Rabbit-proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara.

Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington is the true story of the escape of three young
girls from a settlement school they were forced to attend in Australia, over one
thousand miles away from their families and homes. The three girls, along with many
others, were mandated to be transferred to Moore River Settlement School, which
was a school for half-caste Aborigine children. With the influx first of white raiders
and pirates and then "peaceful" English settlers, there was a multitude of half-
English children. The government considered these children a step above full-blooded
Aborigine children and felt obliged to take them to schools where they could be
educated. These youngsters were unceremoniously snatched from their families and
carted off to these settlements.
Molly, at fourteen, was the eldest of the three girls who are at the heart of the
story. She, along with her relatives Gracie, eleven, and Daisy, just eight years old,
were dismayed and frightened by their fate. Molly, a free-spirited girl and natural
leader, decided on the evening before the first day of school that she and her two
friends would control their own destiny. In the morning, she announced to the other
two girls that they would be escaping. They were running the risk of being recaptured
and punished. Anyone who tried to escape was placed in the "boob" (jail), beaten with
a strap, had their heads shaved and were given only bread and water for a week. Molly
was told that no one had ever successfully escaped. But Molly was undeterred. She
was determined that she and her little friends would return to the people who loved
and cared about them.
Molly's father was a white man who was the inspector of the rabbit-proof fence. The
purpose of the fence was to keep the over-population of rabbits in the eastern
Australian regions from coming into Western Australia. Molly learned from her
father that the fence was installed from north to south for almost the entire length
of the country. She knew that once she and the girls found the fence that it would
lead them home.
The girls set off with only bread crumbs in their calico bags. They walked barefooted
through thick forests and wide heathlands. They faced ferocious animals, hunger,
rough terrain, rain storms and oppressive heat and, worse of all, the constant threat
of being recaptured by the patrols that had been sent out looking for them. They
became very savvy—asking for food from farmers and then taking off in the wrong
direction and then doubling back in case they were reported. They supplemented what
food they were given by trapping wild animals and eating whatever bush tuck they
could find. Molly had learned how to navigate through the countryside from her
father, always keeping an eye on the position of the sun. The girls make it home to
their families who, though stunned that they came so far, were very happy to have
their daughters back home. The trek across Australia is one of the longest in the
recorded history of the country and certainly the longest that was accomplished
barefooted.
Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence Essay by Larissa Behrendt

Doris Pilkington Garimara tells the story of her mother in Follow the Rabbit-
proof Fence. She tells her own story in Under the Wintamarra Tree (2003), of
her premature birth, under the tree of the book’s title on Balfour Downs
Station, a pastoral lease and cattle station located about 132 kilometres north-
east of Newman in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. She was so small when
she was born that she could fit in a shoebox and it was believed that she would
not survive. As her birth perhaps foretold, Doris’s life was not going to be easy.
At the age of four she was taken, along with her mother and two-year-old
sister, Annabelle, from Jigalong to Moore River Native Settlement. For Molly,
Doris’s mother, this was not the first time she had been to Moore River, and
that first visit – and Molly’s subsequent journey home with her younger cousins
Gracie and Daisy – will become the heart of Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence.

To me, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence is a book about connection to country and
family. The heart of the story is the extraordinary journey Molly, Gracie and
Daisy take as they escape Moore River Settlement and make the long walk home
across hundreds of kilometres of desert back to their families. That story,
central to the film adaptation, is given a more complex and expansive treatment
in the book.

For Pilkington, the story of her own family cannot be told without the context
of first contact and first settlement, of the erosion of physical security and
the erosion of the way of life of Aboriginal people in other parts of the
country. So she starts her story with the first encounters between Aboriginal
people in Western Australia and sealers and whalers, as seen through the eyes
of a warrior, Kundilla. He recounts the fate of the Nyungar people as colonial
settlements are established on the west coast of Australia, and through these
encounters we see the creeping but profound influence of European law, as it
becomes the only law. Through these early conflicts, Pilkington explores the
violence on the frontier so that we understand the motivations and contexts of
the characters she will introduce us to.

Indigenous people have always understood interconnectedness. You had to work

together in order to survive in a hunter/gatherer society. You understood the
environment and how it could provide for your basic needs – food, tools,
clothing, entertainment, medicine. You also had to understand your need for
each other and to work together. Everything relates to everything else. And in
this world of interdependence and reciprocity, you can’t think of the present
without thinking of the past and the future.

And so understanding this context is critical. The story of how the Nyungar
fared against the early colonists explains what is at stake for other Aboriginal
people as Europeans expand their hold over the country. By the time we get to
1900 and the Mardudjara, Pilkington has illustrated what the Mardu (the
traditional people) could lose as they navigate the profound changes affecting
the Pilbara. Here there is less violent conflict than with the Nyungar but the
relations are no less complex, and the symbiotic relationship between
pastoralists and stockmen and domestic servants defines the relationship
between Aboriginal people and colonists in the area for years to come.
Aboriginal people, particularly men, worked for pastoralists and Aboriginal
women performed domestic duties in homesteads, ensuring that pastoralists
could make their properties profitable. As part of the exchange, Aboriginal
people stayed on their traditional land and could carry out cultural activities.

This didn’t mean that conflict, violence, retribution and sexual exploitation
weren’t rife. The creation of the Canning stock route caused considerable
conflict and, once established, profoundly changed the rhythms and movements
of traditional life. But what is evident in Pilkington’s account of this history is
that there was not just fear and foreboding about what was happening –
Aboriginal people had a natural curiosity and wonder at the changes in the world
around them. They were intrigued by European customs and technology and
fascinated with the species settlers introduced, including horses, cattle, sheep,
foxes, rabbits. Pilkington shows that this is a people who had long adapted to
everything around them to survive and would continue to show that same
resilience in the face of huge changes. She shows a society in which there is
evolution and adaptation as traditional people sought to keep their values and
adapt to living between two cultures.

And it is this background that is necessary to explain how a once nomadic

society is drawn to the safety of government outposts for protection. As was
the case around the country, many Aboriginal people settled on missions and
reserves to escape frontier violence. This was a large part of the pact with the
pastoralists as well, and it is this promise of safety that leads Aboriginal people
to Jigalong Depot. The depot is a source of both curiosity and interest,
providing protection, clothes, food and blankets. It was a bustling little
community by the 1930s. Sacred objects were brought in from the desert and
buried there, ceremonies were still performed and again we see the adaptation
of Aboriginal people to a new set of circumstances. Nomadic lifestyle becomes
semi-nomadic. But this sanctuary also allowed for greater European surveillance
and control of the Aboriginal people who lived there.

It is here that Molly is born to an Aboriginal mother, Maude, and a white

father, a worker on the rabbit-proof fence. And it is here that we see the first
role the fence will play in this family story as it brings Pilkington’s grandparents
together. The fence is a symbol of colonisation. It seeks to tame the land and
keep out the introduced scourge of rabbits, but it also becomes a link between
worlds.

The fence was built in 1907 to stop rabbits migrating into Western Australia
from the east, but there ended up being more on the WA side of the fence
than on the South Australian. It provides a graphic example of the failed
attempts by Europeans to understand their new environment and brings home
the fact that European impact could not be tempered. Depots like Jigalong
were established as part of maintaining the fence.

Molly is the first half-caste born at Jigalong. Her cousins, Gracie and Daisy,
follow. Half-castes become a distinct part of the community and represent the
conundrum of being caught between two worlds. The government’s removal
policy focuses on them because they are seen as easier to assimilate; as well,
their own community at first are wary of them and the disruption they pose to
traditional tribal and kinship systems. Superintendent Keely from Jigalong
Depot wrote to the Department of Native Affairs in Perth, observing that
Molly and some other children weren’t getting fair treatment because they
were half-caste. And so the wheels of removal are set in motion and the girls
are designated to the Moore River Settlement.

Unlike the heart-wrenching scene in the movie where the children are ripped
from the community, in the book, Molly and Gracie are given over almost as a
fait accompli (with Daisy later joining them), but the loss is no less heart-
breaking. And this is not just so for the Aboriginal parents and families losing
their children; Gracie’s white father watches her removal, feeling powerless to
prevent it. That a white man feels the situation is beyond his control says much
about the compulsion of the law and the sense of inevitability of removing
children from one world to place them into another.

Pilkington describes the long journey the girls take to the Moore River
Settlement – by boat and car – and what is striking is how the white people they
come into contact with seem to express a benevolence and kindness towards
the girls. For them, such forced separations are both necessary and inevitable
even if the situation is also tragic and pitiable. As Pilkington observes of the
girls: ‘They were doomed’.

But for me, this is not so much a book about the stolen generations as a story
about the power of family and connection to country.

Once at the Moore River Settlement it doesn’t take long for the girls to plot
their escape, drawn by their desire to be back with their families and be on
their own country. Molly is clearly the leader in this, confident that her
bushcraft can lead them home, and the younger girls trust her decision, her
strength and her determination. In this there is the irony that the removal
policy focused on half-castes, in the belief that they were more likely to lose
their connection to family, community and country. Through Molly’s steely
determination we see that the longing for family and home is instinctive, primal
and urgent.

Molly and the girls knew about the fence and are armed with finely honed bush
skills. They are helped along the way by a both black and white people who
stand at arm’s length from the girls and their plight but assist with provisions.
We see the curious role that black trackers played in hunting down their own
people to send them back to the places they have fled and the complex
relationships Aboriginal people have with pastoralists, who warily yet generously
provide food for the girls, knowing they are fugitives but not actively helping or
hindering them.

The officials seeking to recapture them assumed that the girls would not be
able to make it home, underestimating their self-sufficiency and ability to
adapt to the environments they encountered. The escape and journey home
challenged the Department of Native Affairs. It was clearly underfunded for
its tasks of providing education, support and provisions for Aboriginal people
and it was under-resourced in its efforts to find Molly, Gracie and Daisy. Yet
the officials seem cognisant of what the girls’ escape would symbolise and are
nervous that the department’s prestige would be undermined if they were
unable to bring the girls back to Moore River.

Gracie is eventually recaptured, but Molly and Daisy make it home. They are
immediately taken out to the bush, away from the tighter surveillance of
Jigalong Depot, though it is clear from the official paper trail that their
movements were followed by the department throughout their lives. Molly
would eventually go back to the Moore River Settlement as an adult, only to
escape again – but that’s another story, one told in Doris Pilkington’s Under the
Wintamarra Tree.

Doris’s own journey to get back home was also a long, circuitous one. She
became a nursing aide, a wife and a mother to six children. She would go back
to school as a mature-aged student, study journalism, work in film and video and
eventually win the David Unaipon Award for what would become her first book –
Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter. Doris seemed to find a kind of closure to what
had happened to her as a child and to how she felt about herself when she took
the journey home to Jigalong, where she had been taken from her family. And
it was when she went home and was reunited with her mother that she
embraced her culture, after being brought up to view Aboriginal culture as
‘savage’. She learnt her traditional language in the hope that she would be able
to speak with the older people.

Doris had to reconcile the joy of home-coming with some painful questions. Why
had she been taken, and not her younger sister, Annabelle, who had been left
behind? Why had she been abandoned at the age of four and a half, not to see
her mother again until 21 years later?

I am interested in the choices authors make when facing the challenges of

writing a story drawn from memory. There are always gaps in the family
knowledge – the removal policy certainly complicates the ability to tell complete
stories as sometimes relatives were dislocated permanently. Then there is the
problem that, if five family members attend an event there will be five –
sometimes more – versions of what happened. The challenge for Pilkington also
includes the time lapse between when she was writing her book and when the
events actually occurred. Memories are not always correct or complete. Doris
allowed for ‘patches of dimmed memories and sketchy reflections’ (Follow the
Rabbit-proof Fence, St Lucia: UQP, 1996, p. xii). She also had to bear in mind
cultural difference – time, numbers and distances don’t have the same meanings
for traditional Aboriginal people who may remember the season or the aspects
of the physical landscape rather than dates, facts and figures. Doris explains
that part of her creative practice as a writer was to ‘synthesise these
different forms of knowledge to give readers the fullest insights into this
historic journey’
The challenge for the author is: How do you fill in the gaps, especially when so
much time has passed? And how do you decipher that when your characters and
sources use seasons and landscape, instead of time and numbers, to remember
when and where things happened? Doris addressed some of these conundrums
by relying on an amalgam of official documentation, as well as the memories of
her own family members. She took the skeletons of facts from the archive –
dates, locations – and then fleshed them out with memories, anecdotes and
recollections. She then added further colour by imagining what characters
might feel and how they might react. This is the craft of the writer who
chooses to tell a family history as a story.

I think of Doris so meticulously researching her story, using the skills that she
went to university to learn, knowing that it was the quintessential tale to speak
across generations and cultures about the cruelty, impact and legacy of the
policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. I think of how insular
and introverted the atmosphere is in libraries – even more so in archives –
where you breathe in the dust and the smell of slow-rotting paper. There are so
many clues to the stolen lives of Aboriginal people in those archives.

In an ABC radio interview, Doris said that the cruellest thing she ever did was
to accuse her mother of giving her away. It took her many years to accept her
mother’s account of what happened to her, to change the narrative that had
been drummed into her head that her mother hadn’t wanted her. Whatever her
deep regrets about her relationship with her mother, she spent much time
atoning for it by telling the story of Molly’s own journey.

When I see how Doris lovingly crafted her story in Follow the Rabbit-proof
Fence, I am reminded again about the deep regret she had for the flash of
unintended cruelty she showed to her mother. When I sit down to write, I do it
because I want to tell a story, but I rarely do it just to entertain. I think most
writers are like that. We also write to teach, to learn, to heal, to grow, to
resolve. These might sound like clichés but they are nevertheless true. And I
like to read Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence in the same way, as a love letter to a
mother, a way of walking in her shoes.

In this way, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence is a meditation on the cultural

clashes of two worlds, where forced assimilation is just one of the very
powerful forces at play. The book asks the reader to step into the shoes of the
heroines and take that long journey – across a continent and across many
decades – in order to see how central love of land and kinship ties are.