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February 02, 2003, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: OUTLOOK; Pg. B01

HEADLINE: A Long Trek to The Truth

BYLINE: Robert Manne

For an under-the-radar movie that takes an obscure and disturbing slice of Australia's history as its subject,"Rabbit-Proof Fence" -- currently playing in just two area theaters -- has drawn a surprising amount of attention. Many critics, however, while praising the film, have wondered whether it portrays Australia's past Aboriginal policies accurately. The movie triggered the same question, and far more discord, when it was released in Australia a year ago. Outlook asked Melbourne historian and journalist Robert Manne to respond.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" tells the purportedly true story of three "half-caste" girls from an Aboriginal settlement in the north of Western Australia who, in accordance with state policy at the time, were seized from their families by police in 1931 and transported to a government compound far to the south. The girls escaped, evaded a hunting party and, in a remarkable feat of ingenuity and endurance, walked 1,000 miles home through the desert. Guiding them was the north-south fence that had been built to keep rabbits out of pastoral lands to the west. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is an absorbing drama, as might be expected of a film by Phillip Noyce, a director who is as well-known in Hollywood as he is in his native Australia. In general, it is a faithful account of a real incident, based on public records and on a memoir written by the oldest girl's daughter. But it is also much more than that. In showing that the girls were seized from loving mothers, who suffered overwhelming grief, and that the architect of the removal policy was a man driven by the vision of a society cleansed of so-called half-castes, the film offers a clear and controversial interpretation of Aboriginal child removal policies in 20th-century Australia.

No episode in the country's history is more ideologically sensitive than the story of what are now called the "stolen generations." In 1997 the publication of an official report into Aboriginal child removal precipitated a harrowing and as-yet-unresolved national debate. Liberal opinion was shocked by the revelation that a violation of such a profound and universal kind -- the forcible separation of mothers and children -- had occurred so widely and so recently. (The policy continued until 1970.) The right responded that if children were taken it was either because of maternal neglect or because half-castes were rejected by the "full-blood" tribes. The issue was clouded by preexisting arguments between supporters and opponents of Aboriginal land claims and the idea of reparations for past wrongs. Many people dismissed the report as propaganda.

When "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was released in Australia last February, and the story became part of popular culture, this debate deepened. Now the film has reached an international audience, which may not previously have thought of Australia as a country confronted by internal issues of race. It is self-evidently important for audiences to know whether the story it tells is representative and whether the historical interpretation it offers is, broadly speaking, true.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the so-called "chief protectors" of Aborigines in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia -- the three colonies where traditional Aboriginal communities still existed -- were each struck by an identical thought. As a result of the frequency of sexual relations between Aboriginal women and European men, a discomfiting new racial type had emerged at the frontier. The protectors believed that it was of the greatest importance that the "problem" of the half-castes be "solved."

In 1899, the chief protector in Western Australia, Henry Prinsep, wrote the following typical report: "The intercourse between the races is leading to a considerable increase of half-castes. Each half-caste is a menace to the future moral safety of the community." Prinsep's aim was to remove such children from the Aboriginals' bush camps. Standing in his way was the fact that the law gave him no power to remove Aboriginal children without parental consent.

In 1905, the law was changed in Western Australia to allow for the removal of half-caste children. Other states soon followed suit. The transfer of such children to Christian missions or state institutions now began in earnest. In Western Australia the most enthusiastic enforcer of the policy was James Isdell, that state's traveling protector for the north. In November 1908, Isdell wrote to the chief protector, "I consider it a great scandal to allow any of these half-caste girls to remain with the natives." In January 1909, Isdell was issued the authority to "collect all half-caste boys and girls." He expressed his gratitude: "It should have been done years ago."

Isdell was aware that sentimentalists from the south sometimes wrote letters to newspapers "detailing the cruelty and harrowing grief of the mothers." This seemed to him nonsense. He did not believe that the Aboriginal mother felt the forcible removal of her child any more deeply than did a bitch the loss of a pup. "I would not hesitate," he wrote, "to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic momentary grief might be. They soon forget their offspring."

In 1915, A.O. Neville, a young, English-born public servant, was appointed chief protector in Western Australia. He was to become one of the most influential administrators of Aborigines in Australian history. Neville, played by Kenneth Branagh, is the main non-indigenous character in "Rabbit-Proof Fence."

The Western Australian archives reveal much about Neville's half-caste policy. Under this system the preferred minimum age for removal was 6, especially in the case of girls. Removals occurred without any reference to the courts; the selection criteria were solely age and racial caste, never parental neglect. Neville was aware that his policy occasioned great suffering among Aboriginal mothers. In 1919, he warned the commissioner of police that it was unwise to notify a local station "beforehand of the date upon which the children are to be taken away, as this would undoubtedly lead to the mother hiding the youngsters."

The institution to which the three girls in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" were sent was the Moore River Native Settlement, established 80 miles north of Perth in 1916 and operated by the government. In part it served as an Aboriginal dumping ground. In a separate compound, fenced off from the camp, it also served as a place where half-caste children were prepared for work in European society, as manual laborers if they were boys and as cheap domestic servants if they were girls. Not surprisingly, escapes from the compound were common, although successful escapes, of the kind shown in the film, appear to have been rare.

Of all the racial anxieties concerning Aborigines of mixed descent none went deeper in the interwar period than the alarm Europeans felt when they encountered a "near-white" child -- the offspring of a half-caste mother and a European father -- living among the blacks. In one scene in "Rabbit-Proof Fence," Neville inspects the skins of the compound children. His purpose is to select lighter children for transference to a "quarter-caste" institution. Was it true that in the early 1930s an Australian government official might be involved in choosing children for placement in a special-purpose home exclusively on the basis of the color of their skin?

The facts are these: In 1932, Sister Kate Clutterbuck of Perth wrote to Neville offering to establish a home for orphaned or abandoned Aboriginal children. Neville convinced her to establish instead a home for so-called quarter-castes. In 1933, such children began entering Sister Kate's. All connections between them and their families were severed. The children received a standard education and training in "civilized" manners. But that wasn't all. At Sister Kate's the aim was to exorcise from those children all trace of Aboriginality. In a trivial sense the selection scene in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is slightly inaccurate. These three girls escaped from Moore River two years before recruiting for Sister Kate's began. In a non-trivial sense, however, the skin-color selection scene is real. In another scene in the film, Neville lectures a small audience of middle-class ladies on his plans for "breeding out the color" of the "half-castes."

This takes us to the heart of Neville's philosophy -- his determination, as he explained to a startled Perth journalist in 1933, to turn blacks into whites within three or four generations. Neville's racial strategy can be explained briefly like this: Around 1930 most Australians were convinced that tribal Aborigines were certain, eventually, to die out. But they were also becoming aware that throughout Australia the number of half-castes was rapidly increasing. If these half-castes continued to mate freely with "full-bloods" or their own kind and to form half-caste communities, an incalculable menace to social stability and to the dream of White Australia would arise.

What was to be done? Very occasionally, the sterilization of half-castes was suggested. Far more commonly, however, a program of encouraged miscegenation -- between half-caste or quarter-caste females and European males -- was proposed, as the only practical solution to the "problem." Neville was one of the most influential advocates of this policy.

The implication is clear. If it was believed that tribal or full-blood Aborigines would not survive, then a scientific program for the racial extinction of the half-castes represented a policy for the elimination of the Australian Aborigine. This Neville understood. In April 1937, at the first-ever national conference of Aboriginal administrators, he posed the following question: "Are we going to have a population of 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?"

At this conference, Neville's absorption policy was accepted as a national goal, although after 1945 it was called assimilation and lost its overtly eugenic dimension. A survey conducted in the early 1990s discovered that between 1910 and 1970, when the practice was abandoned, as many as 10 percent of Aboriginal children had been taken from their mothers and communities. The pain of child removal lives on in the memories of almost all Aboriginal families, who still await a formal government apology.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is far from being propaganda. Rather, this simple story of the seizure and escape of three young half-caste girls is a sober, historically accurate account of the racial fantasies and phobias, as well as the frankly genocidal thoughts, that masqueraded as policies promoting Aboriginal "welfare" in Australia's interwar years. </body> Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is the author of "In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right" (Black Inc).

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