.

The swimmer's journey home
29 Mar 2007
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger touches on the life behind his public face. "I am a swimmer," he writes. From his childhood on Australia's famous Bondi Beach to a career that has taken him to many places the opposite of benign, Pilger has swum through, as he puts it, "the difficulties".

Australia: the 51st State
1 Mar 2007
In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the remarkable servility of John Howard's government in Australia to the Bush administration - Howard is known as Bush's 'deputy sheriff' - and how this is eroding the country's freedoms.

Mourning a secret Australia
15 Feb 2007
In a column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes another 'day of mourning' for the first inhabitants of his homeland, Australia, which for many whites remains a secret country behind the neo-conservative bluster of John Howard's government.

Cruelty and xenophobia shame and stir the lucky country
19 Jan 2007
In an article for the Guardian, John Pilger returns to his homeland, Australia, and described the social regression of a once proud liberal democracy and says that the flag-waving "values" of the neo-con prime minister may be coming unstuck in Guantanamo Bay.

Australia builds its empire
22 Jun 2006
Pilger describes the latest phase of East Timor's struggle for independence, which, in the 1990s, he went undercover to report. One of the world's newest and poorest states now faces the overweening power of its vast neighour, Australia. Once again, the prize is oil and gas.

No mourning for Kerry Packer
23 Jan 2006
Behind the glamour of Australian sport, black footballers, including whole teams, are often dead before 40.

Fear and silence in the 'lucky country'
7 Feb 2005
Australia, once the land of the "fair go", has collaborated with Guantanamo more closely than any other western government and is guilty of human rights abuses of its own.

Understanding Australia's black uprising
12 Jul 2004
Aboriginal children today have the same life expectancy as white children in 1900. Yet most Australians can't understand why there was an uprising in Sydney this year.

A tribute to my mother
17 May 2004
My mother, aged 19, sold her books to pay the fare to her first teaching job in the bush. The currency of her generation was determination and courage.

Once again, white Australia is reminded of life behind its picture postcard
23 Feb 2004
Epidemics of disease ravage Aboriginal communities in Australia as they did the slums of 19th-century England. No wonder there are riots in Sydney.

George Bush's other poodle
20 Jan 2003
John Howard, Australia's PM, is the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within.

Waging war against refugees
28 Jan 2002
Few asylum-seekers actually reach Australia's shores, and if they do, their treatment beggars belief. 

In the remotest parts of Australia's great outback, refugees are incarcerated, insulted and abused
11 Jun 2001
There has been a lot of political partying in Australia this year. First, there was the centenary of Federation, the coming together of the Australian states in 1901 as "a proud independent entity".

Charles Perkins: a tribute
19 Oct 2000
Charlie Perkins was, in many ways, Australia's Mandela. Indeed, had the Australian racial composition, been reversed, as in South Africa, he would have surely fulfilled that role.

Australia is the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations
13 Oct 2000
According to the folksy writer Matthew Engel, the glories of the Olympic Games have a cathartic effect on nations. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles 'helped the US regain the confidence it lost in Vietnam'.

Cathy Freeman's broad Olympic smile is being used to conceal a multitude of Australia's original sins
10 Jul 2000
My flight to Sydney was in a Qantas aircraft painted entirely in Aboriginal motifs. The airline calls it the "Wunala Dreaming" and offers a scale model in its duty-free catalogue.

Fixed race
21 Aug 1999
Australia is gearing up to host the 2000 Olympics, yet its own sporting history is far removed from the spirit of the Games. Some of its greatest sportspeople were denied the chance to make their mark. Why? Because of the colour of their skin. And even today, to be aborigine, is to be a second-class citizen.

When the Olympics comes to Sydney, it will provide a facade for a shameful Australia
11 Dec 1998
Sydney is one of the world's most desirable cities. I grew up here and I keep coming back to my former home at Bondi, with its cocktail of salt spray, milk shakes, dogshit and other summer fragrances; a Hindu returning to the Ganges will understand.