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The stolen ones
So Australian government minister Eric Abetz should really have known
better this May, when he announced that he would use federal funds to
sponsor a leaflet attacking a £3.75m) independent production called
Rabbit-Proof Fence. Despite the involvement of veteran Hollywood director
Phillip Noyce and heavyweight US distributors Miramax, the film had been
scheduled for a fairly low-key release in Australia. It would play the
small houses and hope to make it to bigger screens in the state capitals;
the suburban multiplexes and drive-ins would likely be foreign territory.
But Abetz was not so much concerned about the film's domestic release
as its reception overseas. In particular, he took umbrage at the poster
Miramax had selected for use in the US. Against a forbidding, deserted
landscape, its tagline read: "What if the government kidnapped your
daughter? It happened every week in Australia from 1905 to 1971."
The line is a reference to the thousands of part-Aboriginal children
who were forcibly separated from their families and assimilated into white
society during the 20th century. Aboriginal activists have been pressing
the government for years to apologise, but Abetz turned the issue on its
head by demanding that the film-makers apologise to the government.
"They're asking me to apologise for the poster?" asked Noyce. "Maybe they
could apologise to our indigenous citizens."
It seemed a great deal of fuss to be made about a film which, according
to Noyce and scriptwriter Christine Olsen, was avowedly non-political in
intent. But Abetz was only the most powerful of the conservative
commentators who lined up to lay into the production. Piers Akerman, an
influential columnist with Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper, accused
Noyce of "playing fast and hard with the truth". Andrew Bolt, from
Melbourne's Herald Sun, went further, bemoaning the use of £1.8m of
"taxpayers' money" and attempting to discredit the film with a
point-by-point attack on its "untruths and exaggerations".
His source for the attack was Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the
factual novel by Aboriginal author Doris Pilkington. In 1931, Pilkington's
mother, Mollie Craig, was taken away from her family in the far north-west
of Australia and transported to a settlement north of Perth, to be
re-educated as a white Australian. Her escape with two cousins and their
1,500km journey back home, following the fence used to protect western
Australia from the plague of imported European rabbits, formed the basis
of Pilkington's book and the subsequent film. But Bolt seemed unconcerned
when the novelist came out vocally in support of Noyce and Olsen.
"That sort of thing really angered me," says Pilkington, who also goes
by her Aboriginal name of Nugi Garimara. "You find these people going
through my book and deliberately misquoting it to support their views. It
makes me really annoyed."
The attack didn't just come from the usual suspects, either. At a
literary festival earlier this month in rural Victoria, Pilkington was
confronted by a regional arts administrator from an immigrant family who
took her to task over the issue. "She was saying, why should she and her
family be asked to apologise for things that happened before they came to
Australia?" says Pilkington. "But I wasn't asking her to apologise. We
have a public holiday to recognise the soldiers who died in wartime before
I was born, so why can we not at least recognise what happened to these
children?"
The ferocity of the response shows that the stolen generations remain a
tense issue in Australia - more so even than episodes such as the frontier
massacres of Aborigines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also
shows that many in Australia are unused to being presented with the often
unpleasant facts of their colonial history - least of all when the same
facts are going to be shown abroad. Noyce is best known as a director of
slick mainstream thrillers, from Dead Calm and Patriot Games to Sliver and
The Bone Collector, and his name guaranteed a worldwide audience that
would be out of reach to other Australian directors.
Part of the anger, according to Olsen, comes down to the fact that,
unlike the frontier massacres, the stolen generations affected people
living today. "The reaction didn't surprise me at all," she says. "The
film was dangerous to people because it is demonstrably true. The two
oldest girls are still alive. The documentation about why they were taken
is still complete."
Another cause lies in the desire of conservatives to defend the people
who promoted the policy, many of whom also remain alive. The removal of
part-Aboriginal children was advocated on the social Darwinist grounds
that their full-blooded relatives were dying out. It was believed that the
assimilation of these children into white society would ease the
inevitable passing into extinction of the Aboriginal people.
Such deep-rooted racism managed to taint even the character of
benevolence, says Robert Manne, an expert on the stolen generations at La
Trobe University. "None of the people involved were openly hostile to
Aborigines," he says. "There were quite a lot of very decent people who
genuinely thought what they were doing was for the best. They didn't think
Aborigines were fully human, so they didn't think that they would suffer
as much."
Making films about historical events is always risky, and the fine line
between fact and fiction provided a rich source of ammunition for
detractors. The objectors took particular delight in the moments when
Olsen and Noyce departed from Pilkington's original story for the sake of
drama, such as the harrowing sequence where the teenage girls are forcibly
abducted from their families.
In the novel, Mollie's parents appear submissively resigned to their
fate, and only turn to beating themselves in despair after their children
have gone. But more violent abductions were frequent and well-documented,
and it is little surprise that the film-makers were attracted by the more
dramatic possibilities of kidnapping.
In any case, such licence cuts both ways. AO Neville, western
Australia's "protector of Aborigines", played by Kenneth Branagh, emerges
in the film as a misguidedly sympathetic character who believed he was
doing what was best for part-Aboriginal children. Many historians would
disagree, pointing out that, in reality, he was a passionate advocate of
the cultural extinction of Aborigines who seemed to welcome the prospect
of their disappearance. "Are we going to have... one million blacks in the
Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and
eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?" he asked a
1937 conference on Aboriginal issues.
In the context of such changes, Noyce's and Olsen's assertions about
the non-political nature of the film become more pertinent. Based on a
true story it may be, but it is drama rather than documentary, an accurate
summing-up of collective experience rather than a meticulous detailing of
one personal history.
Noyce predicts that the secret history of Aboriginal dispossession will
now become fertile ground for future Australian film-makers: "If drama
comes from conflict, there's no greater conflict in Australian history
than the conflict between indigenous Australians and white settlers."
That resource is already being explored. This year sees the release of
four major films dealing with black-white relations in Australia. Three of
them - Rabbit-Proof Fence, Black and White, and The Tracker - deal with
episodes from Australia's history of black-white conflict, while
Australian Rules frames the same issues in a contemporary context. The
films mark a departure from the more typical portrayal of Aboriginality on
film. Traditionally, Aborigines have either been used (as in Nicolas
Roeg's Walkabout) as a sounding board for the director's mystical ideas,
or (as in the Crocodile Dundee films and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert)
in comic cameos.
More serious attempts have been rarer. The greatest successes have been
those, like Charles Chauvel's 1950s classic Jedda, and Bruce Beresford's
gritty 1980s film The Fringe Dwellers, which have dropped the mysticism
and the mateyness in favour of a clear-eyed look at the political reality
of race in Australia.
The backlash did little to harm Rabbit-Proof Fence's success, and it
has become the most popular domestic film in Australia this year. In
cinemas across the country it became the focus for a cathartic
re-examination of the country's past, with former stolen children getting
up on stage at the end of screenings to calmly recount their own tales.
"The more you talk to indigenous people you realise that all of them were
touched by this policy," says Olsen.
Pilkington was herself taken from her mother and brought up to think of
herself as white. Her younger sister Annabel still denies her Aboriginal
heritage and refuses to meet her; Annabel's children have seen the film,
but their mother will not do do so.
"I'm very emotional after the film has been screened," says Pilkington.
"I don't go in and sit through it now because I get so upset. But it's a
story for the stolen generations as a whole," she says. "Any person who
was a member of the stolen generations owns this story."
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