Rabbit-Proof Fence

Released 2002
Stars Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil, Ningali Lawford, Kenneth Branagh
Directed by Phillip Noyce

This is a beautifully small movie set in the immense Australian outback. It tells the fact-based story of three half-caste (half white, half aborigine) girls who are taken from their aboriginal mother and transported 1,500 miles to a state-sponsored, Catholic-run, detention camp, where they will be trained to work as servants for white families. The girls are Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Gracie (Laura Monaghan), and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), who are 14, 10, and 8, respectively.

Mr. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) is the Chief Protector of the Aborigine Populace, and it's his duty to care for these children. There's a prologue that describes the now defunct Australian policy that allowed half-caste children to be forcibly removed from their families and placed into these camps where Mr. Neville believed they would have the black bred out of them (it only takes three generations). The film is brilliant in how it shows the white people to be well-intentioned but horribly misguided. Europeans have always looked at aborigines on any continent with disdain and felt they needed to be civilized, and this didn't change until the last few decades. It's never fair to judge people in the past with today's morality, but it's certainly fair to be horrified by their actions. In this case, their actions were deplorable, but I don't think they're that difficult to understand. Social workers in charge of children must do what they believe is best for them, and I can understand why the white Australians felt these children were better off in their care than living as nomads in the desert killing lizards to live. The difficult part to understand is why the Australian government felt they needed to take this action for only the half-caste children. If their intentions were pure, they would have created policies to help the aborigines transition from their barbaric lifestyle to a civilized one. Of course, that would be misguided as well, but at least it would be well-intentioned. Instead, these policies ignored aborigines and focused on half-breeds, because they were partially white so I guess they felt an obligation to them.

Director Phillip Noyce does a wonderful job of creating a story that feels like it documents these children's ordeal as well as the time in which it took place. He knows there are two emotional scenes in his story, the one where the children are taken from their family and the reunion, and he doesn't exploit them. He has a low-key approach, and I especially liked his choice to have the grandmother in the background of the first scene hitting herself in the head with a rock. It showed the women's powerlessness and the terrible pain of the situation without literally beating the audience over the head.

Summary by Bill Alward, May 18, 2003