TRANSCRIPT
"Nothing in my career as a journalist prepared me for the horrors I found in Cambodia (Fades)"
For nearly six decades, John Pilger used his craft to hold the powerful to account.
From Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, to Vietnam and the Palestinian question, to the treatment of Australia's First Nations people, his preferred method was the documentary.
During his career, he produced more than 50 documentaries, and also worked for the British Daily Mirror newspaper for 23 years, and wrote a column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.
Born in Bondi, in 1939, he turned his forensic gaze inward, often, giving the world a searing portrait of what life was like for Australia's Indigenous population.
Here he is, speaking about his book 'The Secret Country' published in 1985
"An apartheid has run right through Australian society for as long as I've known, and I was born and grew up there and I've filmed there over many years. Perhaps the reason why, is that the Aboriginal people, unlike the black people of South Africa, are about three per cent of the population."
Highlighting the high rates of infant mortality, health issues and incarceration, his films and books dealt with the marginalised.
Journalist and author Quentin Dempster says Pilger was a great Australian human rights journalist, author and documentarian.
"He looked immediately at policy failure and he exposed the hypocrisies, the atrocities and the dispossession.”
A trenchant and vocal critic of Western foreign policy he courted controversy, especially in the Middle East.
He was also a strong supporter of Julian Assange.
Here he is, speaking at a rally supporting Assange
"It's the courage of those who speak the truth and speak up for the truth, who dissent, who stand up to the powerful. These are our collective heroes."
Among those who will mourn him, another whistleblower, former British Army major and Australian Army lawyer David McBride.
He faced the wrath of the Australian government after leaking to the media documents that contained information about war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
"People like me follow on in his footsteps and hopefully other people will on in my footsteps, it is a long struggle, but he has certainly inspired me and i think he has inspired a lot of others and I think they will continue his fight for him"
John Pilger's focus on exposing the abuses of power by governments and billion dollar businesses ultimately came down to one thing.
"Journalism is about people, its about about ordinary people. It’s about the struggle of people and the struggle of people against seemingly impossible odds."
John Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979 and numerous TV awards for his documentaries.
He was 84.
