Film and Genocide

6. The Other in Genocide: Responsibility and Benevolence in Rabbit-Proof Fence

The Other in Genocide Responsibility and Benevolence in Rabbit-Proof Fence donna-lee frieze Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) depicts the true story of the removal of mixed-descent Australian Aboriginal children from their home under the biological absorption plan conducted in Western Australia in the twentieth century in the interwar period. Molly Craig, her sister, Daisy, and cousin, Gracie, were forcibly removed by police from their family in Jigalong to a government settlement 1,500 miles away from their home. Under the watchful eye of the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, the girls managed to escape from the Moore River Settlement, intent on walking home to their family. Their home was situated along the rabbit-proof fence—a rabbit barrier stretching the length of Western Australia, which the girls used as their guide. The girls eluded the tracker and police, all employed or encouraged by Neville to return the escapees to the settlement. Eventually, Gracie was recaptured, but Molly and Daisy finally arrived home to their family in Jigalong. The victims of child removal (which occurred for the most part in the twentieth century) are referred to as the Stolen Generations, a term coined by Peter Read in 1981.1 The debates surrounding these policies in Australia—regarding removal and voluntary “capture,” in order to assimilate some Aborigines into “white” society— are beyond the scope of this chapter, but such issues nevertheless impinge on a reading of a film that depicts genocide as the forced removal of children rather than mass murder. Moreover, the depiction of genocide as the intention to destroy a group through the means of forcible child removal forms an essential part of a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical theory of responsibility. 122 6 123 The Other in Genocide Article 2 (e) of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (CPPCG) states that the forcible transference “of children from one group to another,” with the intention to destroy a particular group in whole or in part, constitutes genocide.2 The state government administered a biological absorption policy that insisted, as a matter of supposed good faith, that mixed-descent Aboriginal children were deemed “half-caste” and could “breed out” the colors through intermarriage with “whites,” which evokes another definition of responsibility: an imperialistic morality that claims what I am doing for you is beneficial for both of us. In Levinas’s terms, this ontological responsibility borders on a supercilious and debasing view of Others that insists you are an extension of me, and, in the case of biological absorption, demands that you resemble me.3 For Levinas, the capitalized “Other” always edicts my responsibility and respect and is never regarded as an extension of me: to regard the Other as such would be unethical. This notion of the Other, and the embracing of the Other’s otherness, underpins Levinas’s concept of ethical responsibility. Indeed, responsibility is an issue that frames Rabbit-Proof Fence. The normative grasp of the term responsibility contrasts with Levinas’s ethical understanding of “responsibility,” which is to be always for the Other. Noyce’s film highlights the essence of these two forms of “responsibility” as ethical (Other) and ontological (other). This chapter argues that the film juxtaposes the ontological with ethical senses of responsibility and highlights the genocide of the Aborigines as a process of biological absorption. Responsibility obfuscated as duty—portrayed in the film as genocide—reflects the challenge posed by Levinas’s theory of the ethical. Through this dichotomy of responsibility-as-ethical, and responsibility-as-dutiful, the Levinasian thesis of the ethical over morality motivates this viewer of Rabbit-Proof Fence to examine how a policy of apparent benevolence of the law is transformed into genocide. Responsibility and Duty Duty, service, responsibility. Those are our watchwords. neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority With the release of Rabbit-Proof Fence, five years after the publication of the report titled Bringing them Home, the issue of the Stolen Generations passed from public debate to popular culture.4 Art often mirrors contemporary concerns, rather than the historical event it depicts. Thus, in many ways, Noyce’s film is a product of the polemic in Australia regarding the debates about the Stolen Generations.5 Were the instigators responsible for the forced removal of the children and the subsequent tragic consequences? Was there an intention to...