Secret Country

Expatriate journalist and film-maker John Pilger writes about his homeland with life-long affection and a passionately critical eye. In this fully updated edition of A Secret Country, he pays tribute to a little known Australia and tells a story of high political drama.

Reminiscent of a sabre-toothed, unexpurgated Dickens, A moving account of the abuse of human rights in Australia, all the more valuable because it is written by an Australian writer, Pilger is a first-rate dissident journalist... Presents a harsh narrative of class, race and power; of the oppression and resistance, the betrayal and amnesia, that lie behind the sunny illustions of the Australian self-image, This is a patriotic book in the best sense, written in the belief that Australia deserves not old bromides and stereotypes, but the respect of critical appraisal... A necessary book for those of us who believe in the redeeming power of truth, Pilger's Australia is so different from the image conveyed abroad by films and TV soap operas, so different indeed from the way many Australians see themselves, as to be another country...but none of it alters one starkly apparent fact - he still loves the place.

John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Associated Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he has won France's Reporter Sans Frontières, an American television Academy Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 2003, he received the Sophie Prize for 'thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights'.