Aussie baiting popular
p. 11 · Read in the full issue
in French press
As a result of frequent criticism in Forum member countries espe cially Australia about France’s doings in the Pacific, Aussie baiting has become a popular sport in Tahiti and New Caledonia.
The gist of these counter blasts which fill the columns of the local French language newspapers is invariably that all Australian critics are despicable hypocrites since, at the same time, they neglect their own Aborigines.
The real aim of the Australian anti nuclear and human rights campaigns, they insist, is to boot France out of the region to make room for Australian business houses and missions to take over the French islands.
The following commentary, written by one of the most widely read French journal ists in Tahiti, Christine Bourne, is a typical example: “Our Australian neighbours and sup posed friends, who in their newspapers regularly pillory us and act as dispensers of moral lessons they are, for instance, ardent defenders of oppressed peoples, especially the Melanesians of New Caledo nia (sic), but are, at the same time, blind to the misfortunes of their own degenerated and alcoholic aborigines locked up in reserves where the stone age still reigns, and who are always on the sly opposed to the French presence in the Pacific, which make them the preferred contacts of Polynesians who favour independence these Australians have belatedly begun to realise that they have been outdone.
Thus it happened recently, when (FLNKS leader) Tjibaou sent his militants to Gadda fi instead of sending them to school, the Australian government with great lucidity refused these sorcerer’s apprentices transit permission and turned them back.
The Australian news agency also informs us that in Papua New Guinea the highland ers, seized by destructive frenzy, steed, rape,
burn and butcher everybody within reach, forcing all Australians who live in this region to pack and go home.
But all these good and gentle Australians who give us moral lessons by telling sad tales about fishes floating with their bellies in the air, about withered flowers and about people reduced to a ghostlike state (here in French Polynesia), also practise with supreme address the barbarian sport of dwarf throwing although nothing is said about it in PIM.
The objects are real human beings who have never grown up because of the malfunctioning of their thyroid gland.
Although this is not yet an Olympic sport it is greatly appreciated in Australia where competitions are regularly organised ...
Fortunately the Australian Association of Small People has protested against this debasing exploitation of dwarfs which has consequently prompted the governments of New South Wales and Victoria to prohibit this exciting, typically Anglo-Saxon sport.
After which one must marvel over the political cleverness with which the Austra lians are pulling off the trick of masquerad ing as defenders of enslaved men.”
Ms Bourne offered no explanation as to why dwarf throwing might be of interest to PIM readers.
And her own readers would have been unaware of several facts including those that the Australian government did not interfere with the visit of a group of ni-Vanuatu and one kanak to Libya. (They returned a few days after they were mis takenly turned back and were permitted to complete their journey), that regular dwarf throwing competitions are not a feature of Australian life, that all PNG highlanders do not rape, steal and butcher, and, finally, they were not told of the further fact that the British promoter of dwarf throwing said in a previous interview that he got the idea after discovering this “typically Anglo- Saxon sport” in France.