Rabbit Proof Fence
Rabbit-Proof Fence – analysis
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a drama film, made in 2002 by the Australian director Philip Noyce, and is based on the book “Follow the Rabbit- Proof Fence” written by Molly Craig's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara.
The film follows a rather untraditional composition. Very short into the film there is full action, with the separation of mothers and children. Then we get to the introduction about the unfamiliar new world for the captured girls, the escape, and then the tough journey home. At last the final reunion.
The film is really about aboriginals, “the lost generation”, and how they were treated by the government. It is also about justice
The story took place in Western-Australia and the year was 1931, approximately 150 years after James Cook and the white people first came to Australia. The Aboriginals had at that time lived there peacefully for several thousand years.
161 years later half- and quarter-cast aborigine children, the product of the white man’s control over the native populous, were taken away from their mothers by the state and shipped to resettlement centres. Once there, the fairer skinned children would be put up for adoption by white parents and the darker ones would remain ward of the state, and transferred to basic, indentured work when old enough. It was not until 1970, this conduct stopped.
The setting is important to the story because it couldn’t have happened before or after.
Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of three, young half-caste (the mother is Aboriginal and the father is white) girls, Molly, her little sister Daisy and cousin Gracie, who are stolen from their families, in Jigalong, to be brought up in an official government camp called Moore River. The set up is a part of an official government policy, in an attempt to change them to fit into white society - as household servants and farm labourers. But under Molly's lead, the girls manage to escape from Moore River, and begin the 1500...
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