Backbencher

After watching “Rabbit Proof Fence”, I took some time to mull it over in my brain. The story is about three girls that are taken from their home in Western Australia in 1931. At this time, the government had a policy to “better” the aborigines and half bloods. The three girls were taken to a camp where they learned to be house servants and to eventually have the “black bred out of them”. However, Molly will not have that happen to her sister and cousin, so the three of them escape and decide to walk the rabbit proof fence over 1200 miles to their home. Along the way an Aborigine tracker follows them, and the government is determined to find them and return them to the camp. The film shows the will of the three girls to survive and the difficult task of walking that far without and food or water. Along the way, the cousin is fooled into believing that her mom is at the next town waiting for her, and she is captured and never heard of again. However, the two sisters make it home to their mom. At the end, the subtitles explain that they were captured for a second time, and again they walked back.

Overall, I thought this was a powerful movie because it was based on a true story. It was upsetting at how the Australian government had a system to rid the continent of Aborigines by kidnapping them and integrating them into white society. At one point in the movie while the girls were at the camp, they looked at the color of their skin, and if it were light enough they would go to a different school because it was believed they had a higher capacity to learn. This really upset me. Also that this policy went on until the 1970’s. I can see how those generations of Aborigines are upset and “lost” as they do not know their roots. I also liked how the film was able to capture the landscape of Australia, and they even were able to integrate a map into the film as they were tracking the girls, so it gave the viewer a sense of where it was taking place. I would recommend this film to anyone because of its power to make one think of the cruelty and mistreatment that happens between races.