This
Australian Screen Classic is about the movie
Rabbit-Proof Fence based on
the book
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara.
The
2002 film, written by Christine Olsen and directed by Phillip Noyce, tells the
story of Doris Pilkington’s mother, the then fourteen-year-old Molly Craig, her
sister Daisy, aged eight, and cousin Gracie, aged eleven, who were all forcibly
removed from their families at Jigalong in the Pilbara region of Western
Australia in 1931. Taken to the Moore River Native Settlement, a mission on the
western Australian coast some 2000 kilometres from home, they were to be
trained as domestic servants. Desperately home sick, Molly, Daisy and Gracie
escaped, and following the rabbit-proof fence, they walked thousands of
kilometres across desert back home, all the while being stalked by the
authorities.
In
this honest and frank account Eualeyai and Kamillaroi woman, academic and
award-winning author
Larissa Behrendt finds much about this story that
resonates: the need and desire to find one’s home, one’s sense of place, one’s
sense of self. This is undoubtedly a universal quest but for Aboriginal people
taken from their families, as these children were, that search for home, that
need to feel complete, is all the more powerful.