Rabbit-Proof
Fence
Dir: Phillip Noyce 2002 Australia
1hour 34 minutes (PG)
Summary :
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who in 1931 escaped
from an official camp - and the government's integrationist policy - to make
the 1,500 mile trek home.
Roger Ebert, Chicago
Sun-Times: [Read
The Full Review Here]
The most astonishing words in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" come right at the
end, printed on the screen as a historical footnote. The policies depicted in
the movie were enforced by the Australian government, we are told, until 1970.
Aboriginal children of mixed race were taken by force from their mothers and
raised in training schools that would prepare them for lives as factory workers
or domestic servants. More than a century after slavery was abolished in the
Western world, a Western democracy was still practicing racism of the most cruel
description.
The children's fathers were long gone--white construction workers or government
employees who enjoyed sex with local aboriginal women and then moved on. But
why could the mixed-race children not stay where they were? The offered explanations
are equally vile. One is that a half-white child must be rescued from a black
society. Another was that too many "white genes" would by their presumed
superiority increase the power and ability of the aborigines to cause trouble
by insisting on their rights. A third is that, by requiring the lighter-skinned
children to marry each other, blackness could eventually be bred out of them.
Of course it went without saying that the "schools" they were held
in prepared them only for menial labor.
The children affected are known today in Australia as the Stolen Generations.
The current Australian government of Prime Minster John Howard actually still
refuses to apologize for these policies. Trent Lott by comparison is enlightened.
Phillip Noyce's film is fiction based on fact. The screenplay by Christine Olsen
is based on a book by Doris Pilkington, telling the story of the experiences
of her mother, Molly, her aunt Daisy and their cousin Gracie. Torn from their
families by government officials, they were transported some 1,500 miles to
a training school, where they huddled together in fear and grief, separated
from everyone and everything they had ever known. When they tried to use their
own language, they were told to stop "jabbering."
At the time of the adventures in the movie, Molly (Everlyn Sampi) is 14, Daisy
(Tianna Sansbury) is 8 and Gracie (Laura Monaghan) is 10. The school where they
are held is not a Dickensian workhouse; by the standards of the time, it is
not unkind (that it inflicts the unimaginable pain of separation from family
and home does not figure into the thinking of the white educators). The girls
cannot abide this strange and lonely place. They run away, are captured, are
placed in solitary confinement. They escape again and start walking toward their
homes. It will be a journey of 1,500 miles. They have within their heads an
instinctive map of the way and are aided by a fence that stretches for hundreds
of miles across the outback, to protect farmlands from a pestilence of rabbits.
The principal white character in the movie is A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh),
who in 1931 was the administrator of the relocation policies and something of
an amateur eugenicist, with theories of race and breeding that would have won
him a ready audience in Nazi Germany. That Australians could have accepted thinking
such as his, and indeed based government policy on it, indicates the sorry fact
that many of them thought aborigines were a step or two down the evolutionary
ladders from modern Europeans. That the aboriginal societies of Australian and
New Zealand were remarkably sophisticated was hard for the whites to admit--especially
because, the more one credited these native races, the more obvious it was that
the land had been stolen from their possession.
As the three girls flee across the vast landscape, they are pursued by white
authorities and an aboriginal tracker named Moodoo (David Gulpilil), who seems
not especially eager to find them. Along the way, they are helped by the kindness
of strangers, even a white woman named Mavis (Deborah Mailman). This journey,
which evokes some of the same mystery of the outback evoked in many other Australian
films (notably "Walkabout"), is beautiful, harrowing and sometimes
heartbreaking.
The three young stars are all aborigines, untrained actors, and Noyce is skilled
at the way he evokes their thoughts and feelings. Narration helps fill gaps
and supplies details that cannot be explained onscreen. The end of the journey
is not the same for all three girls, and there is more heartbreak ahead, which
would be wrong for me to reveal. But I must say this. The final scene of the
film contains an appearance and a revelation of astonishing emotional power;
not since the last shots of "Schindler's List" have I been so overcome
with the realization that real people, in recent historical times, had to undergo
such inhumanity.
Audience Award, Edinburgh
Festival 2002
Audience Award, Denver, Leeds, Aspen, Calgary, Durban
Nominated for 10 Australian Film Institute Awards