AustLit

'Philip Morrissey discusses the function of the child in Phillip Noyce's film The Rabbit Proof Fence and its return from exile by socio-political strategies of whiteness and ethnocidal processes of colonisation. He places this film in the context of other films featuring child characters such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Night of the Hunter and The Sound of Music and in the context of various writers' (such as Daisy Bates) depictions and summations of the removal of half-caste Indigenous children from their families. He characterises the figure of the child as simultaneously helpless and powerful and argues that the Indigenous child actors in The Rabbit Proof Fence have a theurgical function in "delivering half-caste children from the netherworld to which Australia once tried to exile them" ' (Introduction, Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey).