AustLit

'Written by Christine Olsen and directed by Phillip Noyce, Rabbit-Proof Fence 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.' (Publication summary)

John Grant, a young Englishman, teaches in Tiboonda, a tiny railway junction on the far western plains of New South Wales. He sets off to spend his summer vacation in Sydney but doesn't make it beyond Bundanyabba, a nearby mining town known as 'the Yabba'. Stranded in town after losing all his money in a two-up game, he finds himself engulfed by the Yabba's claustrophobic, nightmarish, beer-fuelled stupor, an atmosphere compounded of repressed sexuality, squalid violence, and the sinister mateship of the locals. After being sexually assaulted by the town's alcoholic doctor, he attempts to hitchhike out of the town but is brought back by a truckie. In anger, he tries to shoot the doctor but ends up only shooting himself. After discharging himself from the hospital, Grant takes the train back to Tiboonda, resigned to another year of teaching.

'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth...

The three girls - aged 8, 11 and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by native police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.

The journey to freedom - longer than many of the legendary walks of [the Australian nation's] explorer heroes... told from family recollections, letters between the authorities and the Aboriginal Protector, and ... newspaper reports of the runaway children.' Source: Publisher's blurb