KATHY MARKS reports on a movie about the Stolen Generations.
ONKAPARINGA - The plight of the Stolen Generations - Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families by the white authorities - is set to receive international exposure thanks to a new film based on the remarkable true story of three girls who escaped and walked 1930km home across the Australian Outback.
Rabbit-Proof Fence, which stars the British actor Kenneth Branagh as a principal architect of the discredited assimilationist policy, will provoke a flurry of soul-searching in Australia when it is released this year.
It will also embarrass the Prime Minister, John Howard, who has repeatedly refused to apologise for the episode.
The policy, which aimed to "breed out" Aboriginality by absorbing mixed-race children into white society, was carried out from early last century until 1972.
Backed by laws in every state, it was implemented with particular fervour in Western Australia, where a British-born administrator, Auber Octavius Neville, set up "native settlements" in which children were incarcerated and trained as farm workers or domestic servants.
The three girls - Molly Kelly, aged 14, and her cousins Gracie Fields, 11, and Daisy Kadibil, 8 - were abducted from Jigalong, a remote township on the edge of the Gibson Desert, and taken to Moore River Native Settlement, just north of Perth, in 1931.
Jigalong was a maintenance depot for the "rabbit-proof fence," which was built along the entire length of Western Australia, from north to south, to protect agricultural land from a plague of rabbits.
The girls found their way home by following the fence and evading police, trackers and spotter aircraft during their epic two-month journey.
Branagh required little persuading to play Neville, the state's Chief Protector of Aborigines for 40 years.
"It's a story of survival," he said, "but it seems in lots of subtle ways to touch on very current and emotive issues."
The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, who returned to his native Australia from Los Angeles to make what he describes as "a labour of love."
Noyce, who has spent the past decade directing Hollywood blockbusters such as Sliver, Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger, shot Rabbit-Proof Fence in a couple of months on a shoestring budget of £4 million ($13.4 million).
Filming - on location in Onkaparinga National Park, south of Adelaide, and in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia - was recently completed, and the movie is expected to receive its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August.
Distribution rights have already been sold in Britain, France, Germany and Japan.
The screenplay is based on a book by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington, which was published in 1996. Both Molly and Daisy are still alive, aged 84 and 78. They still live in Jigalong, in adjoining houses. Gracie, who was captured during the trek and taken back to Moore River, died in 1983.
The three girls survived by begging for food at homesteads and, when they penetrated into the bush, by using traditional hunting skills. They slept by day and walked at night, covering 32km of forbidding terrain at a time.
An unusually wet winter helped to conceal their tracks as well as provide them with water.
But their arrival in Jigalong was not the end of the story. Nine years later, Molly was taken to Moore River once again, with her two children, 4-year-old Doris and 18-month-old Annabelle. Again she escaped and again she walked home, with Annabelle in her arms.
Forced to leave Doris behind, she was reunited with her only 30 years later. Annabelle was separated from her at the age of 5 under the same integrationist policy and taken to a children's home for "near whites" near Perth; Molly never saw her again.
The film's executive producer is the British film-maker Jeremy Thomas, who produced The Last Emperor, Crash and The Sheltering Sky. Thomas, who provided early financial backing, said: "It's a universal story, children plucked from their parents and making that incredible journey home."
The film is certain to stir controversy at home, where the fall-out from the Stolen Generations is the single most divisive issue confronting modern Australia. Noyce says: "This was a film that had to be made. It screamed out to be made."
It is estimated that as many as one in three indigenous children were removed by force - kidnapped, effectively - between 1910 and 1970.
Last year, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister at the time, John Herron, provoked outrage when he suggested that the Stolen Generations did not exist.
Many of the film crew, including Noyce, were reduced to tears when shooting the scenes of the girls being torn from their mothers.
"On that day, 200 years of black-white relationships suddenly bubbled to the surface in a volcanic outpouring of grief," Noyce said during filming in Onkaparinga.
"Out of these actresses came all of the frustration, all of the victimisation, all of the pain."
He hopes that the film will help to bridge the racial divide. "There has been a sea change in recent years in terms of acceptance of Australia as both a black and a white society.
"But there is still a huge gap. People understand the Stolen Generations on an intellectual level, but they don't understand the pain, they don't understand why there is so much emotion attached to this particular issue ... "
- HERALD CORRESPONDENT
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