Anyone see this last night? Brilliant documentary, interest in Aussie Rules not required.
Some really shocking stuff. And that bloody social media again…
Catch up:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lpv7/the-australian-dream

i watched it. i thought it was a great film.

definitely worth a watch for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

A link to a 70s TV programme.. how odd.

See also: Miriam Margolyes – Almost Australian on iPlayer.

I can’t be doing with celebrity travelogues, but she is an interesting and sympathetic guide showing some great insights into aspects of Australian life.

Halfway through watching it with the family now. Interesting, sad and unsurprising. I’ve an interest in Aboriginal culture so have seen and read a lot.

I was in Australia on a teacher fact finding visit in 2007 and was shocked at the racism and sexism I came across. The Victoria education system refuse to discuss education and Aboriginal issues and when coming home our top level host education officer apologised for not being able to see us off and said ‘xxxx will see you off at the airport, she’s Asian, but she’s ok’.

I did enjoy my visit though and met many good people doing good work.

I taught in Victoria, including koorie students, and they had a number of opportunities for (paid for) cultural visits and camps etc. Obviously a lot more could be done but it wasn’t an absent concern. I remember Mandaway Yunupingu was refused service in a Melbourne pub.

was shocked at the racism and sexism I came across – yeah I was like that with Canada

Saw another documentary on Adam Goodes a while beck so sadly not surprised. To think that Australia classed Aboriginal peoples under ‘fauna and flora’, not as human beings right up to the 1970’s.

The land of Murdoch ‘innit.

Just finished watching this after seeing the thread earlier.
Shocking, thought provoking and fascinating

The spear throw was a hell of a reaction to the crowd and good on his teammate who repeated it.

I’ve just started a thread about Dawn Butler but I can see some relevance to what we saw in this programme. I had the misfortune to see a talk radio youtube clip today where they were putting the boot in hard.

It reminded me completely of the bile spewing, snarling faces I saw on those red meat sports journalists and chat show hosts who were disparaging Adam Goodes in the documentary last night. In fact it was making that visceral link that encouraged me to start the Dawn Butler thread.

We are much more like Australia than we care to recognise.

The spear throw was a hell of a reaction to the crowd and good on his teammate who repeated it.

I was shouting “YEAH! GO ON!” at the telly when Adam Goodes did it. Utterly brilliant.
Then (again!) all the weight put on social media morons’ comments. It’s just baffling.

In my house share of the 90s even the most right on save the whale/ forest/air/ tree huggers treated the rightful owners of Australia with nothing but contempt.

An incident in Alice Springs summed it up for me.

A white lady with a pickup opened the door so her dog could sit in the cab while the aboriginal man clambered into the back.

As much as I love Australia I never moved there full-time  as it could never be MY country , I’d always be an unwanted guest.

I thought it was an excellent documentary. Hard to watch really with so many echoes of what it must be like being black (or even just foreign really) in this country. Although the root is slightly different, the attitudes and treatment are not.

Just watching it and wholeheartedly agree with the above comment. Very difficult to watch and the whole treatment of the Aboriginal Australian people is pretty sickening.

To give a programme sparkle you seek out extremes. You get as much variety of opinions in Oz as anywhere else. Most Victorians I know/knew were pretty measured in their opinions but brutally frank and funny with expressing them. I’ve seen crowds go wild listening to aboriginal bands in Byron Bay and Djapanai (sp?) was almost the national anthem for a while, Yunupingu was a head teacher. Now, if we can get all that anti-racist anger (and a bit of prejudice) to focus on those foul-mouthed half-wit Australians, it might distract people from our own nasty, brutish and short specimen in Downing Street. Murdoch wizardry at its best.

Another bit of sparkle:

Thanks for suggestion DezB managed to catch up with this on iplayer, and it was a  really interesting (and often uncomfortable) watch