School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Start date: 1990 × Subject: history × Subject: stolen generations ×

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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.