School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    This is a true story: Rabbit-proof fence, 'Mr. Devil' and the Desire to forget
    Birch, A. ( 2002)
    In February this year I attended a premiere of Rabbit-Proof Fence, a film directed by Phillip Noyce. The story deals with a journey, made in 1931, by three Aboriginal girls, sisters Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy Craig (Tianna Sansbury), and a cousin, Gracie Fields (Laura Monaghan). The girls escaped from the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement in the south of Western Australia and walked home, to their own community at Jigalong, some 1600 kilometres to the north, by following of the state’s three rabbit-proof fences. In telling the story of the children’s journey, Rabbit-Proof Fence addresses the history of the stolen generations, the historical experience of the removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, a history often subject to ridicule by those in white Australia unable to accept and own their story of oppression. The film also gives some attention to A.O. Neville (or ‘Mr Devil’ as he is referred to by one of the female inmates at Moore River), the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 until 1940, a man obsessed with issues of miscegenation and the (literal) purity of skin.
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    'The first white man born': contesting the 'stolen generations' narrative in Australia
    Birch, Tony (Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004)
    The Australian political landscape from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was periodically dominated by issues relating to contested versions of its colonial past in conjunction with a discussion on the legal and human rights of indigenous communities within the nation-state. Key moments within this discourse included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (established in 1987), the Bicentennial “celebrations” of 1988, the High Court’s Mabo land rights decision of 1992 (and subsequent Native Title amendments), and the reception of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which was the published outcome of a HREOC inquiry into the history of removing indigenous children from their families and communities during the twentieth century.
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    Returning to country
    Birch, Tony (Scribe Publications, 2001)
    As this history began - with journeys - so it will end. In February 2001 Tony Birch, writer, historian and former senior curator with Museum Victoria, rode into Melbourne from the north west. His tram wound along a route once familiar to Wurundjeri people travelling to Mt William - traversing the plain just to the east of the Moonee Ponds Creek and Coonan’s Hill, before veering away towards the central city. Along the way, in Royal Park, still stand a few eucalypts old enough to bear witness to all these comings and goings.
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    The last refuge of the 'un-Australian'
    Birch, A. ( 2001)
    In 1860, with the establishment of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (BPA), the Victorian colonial government formalised, through the legislative process, the alienation of Aboriginal people from our country. To ensure that we would become non-citizens in our own land the government incorporated the independently established Christian missions with existing and proposed government stations into a system of centrally administered Aboriginal reserves.