Rabbit-Proof Fence: A Short Film Report.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is an Australian-produced drama movie and semi-documentary, being based on a book and true story told by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Her book is called Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and by watching the movie we can easily see why it bears that name.

The story takes place in 1931, a time quite different from ours, when the indigenous Aborigines were suppressed by the relatively newly arrived white Europeans. The Aborigines were reduced to “lower-caste” citizens, and had several rights taken away even though this land originally was theirs.

Auber Octarius Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines at the time(although “protector of Aborigines” might sound odd), is one of the main characters and the main “evildoer” in this film. He introduced a new policy which gave the government judicial power to take “half-bred” Aboriginal children away from their parents and bring them into a white, and in their eyes, sophisticated environment. The idea was to raise them as Europeans, and eventually they would be assimilated and bred out. Mr. Neville is not purposely evil. All he does, he does with the best of intentions. It was more a general idea at the time, he was only a product of the environment he grew up in. For us, what he does is despicable and cruel, but he honestly thought he was doing