Behrendt ponders the decision to include these scenes: As with the farmer’s wife (Edwina Bishop) who provides the girls with food and clothing, people are prepared to help – but only to the point where it doesn’t inconvenience them. It’s a useful piece of advice, but scant assistance for three young children alone in the outback. 2 fence, heading west, and suggesting a shortcut to reach the northward fence – and home. Mid-way through the film, the three girls encounter a fence worker (Ken Radley) who tells them they’re actually on the No. The distance created between the audience and Molly, Daisy and Gracie betrays Rabbit-Proof Fence’s intention to reflect upon the ways in which Australia’s white population failed its native peoples.

Rabbit-Proof Fence – whose fictionalised elements are all drawn from the accounts of other members of the stolen generations – undeniably played a role in shifting the national conversation around the stolen generations.

Des Moore and Peter Howson – who was Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the early 1970s – argued that the film’s depiction of the girls’ “forcible removal” was fictitious and that “Neville acted responsibly.” Such naysayers found themselves on the wrong side of history in wake of Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology. Andrew Bolt sneered at what he regarded as “untruths and exaggerations” and “Aboriginal leaders who falsely claim they were “stolen””. Release in a time when the Stolen Generations were a contentious issue, the film proved controversial conservative commentators accused it of misrepresenting the facts. The three girls are representatives of the real women they play, but they also symbolise the thousands upon thousands of children cruelly removed from their homes. Rabbit-Proof Fence’s importance, then, is as much political as artistic. As Larissa Behrendt notes (in her book on the film), “this is the film that took the story of the stolen generations to the world.” Australia had only abandoned its relocation program some three decades earlier, and despite the release of the Bringing them home report, the government at the time – led by John Howard – evinced no interest in apologising to Australia’s indigenous population. This approach is somewhat explained by the film’s political agenda.

Margaret Pomeranz, while describing Rabbit-Proof Fence as a “very good film”, noted that it “look at the children, rather than ever getting to know them.” Matthew Dillon’s Metro review makes a similar observation, noting that “we’re a little detached from the main characters”. The girls escape from Moore River and make the arduous – and long, stretching over nine weeks – journey home to Jigalong and their families, all along following the titular rabbit-proof fence. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) as a solution to “the problem of half-caste” – children with Aboriginal and white heritage. Their abduction is justified by “Chief Protector of Aborigines” A.O. The film tells the true story of three Aboriginal girls (as recorded in Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence) – Molly Craig, her sister Daisy, and her cousin Gracie (played by Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan in the film) – who are taken from their family in 1931 and sent to Moore River Native Settlement.

In the lonely hour opening act 2015