|
December 26, 2003
When I watched a video of Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence the other night, I noted how little the film engaged with social philosophy behind assimilation as a mode of governing the aboriginal population in Australia in the 1930s.
The philosophy behind taking the half caste indigenous children away from their parents, community and country to breed the blackness out of them was Social Darwinism. That assumed struggle, competition and violence as the inevitable and necessary condition of progress. The Aborigines were beyond saving. They were doomed to extinction; as an inferior race they were stepping stones of the progress of the superior and more capable white race (the English colonists). This progress was an inexorable law of nature. There was no room for ethical considerations about the right and wrong of this because human beings were governed by the necessity of natural laws.
Should a film engage with this philosophy that viewed the aborignes as a dying race? I think that it should. It is impoverished if it does not.
What Social Darwinism was saying was that Aborigines were to primitive, too archaic, too inferior to adapt to modern society and nothing could stay the death sentence. All that could be realistically done once the frontier wars were over was to take the half castes from the desert savages and breed them with whites so they would become white skinned afer a couple of generations.
Social Darwinism was the philosophial justification for the racism of 1930's Australia.
The reality was that the Aborigines had owned the land desired by the English colonists. They had to be dispossessed and gotten rid off to ensure progress and personal enrichment. That bit never came throught the film either. Noyce failed to sketch the historical background.
|
We're talking about the mid 20th century here. European colonists had already squeezed native Aboriginal tribes off enough valuable farming land throughout the previous 150 years (utilising the far more efficient method of simply rounding up and shooting those trespassing on "their" land) to be seen as the primary justification for the policies of the Stolen Generation (which, incidentally, along with the post-war White Australia immigration policy, continued the disgraceful traditions of racial social engineering over the next 30 years). Politicians of the day expounded the bigoted belief that white Christian households and boarding schools were the best environment in which to raise Aboriginal children. They believed they were doing what was best for them, whether they or their biological parents liked it or not.