07.16.06

Movie: Rabbit-Proof Fence

Posted in Movies, Politics at 9:21 pm by Moody

Drama, Based on a True Story; 2002; Rated “PG” for emotional thematic material; 1h 33m. Recommended.

A beautifully filmed movie of a poignant, difficult, true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence follows three so-called “half-caste” Aboriginal girls — Molly Craig, age 14, Daisy Kadibill, age 10, and Gracie Fields, age eight — as they flee their captors, making their way across 1,500 miles of the Australian Outback to return home and to their family. The movie occasionally cuts to scenes inside the government office where, as the three attempted to make their way home, the “Chief Protector of Aborigines”, the white man behind the policy, A.O. Neville, continued to sell his racist policy of eugenics and attempted to locate and recapture the girls.

Based on the book by Doris Pilkington (who also goes by the name Nugi Garimara), daughter of Molly Craig, the movie mainly takes place in the early 1930s when the government of Western Australia was following what could reasonably be called a genocidal policy designed to “assimilate” the “half-caste” Aboriginies into “white culture”. “Full blood” Aborigines were generally not considered to be the issue. A.O. Neville believed that the “full blood” Aborigines were “dying out”. Neville believed that if a “half-caste” were to breed with a full-blooded “white”, then the “half-caste’s” offspring would be more “white” than “black”. After enough breeding, the descendants of the original “half-caste” would be purely “white” — in other words, they would have been successfully assimilated, their “blackness” would have been bred out of them and destroyed.

Assimilation aimed to absorb mixed-descent Aboriginal people into mainstream Australian society. The report of the 1937 conference stated, ‘the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.’ Policy-makers expected that mixed-descent Aborigines would assimilate. They thought that the ‘white blood’ in mixed-descent Aborigines enabled them to be educated in European ways. [More: Source]

Although this may not sound like the typcial definition of a genocidal policy — we are not talking about wholesale slaughter, after all — the end results of it are equivalent. The flagrantly racist rationale behind the policy instituted by the government certainly did not favor the long-term survival of the Aboriginies as a unique and historically self-determining group, and, successfully implemented, would very likely have spelled an end to them.

More information about the policy and its results may be found at the HREOC Website: “Bringing them home: The ‘Stolen Children’ report“. See also the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005 and the Apology for further information and links. I hope that you’ll join me in taking some time to read up on what happened in Australia. Like many people who live far from Australia, I imagine, I was not at all fully cognizant of what the indigenous populations of Australia and the Torres Strait suffered at the hands of those of European descent who “colonized” and “settled” their lands. I was dimly aware that there had been a great amount of conflict over the years, and that tensions remained to this day, occasionally acted upon to hurtful consequence. However, I was mostly ignorant of the history, and of that I am ashamed. The full story is so much deeper and so much more difficult. Rabbit-Proof Fence does an excellent job of pointing that out. It is important that such histories are learned, in hopes that they’ll not be repeated… anywhere, by anyone.

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