Peter Gabriel - Ngankarrparni (Sky Blue) - The Rabbit-Proof Fence

Peter Gabriel - Ngankarrparni (Sky Blue) - The Rabbit-Proof Fence Rabbit-Proof Fence is the true story of Molly Craig, who, in 1931, at 14, was taken from her mother in Jigalong, a depot on one of the fences that were being constructed across the continent in an attempt to keep marauding rabbits from destroying the western farmlands. Along with her half-sister Daisy, 8, and cousin Gracie Fields, she was taken to the Moore River Native Settlement in Western Australia. “I would not hesitate to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic momentary grief might be at the time,“ wrote one “protector“. “They soon forget their offspring,“ He maintained it was just like removing a pup from a bitch. The film would show the terrified children sprinting across stony wasteland in a futile attempt to escape the police, distraught mothers wailing in the dust, and an aged granny battering her head with a stone in impotent frustration. It would show the girls in a cage as they are transported by train to their new home and a culture of flogging and solitary confinement for those who failed to appreciate what the white man was doing for them. One day, when the coming rainstorm would hide their tracks, Molly, Daisy and Gracie set off for home, traipsing across the desert, scavenging from farmers and aborigine hunters, cooking what little meat they could obtain over an open fire, close to collapse with hunger, heat and exhaustion. For long parts of the journey the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence. After walking for nine weeks, Molly and Daisy were reunited with their mother (though Gracie was recaptured). They disappeared into the desert, just the sort of uplifting ending the film needed. They are still living in the Jigalong area, 600 miles north-east of Perth - two days on a bus, followed by a couple of hours in a truck. Their story was retold in the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, written by Mollys daughter, Doris Pilkington, and published by the University of Queensland Press in 1996. It might never have attracted anything more than local attention had it not been for Christine Olsen, who forced herself on Pilkington, with much the same persistence she would later apply to Noyce.