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| home | news lOnly understanding will bring down the fence dividing a nationOnly understanding will bring down the fence dividing a nation 21 March 2002 - Organisations that support members of the stolen generations are crying out for proper funding, writes Doris Pilkington Garimara. After a Perth showing of Rabbit-Proof Fence some Australian students of Asian background came to talk to me.
Today a fence still divides this country, but it is not one to keep the rabbits out of farmland. It has been built in an effort to divert the nation away from issues of human rights. But the issue of the stolen generations is not going to go away when many people are still hurting from the policies that produced them. We all share the history. We must come up with solutions together. For a long time, though, I was angry, particularly at the missionaries who brought me up to believe Aboriginal people were dirty and evil. For many years that alienated me from my people, including my father, an Aboriginal man from the Western Desert. Then I took the journey back to my land at Jigalong in Western Australia, where I was taken from my family at the age of four, to the Moore River Settlement, 1600 kilometres south. I took my children to walk on my hot, dusty land. It was then that I was reunited with my mother and learnt her story. When she was young my mother, Molly, her younger sister and cousin escaped from Moore River Settlement and walked to Jigalong. There was no happy ending. A few years later my mother was taken back to the settlement with myself and my younger sister, then a baby. My mother escaped again, this time leaving me behind but taking my sister with her. My reunion with my mother, my ability to return to my country, was pivotal to my healing - as it is for others separated from their families. One of the 54 recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report called for assistance for stolen generations members to return to their country. But this and other recommendations that relate to family reunions have not even started to be implemented as money earmarked for the stolen generations has gone mainly to general programs. Organisations such as Link Up, which has already, on meagre funding, done so much to support the stolen generations, need to be resourced properly to help people return to their land. I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm learning my language, Mardudjara, at the language centre at Port Hedland. I hope that before long I will be able to speak fluently with the old people. I plan to write in Mardudjara too. But it is different for my younger sister. When she was two years old, she was taken by the authorities. Brought up to believe she was an orphan, she has never seen my mother since. My mum, now old, hangs on every day, hoping to meet her. I met my sister many years ago when, like me, she started as a nursing aide at Royal Perth Hospital. But she has chosen not to acknowledge her Aboriginal roots, and so she has nothing to do with me or our mother. Recognition and understanding can help with our healing. That is why this May 26, like every year since the first Sorry Day in 1998, we will look to an apology from the Federal Parliament. Doris Pilkington Garimara, the author of Beyond the Rabbit Proof Fence , was named yesterday co-patron, with Malcolm Fraser, of the Journey of Healing.
ABOUT DORIS PILKINGTON GARIMARA
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  Other books by Doris Pilkington Garimara: Under the Wintamarra Tree; Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter. |
It wasn't until I did research for Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence that I read how government policies were implemented, how children were removed under ministerial warrants and their mothers had no say in the matter. While my sister and I didn't come under ministerial warrants, the government did it in a rather cunning sort of way. My mother had been suffering with appendicitis for many months and in those days Aboriginal people weren't admitted into public hospitals. They were taken to hospital if there was a medical problem and [only] if there was a "Native Ward" attached to that hospital. Otherwise they were sent to Royal Perth Hospital and that's what they did with my mother. On the way they said that after the operation she'd be able to take us back with her, but the government had already arranged to keep us, particularly my sister who was lighter-skinned than I. They didn't consider feelings at all, they just wanted to take the children away. They had decided as soon as my sister was born, they would focus on her. So they monitored mother's movements all throughout. [My sister] ran away a second time about 10 years later. The first time she escaped was in 1931, then again in 1941. Part of that story is told in Under the Windamarra Tree, and I hope [it] will open the eyes of every Australian who reads this because it is not only part of my history and my family's history, but is a part of theirs as well.
KM: How often do you get to go back home and see all your family?
DP: I go up quite often. Sometimes it's to attend a funeral. But then I have the opportunity of staying with my mother. She's still alive and well in the community. It's good because I can go back and speak the language. You love for the old people to understand. We can communicate in as English as well. When I went up there in the 1960's, I didn't bother to learn the language because my Christian upbringing made it so difficult. We were taught that our culture was evil, that our people and practices were devil worshipers and evil doers. I was very frightened because the Christian learning, brainwashing, was still there and I had to undo that before I can even learn anything about my own culture, language, cultural history, where my people came from, and who they were. I'm more fortunate than most now that I have an identity, an Aboriginal name. My traditional name, my true name is Nugi and my kinship name is Garimara. That was sort of shelved when I was institutionalised, but my mother called me that as soon as I went home.
I'm hoping that through my writings others who have been taken away from their traditional areas, would be encouraged to go back and reconnect with their land, reclaim their language, culture and identity. It took me over 10 years to really sit down and say "I belong to this land, the land belongs to me". I had to go through a lot of relearning. Metaphorically going through the Cross and undoing all the conditioning that taught me that my culture and my father, a traditional man from the Western Desert, was evil. You can imagine what effect that had on me when I first met him. I wasn't sure what to think when I was in the mission [and] received photographs of my parents. I used to tell all the girls that [he] was my stepfather. I wanted to have a white father like the rest of them and didn't want them to discriminate. The light-skinned people discriminated against the dark-skinned people. Even the government labeled us, categorised us - the "quarter-caste", "half-caste" and the "full-bloods". If they were traditional people, they were ashamed to own them. That caused a lot of problems in the community. Even now my sister and I have the problem. She was brought up in another institution, one for the near-whites. I was trying on behalf of my mother to reunite them, but my sister believes that she is an orphan and just disclaims us. That's the sad thing about conditioning when you're taken.
A lot of people are put into institutions and told that they were orphans. You can imagine the trauma and shock when they went back into their communities and found their mother still alive and well, which happened to a lot of the girls in the Mission. They went back and discovered that their mother was there, they had brothers, cousins, sisters and a whole branch of relations. We're trying to help the other girls to come to terms with their separation and start on the journey of healing.
KM: How were you dealing with your separation from your family when you went down to the mission?
DP: I was fortunate because my mother was at the settlement and I had lots of relations who came down from the Pilbara. When the Moore River Settlement opened the first inmates were from the Pilbara and they always told me "don't forget where you came from. Your mother is Molly Craig. She comes from Balfour Downs Station", near Meekatharra in those days. I remembered that, and I was reunited with my parents in December 1962. That was a really traumatic experience, going from Perth into on a reserve in Meekatharra. Not only an emotional shock but it was a cultural shock as well, because no-one prepared me for the conditions that people lived under. It was shocking, I hadn't seen so many dogs in my life. It was just tin humpies and people just slept anywhere. It took me quite a few weeks to adjust.
KM: How old were you at the time?
DP: I was 25. I'd been away, (I was taken away when I was three and a half). All those years we were assimilated. We were in a Christian mission and told that you're the same as everybody else in the eyes of God. But the reality was you weren't. The first time that I came [across] racism was when I came to work in Royal Perth Hospital. Not the staff, but the patients. I was being referred to as the 'boong nurse' or the 'nigger nurse'. I couldn't believe that people were so cruel, but that was an accepted attitude of those days. It was a real emotional shock, I went through hell trying to adjust to remarks like that. I'd never been called that in my life. We lived at Moore River Settlement with other Aboriginal people down at Rowlands. To be called that as a young sensitive 18 year old, I didn't know how to handle that, so I took refuge in religion, church and christianity which strengthened me in lots of ways.
It wasn't till other girls followed me into the Royal Perth Hospital for nursing aid training that we were able to support each other. Remarks like that still hurt.
Clip from 'The Space', ABC Arts
December 7 2002 - Doris Pilkington Garimara wrote of her mother's trek along the rabbit-proof fence. Now comes the sequel - her own journey, writes Tony Stephens.
It's a long way from Jigalong, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, to Los Angeles, or from Jigalong to London, to Rome, Tokyo, Madrid and New York. It's a long way but it's all part of Doris Pilkington Garimara's journey of learning and teaching. And Doris's family are very good at long journeys.
The Herald caught up with her in Los Angeles, just before she left for Anchorage, Alaska, where a granddaughter lives with her family. Pilkington Garimara is back home in Perth now and will return after Christmas to her other home in Jigalong.
Which did she prefer, LA or Jigalong? "Well, Los Angeles isn't too bad, but I still want to go home. It's all go, go, go, here and in New York and the other places."
She remembers her father at times like this, back home: "My dad taught me patience. He said, 'You never be in a hurry, girl. Just sit and wait. You have a cup of tea; you sit there and enjoy it. You enjoy the conversation that's going round."'
Pilkington Garimara, who had never been out of Australia until a few months ago, has been touring the world with film director Phillip Noyce to promote Rabbit-Proof Fence, based on her book, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence."It is the final step in my journey of healing," she said.
She wrote the book as an adventure story about three young Aboriginal girls, including her mother, who triumphed over the odds and government officials by escaping their captors, evading their pursuers and making their long journey home. However, many readers and audiences have seen the book and film as testaments to the stolen generations.
"It has a universal language, about the importance of family and family values," the author said. "The rabbit-proof fence could be a symbolical umbilical cord."
Pilkington Garimara went from Scotland, where the movie won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival, to Oslo, where she and the film received a standing ovation and locals told her that Norwegians had treated Laplanders in much the same way as Aboriginal Australians had been treated. In South Africa, she saw the cemetery at Soweto, with adults on one side and an almost equal number of children on the other. "It will haunt me for the rest of my life," she said.
In Tokyo, Pilkington Garimara discovered that her book, which has sold about 60,000 copies, is to be published in Japanese. She went to Rome and Madrid, where Italian and Spanish translations are being considered.
She went to Dublin and to London, where the screening was attended by human rights activist Bianca Jagger, writer Salman Rushdie, singer Kylie Minogue and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC, who said the policy of removing half-caste Aboriginal children from their families was one "that we can now see is genocide". Pilkington Garimara spoke about being scared of her Aboriginal father when she finally met him, after years of being conditioned by her white guardians to believe such people were evil "devil worshippers".
Pilkington Garimara tells her own story in a new book, Under the Wintamarra Tree, a sequel to Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.
The first book told how Molly Kelly, probably 14 at the time, and her younger sister-cousins, Daisy Burungu and Gracie Fields, were taken in 1931 from Jigalong, in the East Pilbara, to Moore River, 130 kilometres north of Perth, in accord with the belief that part-Aboriginal children were more intelligent than their darker relatives and should be isolated and trained as domestic servants and labourers. A.O. Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, told a conference in Canberra in 1937: "We have power under the act to take any child from its mother at any stage of its life ... Are we going to have a population of 1million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?"
The girls didn't like the Moore River settlement. Molly decided they would walk home. Since Jigalong was on the rabbit-proof fence that ran the length of Western Australia, Molly reckoned that, if they headed east to the fence and then north, they couldn't miss. The walk of about 1600km took nine weeks. It is one of the most remarkable feats of endurance, cleverness and courage in Australian history, dramatising a dark side of the Australian story.
Molly and Doris's forebears, the Mardudjara people, had left their desert homelands in the face of white settlement to make Jigalong their permanent "sitting-down place". Molly married Toby Kelly, an Aboriginal stockman, a few years after her walk from Moore River and Doris was born under a wintamarra (mulga) tree on Balfour Downs station, where the couple worked. When the premature baby arrived, Molly cut the umbilical cord with a butcher's knife, tied the knot and put her in a shoe box. Molly called her baby Nugi.
"Nugi, that's a stupid name," said Mary Dunnet, whose family ran the station. "Give her a proper name; call her Doris."
Doris defied a doctor's prediction and lived to tell the tale. As her birth was unregistered, the Department of Native Affairs later issued her with the birthdate of July 1, 1937, in line with government policy and much as all racehorses are registered with August 1 as a birthdate. It was the year that A.O. Neville made his historic statement.
Molly Craig had another daughter, Anna. Molly was taken back to Moore River, this time with two daughters. Doris was never to see many of her relatives again, including her beloved grandmother, Bambaru Banaka, who was blind but hunted kangaroos with young Doris, using her granddaughter's eyes.
Molly Craig absconded again in 1941, carrying 18-month-old Anna about 1100km to Meekatharra, where they picked up a lift the rest of the way to Jigalong.
It must have been a Sophie's choice for Molly. Pilkington Garimara says that her mother left her at Moore River because she couldn't carry two girls. She knew that Doris would be cared for by Gracie, who was also back at Moore River.
Doris survived the settlement, where she was beaten for speaking her native tongue. Long walks to the cemetery for children's funerals became "a regular event", although she enjoyed Christmas Day - there were no presents but "Jesus's birthday was a wonderful day". She was taken at the age of 12 to Roelands Native Mission, where she was told Aboriginal culture was evil. When Doris discovered her father was a Mardu, full-blooded Aborigine, she was ashamed. The girls marched to the dining hall singing:
"Steadily forward march to Jesus we will bring
Sinners of every kind the Lord will take them in ..."
She became a nursing aide in 1955, the first of the mission girls to qualify for a career outside domestic labour. She married and had four children. Jigalong nearly slipped from her daily consciousness, but not quite. Pilkington Garimara says in Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation, a new National Library of Australia publication, that an aunt had told her before she left Moore River: "Don't forget who you are. Your mother's name is Molly Craig and you come from Balfour Downs."
Doris finally found her parents again at Christmas 1962, when the father she had never really known hugged his daughter and her four children and taught the quality of patience.
"I used to admire and envy the women of the Western Desert," Pilkington Garimara says in Many Voices. "I used to think, how can I get that peaceful, dignified look of a desert woman? You learn it and what you learn is acceptance, tolerance ... Of course, me and my pride who thought I knew everything, had to sit down and relearn, be re-educated by my mum, aunts and grannies.
"Mum took me over to this wintamarra tree and showed me where I was born ... This is my birthplace, playground. It's a symbol of love, my mother's love, grandmother's love, father's love and care, and all those lovely warm things about family that I missed out on all those many years ago."
Pilkington Garimara is relearning her Mardudjara language. She will resume lessons at Port Hedland and return to Jigalong in the new year to practise, with Molly, now 86, and the others.
Anna was taken away at two years and told she was an orphan. Anna's children, Helen and John, will visit Jigalong with their aunt. Anna has said she is not interested in the past. Molly, however, has not given up. "All I want is to hold my daughter, just once, just one time."
Under the Wintamarra Tree, by Doris Pilkington Garimara, is published by University of Queensland Press, $24.
1 September 2002 - A new film about three aborigine girls who walked 1,000 miles through the outback reveals the truth of Australia's Stolen Generations. Demetrios Matheou talks to the author and director of 'Rabbit-Proof Fence'.
The writer Doris Pilkington grew up believing that her mother had deliberately abandoned her at the age of four in a forbidding state-run institution far away from her family, her people and her birthplace in the Western Australian desert.
"I really resented her. The thought that my mother just gave me away haunted and tormented me."
At the Moore River Native Settlement north of Perth - a cheerless internment camp for cross-breed Aboriginal children - the windows were barred and any child who attempted escape was punished with solitary confinement. Here, Doris's native tongue - Mardujara - was beaten out of her.
"Every time I spoke in my own language," she says, her measured English betraying no hint of rancour as she sits opposite me in the bar of an Edinburgh hotel, "I was told: 'You don't talk blackfella language here.'
Now 65 - an imposing grey-haired figure, whose floral dress and silver jewellery suggest a certain bohemian grandeur - Doris clearly remembers the day 40 years ago when she was finally reunited with her mother, Molly Craig, and first learned the truth.
Far from being abandoned, she had been stolen, forcibly separated from her mother as part of an official government policy to "assimilate" half-castes and quarter-castes into white Australia and train them to enter "civilised" society as servants and labourers.
"When I confronted my mother about it, when I asked her why she had deserted me, my mum just broke down.
"She said, 'I didn't give you away, the government took you away. And it hurt me so much to have to leave you.' It was such a moving moment between us. That is when I decided to learn more about my own culture, and to research the policies and the politics that had affected our lives."
Doris's decision took her on a long journey of self-discovery, during which she learnt that she had no monopoly on childhood suffering: her mother had been through exactly the same misery at Moore River Native Settlement - with one key difference. Molly escaped.
In 1931, the 14-year-old Molly seized her little sister Daisy and her cousin Gracie by the hand and walked more than 1,000 miles home across baking desert to the outback station of Jigalong, taking as her guide the immense rabbit-proof fence that crossed the desert.
The girls' extraordinary trek - as written up by Doris in her acclaimed 1996 book, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence - has now been turned into a controversial, moving and highly praised film which tackles one of the ugliest aspects of recent Australian history.
Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by the Australian Phillip Noyce on a budget of just £4 million, is a visually stunning, simply told story. When it had its premiere in Sydney earlier this year, paper handkerchieves were left on every seat in the house - with good reason.
At the Edinburgh Film Festival last month it won the coveted Audience Award, largely because of the astonishing performances of the untrained Aborigine children who play the girls, led by the remarkable 11-year-old Everlyn Sampi as Molly Craig. Opposite these free spirits, Noyce cast a thin-lipped Kenneth Branagh as A O Neville, the real-life Chief Protector of Aborigines, who was responsible for the girls' removal from their families.
The English-born Neville was the prime mover behind the half-caste removals, believing that the offspring of Aboriginal women and white men belonged with their fathers' race.
The underlying purpose of the policy he enforced, which affected tens of thousands of mixed-race Australians between 1905 and 1971, was to encourage miscegenation between "near-white" females and white males, thus stealthily and systematically breeding out the darkness of Australia's indigenous people. The process, which has been described as attempted genocide, created what are now known as the Stolen Generations.
Noyce has come under attack in Australia from academics who accuse him of embellishing the facts set out in Doris's book in order to make the story more moving. They have an important ally in A.O. Neville's son, who has called the film a "gross distortion of the truth".
John Neville told the Sydney Sun Herald that his father, who is referred to as "Mr Devil" in the film, did not order children to be taken away from "happy" Aboriginal families but sought to help half-castes who faced hostility from both sides: the Aborigines and the whites.
"My father was told there were three little girls running wild in the bush and he ordered they be picked up for their own protection . . . He believed in assimilation. He had the greatest respect for full-blood Aborigines. He wanted to help them become civilised."
Neville's filial loyalty is understandable but untimely: both Doris Pilkington's research and the content of the film dovetail neatly into the findings of a far-reaching Royal Commission into the Stolen Generations which concluded in 1997 that the policies overseen by Neville were tantamount to genocide.
Noyce, a major-league Hollywood director, with the blockbusters Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger to his credit, vigorously defends the adaptation. "Look, when I was first sent the script, I didn't even know about the Stolen Generations. But when I went back to Australia to make the movie, the first thing we did was go into the Outback to try and cast the children.
"And in searching for these three kids, suddenly I'm plunged into a black world - meeting black families, black communities. So I've been introduced to the topic by first-hand association with people. And I could hardly find a family in non-white Australia who hadn't been affected by this."
Noyce and scriptwriter Christine Olsen were determined not to depict Neville as a standardised film villain. "Neville was a man who believed he was a saviour, doing the right thing," says Noyce. "And I hope that the film makes this clear. But he was also a man who enacted a scheme to destroy a race."
Doris insists the film has done a "great job" of telling her family's story, recalling with a smile the reception it received when screened at Jigalong, the community the runaways struggle to reach - and where Molly and Daisy, now in their eighties, still live.
"It was the first time that many of the Aborigines there had seen a film on a big screen. It was a very exciting moment, just magic. Even the men were crying and coming up to give me a hug."
The film, like Doris's book, climaxes with Molly's triumphant return home. But reality was messier and more complex. On her return Molly married an Aborigine and had two children: Doris and Annabelle.
She was then taken back to Moore River with her children. Molly again escaped - making the same extraordinary journey for a second time, this time with her baby in her arms; but she was unable to rescue Doris and had to leave her behind.
Doris was eventually transferred from Moore River to a Christian mission where she learnt to read and write and behave like a "civilised" child. "The missionaries brainwashed me to think that my people were devil worshippers, that their culture was evil," says Doris.
"People like me were made to feel ashamed of their relationship to their own people, to the indigenous people of Western Australia. I was the daughter of a part-Aboriginal woman and a black man. But I did not want the white girls in the mission to know that; so I used to tell them that my father was a white man too."
Doris evidently has mixed feelings about the mission: she admits that she "wouldn't be here today" without the education and discipline that she received there, which enabled her to pursue a career first as a nursing aide, then as a documentary film-maker and journalist and now as a writer. But although she managed to track down her mother at the age of 25 - and has reclaimed her indigenous identity under the name Nugi Garimara - the early enforced separation still casts a shadow over the family.
After Molly's second escape with her youngest child, Annabelle, the baby was taken from her. Because her skin was a great deal lighter then her sister's, she was sent to a "whiter" mission than Doris, and to this day Annabelle still refuses to accept her darker-skinned family. "She has a changed history which is much more important to her than her real history," says Doris. "I don't think she's going to see us for many, many years."
As for herself, Doris says: "I've reclaimed my history, my culture, my family. But my journey, my healing will only end when I am able to read and write in my own language. Otherwise my mother's language could die with her." Meanwhile, she has the satisfaction of being what Phillip Noyce calls "a lightning rod" to the thousands of the Stolen Generations yet to reconnect with their pasts.
"These are people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, who have seen the film all over Australia and who now, for the first time, are talking about their history and their experiences, experiences that have been suppressed for so many years. It's a very traumatic time for them. But many Aboriginal women have said to me. 'Now I'm going to search for my family. I want to go home'."
Source:The Daily Telegraph
27 October 2002 - In 1931, Aboriginal girls Molly, Daisy and Gracie ran away from their white captors and walked 1,000 miles to get back home. Now their story is a film which has stirred up the 'stolen children' issue in Australia. Kevin Maher talks to its director and Molly's daughter
3am. A phone rings in a Hollywood mansion. Action-movie director Phillip Noyce drowsily answers. The timid voice of Australian producer Christine Olsen warbles down the line. She has the perfect script for him. It's called Rabbit-Proof Fence and it's a beautiful, heart-wrenching story about the stolen generation (based on Doris Pilkington's book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence). Noyce, an Australian émigré and director of the hugely successful Harrison Ford films Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, is unimpressed. He tells her to call at a more civilised time, and hangs up. Then he lies back in bed and thinks to himself: 'The stolen generation? Hmm. Sounds like a rock'n'roll movie to me.'
'And that's indicative of two things,' says the repentant Noyce, now preparing for the international release of his beloved Rabbit-Proof Fence three years after that call. 'One, how out of touch I was, and, two, how out of touch Australians in general have been with their own history.'
When he eventually read the Rabbit-Proof script, Noyce loved it. He loved the simultaneous impression of narrative simplicity and political complexity in the story of three plucky indigenous Australian children forcibly transported far away from their families by a brutalising state in 1931, yet somehow, against all odds, heroically finding their way back home. So he put the finishing touches to his gloomy Angelina Jolie serial-killer flick, The Bone Collector, and dashed back to Australia to 'plunge myself into a world that I had not known before. The world of black Australia.'
What he found was a world already reeling from a devastating 689-page document called Bringing Them Home: The 'Stolen Children' Report, which had been published in 1997 by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. It told how between 1900 and 1970 many 'thousands' of Aboriginal children were removed from their families and communities and sent to live in state-run 'native settlements' where they were inhumanely treated and harshly educated in the ways of white Australia at the expense of their own language and culture. Most disturbing, the report testified that children were chosen on the basis of skin colour, with the lighter 'half-castes' targeted on the grounds that they alone could be 'saved' by intensive Europeanisation and eventual absorption into pure white society.
The issue of the stolen children was incendiary to political Australia, with some outraged critics attempting, as Noyce describes, 'to convince Australians that all of this had been a product of false recall on behalf of indigenous people who could not accept the reality of their parents giving them away'.
Others, faced with the prospect of a nation officially apologising to its indigenous community, launched irascible journalistic counter-attacks. The political commentator Des Moore said in the New Australian that Sir Ronald Wilson, president of the Human Rights Commission, should be the one apologising, not to Aboriginals but to all Australians for the falsehoods contained in his report. The Australian government under John Howard stood to lose up to $3.9 billion in compensation (and still does), and refused to countenance the idea of an apology, with Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron arguing on national television that the small numbers of children stolen didn't warrant the definition of a 'generation'. It was into this simmering cauldron that Rabbit-Proof Fence was thrown when it was released in Australian cinemas in February.
The film is deceptively simple. At its core is that fundamental theme (from The Odyssey to ET) of the homeward journey, this time enacted by three lost girls: Molly, 12, Gracie, nine, and Daisy, eight. The journey is the primal return, to the mother. And yet surrounding that aim is a wealth of subversive subtext. When Molly's mother and grandmother frighten away the local armed constable it becomes a feminist film in which female indigenous communities, bereft of men, operate on the outskirts of patriarchal society. When Molly is beaten for speaking in her native tongue, it is a film that illustrates the oppression of a received language and the inability of true expression in post-colonial society. And when Kenneth Branagh's tight-lipped AO Neville, chief protector of the Aborigines, discusses the need to 'breed out' the half-caste third race, it is a film that underscores the genocidal project at the heart of Australian nationhood.
Within days of its release, the stolen generation controversy erupted all over Rabbit-Proof Fence. 'It stirred up the usual naysayers,' says Noyce. 'They're the ones who, because of their own ignorance, are incapable of making an adjustment to a real history. They're the ones who want to think that settlement was made by the Aboriginals moving out of their lands and shaking hands. Not that they were killed or massacred or poisoned or hunted.'
These 'usual naysayers' had quibbles with the story. The Australian questioned its overall veracity, the Australian Humanities Review argued over which rabbit-proof fence the girls had actually walked along, while tabloid voices simply broke the story down into narrative sections and found lies in each case. The Aboriginal camps were squalid places, and half-castes would have been in danger from territorial 'full-blood' tribesmen. And the girls didn't travel to the reservation by train, they went by steamship and had a lovely time. And they got a free education, too.
And yet, more surprising, and more encouraging, is the degree to which Rabbit-Proof Fence has been embraced by the majority of Australians. The press reviews have been effusive, and the movie has been the most successful in Australia this year, playing at suburban multiplexes for an unprecedented six months. It has received 10 nominations for the Australian Film Institute Awards, at which it is expected to clean up on 7 December.
The Australian reaction has set up a positive populist momentum for the movie, one that's sure to continue on its international release in the UK and US next month. 'The popularity of the film shows that most people are coming to terms with this and want to come to terms with this issue,' says Noyce. 'It says that white Australians needed a vehicle to express this huge shift that everyone has made. And I think that Australians were just longing to do that, longing to celebrate their alternative history, longing to celebrate these women, longing to come out of ignorance. And, ultimately, longing to celebrate their blackness.'
Doris Pilkington, Molly's daughter, tells how she came to write her mother's tale.
'I first heard the incredible story of how my mother, Molly, and her sister Daisy and cousin Gracie, escaped from the white settlement in 1986. It was Aunt Daisy who told me her memories and as soon as she finished talking, I wrote it down and vowed to fill in the missing pieces later on.
'My mother had always been reluctant to share her experience, unwilling to embark on an emotional journey into the past she wanted to forget. I persisted and she briefly recounted the part of the trek when Aunt Gracie left her cousins to travel alone to the West Australian settlement of Wiluna to meet her mother.
'Before this I had known only about the time when my mother, my baby sister Annabelle and I were taken and transported to the same settlement in 1940, nine years later. Mum had never mentioned the incarceration and heroic escape that occurred in 1931. Their 1,000-mile journey was the first time anyone had successfully defied the government and returned home. I was inspired to write a book that would preserve my family's history for future generations.
'I never imagined my story would be turned into a film, but eight companies were interested in the rights. I chose Phillip Noyce because he was an excellent director and an Australian who understood the material. Unfortunately, I was ill during filming and couldn't work as the on-set consultant, so my son Albert took the job. Phillip was sensitive to cultural issues and recognised the importance of not breaching indigenous protocols, violating the customs of my people by depicting certain sacred rituals in the film.
'It was very painful watching the early rushes, especially seeing images of Gracie, who was recaptured and grew up with a white family, later refusing all contact with her actual relatives. I cried my eyes out when I first saw the film and even now I don't like attending premieres or festival screenings, preferring to wait outside until the credits start rolling, then arriving for the Q&A.
'The highlight for me was the open-air screening held at my family's hometown of Jigalong in front of an excited audience of several hundred people. As the sun set, we watched the film under a typically brilliant Pilbara sunset. My mother found it hard to relate to the film. Although she recognised the story, she couldn't relate to the girls who played Molly and her siblings. In fact, at that screening many people didn't understand the concept of a performance film and initially thought they were about to watch a documentary. After the nature of the film was explained, they found it moving and enjoyable.
'The film has highlighted the plight of the 'stolen generation' and in Australia it has become a tool of reconciliation; a lot of pain that was suppressed for decades resurfaced after its release.
'The film has also had a remarkable response around the world. In Norway, the audience was stunned into silence at the end before giving us a standing ovation: they compared it to the plight of Romany gypsies in their own country. Everywhere I have been to in Europe, America and South Africa, someone has told me a local story relating to the stolen generation.
'Back home, my mother and Daisy have become celebrities. So many people have seen the film, then decided to go to Jigalong and visit them that the area has become a tourist attraction. Everyone is proud of those two old ladies. Everyone knows about the rabbit-proof fence. And everyone knows that they walked a long, long way.'
Source: The Observer
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Nugi Garimara is Doris Pilkington’s Aboriginal name. She was born on Balfour Downs Station approximately sixty kilometers northwest of Jigalong Community in the East Pilbara.
