ELDERS RECEIVE APOLOGY
by Vanessa Gould
the West Australian Newspaper - 31 January 1996
HOLLYWOOD action star Steven Seagal has brokered an apology to eight
Aboriginal elders from Marlo Morgan, the American author who claimed
first-hand experience of a group of unknown Aborigines she called the
wild ones.
The New Age author of a best-selling book, Mutant Message From Down Under,
claimed she was initiated by the tribe during a four-month walkabout in
the central desert.
In an emotional hour-long telephone call to Morgan in New York from
Seagal's Hollywood studio on Monday, Morgan admitted for the first time to
the eight elders that her work was fiction and a fabrication.
"She sounded really upset, she was really sorry," WA Nyungah delegate
Mingli Wanjurri-Nungala said from Los Angeles.
"Most of us said what we felt and also said we didn't want to attack her
personally. We just wanted to get rid of this story and all the cultural
desecration it has caused".
The group did not want her money or any compensation, just to stop the
story.
Morgan made $1.8 million from the first book's publishing rights, is
likely to make $3 million from a second volume, and stood to make up to
$90 million from lecturing and film rights. The book has been published in
11 languages.
She had written a disclaimer in the second 1994 edition of her book,
published by Harper Collins, which said the book was fiction, but based on
her experiences in Australia. However she maintained this was only to
protect the identity of the tribe.
Dr John Stanton, curator of the Bendt Museum of Anthropology at the
University of Western Australia, said the book contained misleading and
damaging information about Aboriginal people which had pandered to the
gullibility of Americans desperate for New Age ideas.
It included facile ideas such a dolphins, koalas and platypus being sacred
to Aborigines in the middle of the desert and culturally denigrating
statements which confused intimate and secret details of men's and women's
lore.
He was not sure whether the damage the book had done to the overseas image
of Aboriginal culture, which was complex, diverse and vibrant, could be
ever undone.
Seagal's lawyers were to prepare a written apology from Morgan. The group
would hold a press conference in the Los Angeles Press Club today to
reveal its contents.
Robert Eggington, of Perth's Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation who has
gathered evidence for the trip for 15 months, said from Los Angeles that
Morgan's apology would send a message to other New Age authors that
Aboriginal people would not remain silent while their culture was
exploited.
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mktrecon@iinet.net.au
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