by Marcie McCauley

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is an iconic Australian story about three little girls who did what Burke and Wills couldn’t – cross thousands of kilometres of desert, and survive; on foot and without a supply train of supplies. We asked Marcie, who hadn’t read the story nor seen the movie, for a Canadian perspective.

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For years, I’ve recognised the film poster of Rabbit-Proof Fence as being a story that I should know. Even from the other side of the world, but without recognising it as Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996), the biographical narrative of three Aboriginal girls – Molly, the author’s mother, Daisy, Molly’s half-sister, and Gracie, their cousin – and their escape from internment in 1931.

And without knowing how these girls’ experiences might connect with writing about the devastating effects of colonialism on Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples closer to my home where I read and write in Tkaronto/Toronto and N’Swakamok/Sudbury (on the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and Wendat).

Doris Pilkington (1937-2014)—called Nugi Garimara by her mother, Molly—tells the girls’ story in nine chapters, and structures it chronologically. Though a well-known story in your region, those unfamiliar who wish to uncover the outline of their lives directly from her book, can skip the next section and resume reading with “How to Find the Beginning”.

Three Girls from Jigalong

Nugi Garmara divides the story roughly into three parts: a historical summary of colonial and Aboriginal relations, the girls’ lives in Jigalong before the government mandated their relocation and travel to the Moore River Native Settlement in the south, and the 1600-kilometre-long escape undertaken by following the continent-long fence (originally constructed early in the twentieth century to manage the rabbit population) to their northern homeland.

Using interviews, historical research, and reproducing some documents, Nugi Garmara moves from sweeping historical events to granular personal experiences. In a matter-of-fact tone, she illustrates how a caste-based system brutally impacted her ancestors and continues to affect the lives of their descendants.

How to Find the Beginning

Just three short chapters summarise the colonial settlement of what’s now called Western Australia, initial and early contact between Aboriginal inhabitants and whalers and sealers and, eventually, 19^th-century settlers.

To contextualise the girls’ story, Nugi Garmara discusses how “the growth of the rural industry” impacted Aboriginal peoples, “either by expulsion from traditional lands, sexual exploitation of the women or by the criminal acts of murder and violence committed against them.”

In this way, communities like Jigalong were established, and the Mardus’ homeland was inextricably altered, inhabitants’ lives increasingly enmeshed with white settlers’ lives. The book focuses on events of 1931, but the backdrop of a century of increased subjugation informs the girls’ daily lives and opportunities. On the other side of the globe, similar patterns are recognisable.

Shifting the Focus

In 1980, Canadian academic Sylvia van Kirk upset the traditional view of the 17^th-century fur-trade in the north (of what’s Canada today) in Many Tender Ties. Women are at the heart of her narrative—Native women, white women, and mixed-blood women—and their abandonment, when colonial men fulfilled the terms of their employment contracts and returned overseas, leaving their wives and sons and daughters.

Nugi Garmara originally submitted her manuscript in 1985, but she was urged to rework her academic-styled narrative for a broader readership.

Decades later, there’s an abundance of stories, in different forms and styles, inviting readers to reconsider how history has been presented and whose perspectives are prioritised. In North America, fiction by Louise Erdrich (a Chippewa/Ojibwe writer) resituates Indigenous women and their ancestral stories at the heart of her fiction (beginning chronically with Tracks, set in the early-20^th century). And writers like Aviaq Johnston and Katłįà (Inuk and Dene respectively) tell stories for young adults, sometimes marketed as “fantasy”, that highlight the importance of their ancestors—what Norway House Cree writer David A. Robertson does with his Misewa Saga.

Niigaan Sinclair (an Anishnaabe writer, from St. Peters/ Little Peguis) has written about the legacy of Indigenous slavery (in journalism freshly collected in 2024’s Winipêk) and Gregory Scofield reconsiders Métis identity and 19^th-century resistance warriors in his memoir Thunder through My Veins (1997). Cree writer Bernard Assiniwi’s epic novel The Beothuk Saga imagines the story of the now-extinct Beothuk nation (English translation by Wayne Grady). And Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s poetry has challenged the ways that colonial institutions rewrote the narrative of Indigenous homelands (The place of scraps, for instance).

Books like Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence provided a foundation for stories like these, insisted that readers would recognise the power of these survivors’ resilience and resistance.

“Protector of Aborigines”

When Constable Riggs tells the Marda family that he’s “come to take Molly, Gracie and Daisy, the three half-caste girls, with [him] to go to school at the Moore River Native Settlement,” they are unsurprised but concerned. “The common belief at the time was that part-Aboriginal children were more intelligent than their darker relations and should be isolated and trained to be domestic servants and labourers,” Nugi Garmara writes.

This policy wasn’t new in Australia; the colony of Victoria first passed acts supporting these ideas in 1869. There were policies like this in pre-Confederation (i.e. pre-1867) Canada too. The assimilationist tools called settlements and missions there, were called residential schools here and, as their authority declined, the erosion of Indigenous families continued through the Sixties Scoop. Under the guise of paternalism, in the name of “care”, cultural genocide flourished.

Three Girls NOT from Nullagine

When Molly, Daisy, and Gracie arrived in the south, settlers introduced them incorrectly. It wasn’t important who they have been; all that mattered was who they would be. The girls “wanted to tell these midgerji that their home is Jigalong not Nullagine” but they remain quiet.

Their story has created a space for other survivors to tell their own truths about colonial institutionalisation. Xatsu’ll chief Bev Sellars’ memoir They Called Me Number One and Bevann Fox of the Pasqua First Nation’s Genocidal Love: A Life after Residential School present their experiences in these “schools”. Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko writes about a girl “attending” in her novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and Richard Wagamese of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations writes about a boy in his novel Indian Horse (2012). But it’s Cree-Métis writer Tracey Lindberg’s novel Birdie that comes to mind most prominently:

“Bernice has been immersed in travelling, lately. The three women moving around her generate some sort of resistance that allows her to travel back and forth (Now and Then, Here and There) without much pain. Somewhere in the back of her mind there is an idea. A memory. A piece of something yet unearthed.”

The women in her story are on a journey even when they’re not in motion, and this examination of intergenerational trauma appends another dimension to Molly, Daisy, and Gracie’s survival story.

Incarceration, Not Education

Most of what the girls know about the Moore River Settlement comes from other children’s warnings. They must eat weevily porridge; they must not speak their own language; but beyond the realm of their personal experience, there’s another layer of threat.

“What is that place?” asked Rosie, doing the talking for the other three.
“That’s the ‘boob’, they lock anyone in there for punishment,” Martha explained.

The punitive system underpinning the “school” system here is explored in detail in Up Ghost River, by former Chief of Fort Albany First Nation Edmund Metatawabin (written with Alexandra Shimo). Art like the Witness Blanket, created by Casey Newman (Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish) acknowledges the abuses suffered by so many. Michelle Good’s novel Five Little Indians presents five “students’” experiences, and the trauma suffered even after they “graduate” (she’s from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation). Particularly notable is her character who repeatedly escapes, which also brings to mind the true story of Charlie Wenjack—an Anishnaabe boy who dies in the course of his escape, his last days painfully and movingly imagined in Wenjack by Joseph Boyden.

What makes Charlie’s story so powerful is his relationship to the natural world. This is evident in the girls’ relationship to landscape in Nugi Garmara’s book too. The paperbark trees and acacia thickets, dark-brown mud and white sand, leeches and prickly grevilleas reflect what’s known and unknown to them. To readers, their observations represent how the knowledge they possess, even in their youth, is valued differently by settlers, who have internalised their sense of superiority.

“To the girls from the East Pilbara region, this chocolate-coloured river was a new and exciting spectacle, quite different from the normal pinky coloured salt lakes, creeks and rivers back home. This sight only made Molly more aware that she was a stranger in this part of the country, as were all the others in this small group.”

Invisible Fences

The physical landscape through which the girls move is vitally important and eventually they follow the rabbit-proof fence, a tangible border. This reminded me of Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar’s observation: “Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire. Caste is a notion; it is a state of mind.” In the context of Nugi Garmara’s story, caste is not a rabbit-proof fence.

(This I read in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, which also considers the impact of colonialism. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her journalism in 1994, but she’s best known for The Warmth of Other Sons, about the Great Migration; this coincides with the lifetimes of Molly, Daisy and Gracie—from around 1910 to 1970, when Black people moved from the southern United States of Black Americans to the north to escape racism and genocide in the United States.)

I had never seen a photograph of the rabbit-proof fence. On the map at the front of the book, I only recognise Kalgoorlie from Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfields trilogy and Perth from Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. And, until now, Nugi Garmara’s book was just a movie poster I intuited was important.

How often do we avoid the books we recognise that we should know, read the stories that we should understand. How many times do we dismiss what’s hard to confront so we need not revise our awareness. How much easier it is to dismantle a barrier than it is to change your mind.

Doris Pilkington (Nugi Garmara)
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1996
136pp

Marcie McCauley blogs about reading at Buried in Print and about writing at Marcie McCauley.com. She lives in the city currently called Toronto, built on the homelands of indigenous peoples – including the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and the Wendat – land still inhabited by their descendants.