Rabbit-Proof Fence: A Short Film Report.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is an Australian-produced drama movie and semi-documentary, being based on a book and true story told by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Her book is called Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and by watching the movie we can easily see why it bears that name.

The story takes place in 1931, a time quite different from ours, when the indigenous Aborigines were suppressed by the relatively newly arrived white Europeans. The Aborigines were reduced to "lower-caste" citizens, and had several rights taken away even though this land originally was theirs.

Auber Octarius Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines at the time(although "protector of Aborigines" might sound odd), is one of the main characters and the main "evildoer" in this film. He introduced a new policy which gave the government judicial power to take "half-bred" Aboriginal children away from their parents and bring them into a white, and in their eyes, sophisticated environment. The idea was to raise them as Europeans, and eventually they would be assimilated and bred out. Mr. Neville is not purposely evil. All he does, he does with the best of intentions. It was more a general idea at the time, he was only a product of the environment he grew up in. For us, what he does is despicable and cruel, but he honestly thought he was doing them and the society a favor. Some people say he was a racist. But personally I think he was just doing what was expected, and he thought he was being terribly nice giving the "half-bred" children a chance to grow up in a white environment. In my eyes, it is not Mr. Neville who is the villain; it's rather the majority of Australia's population. Although, they had no idea they were being cruel.

The two sisters Molly, Daisy and their cousin Gracie, aged 14, 8 and 10 (in that order), are the other main characters of the film, Molly being the most prominent one. They live with their parents in the small native settlement of Jigalong. One day, what they are all fearing happens: they are taken away from their parents and families to Moore River Native Settlement, which is actually not a native settlement at all. It is a place where they learn how to be and act European.