Daisy Kadibil
One of the ‘stolen generation’ of Aboriginal children whose 1,200-mile trek home inspired a film
DAISY KADIBIL, who has died aged 95, was eight when she was forcibly removed from her Aboriginal mother by the Australian authorities and sent, with her half-sister Molly, 12, and their cousin Gracie, 9, to a bleak government institution to be trained as domestic servants; the story of their escape, and their 1,200-mile trek home, inspired Phillip Noyce’s acclaimed yet harrowing film Rabbitproof Fence (2002), starring Kenneth Branagh.
The film shone a light on one of the most shameful episodes in Australian history, that of the “stolen generations”, when thousands of children, many of mixed Aboriginaleuropean heritage, were kidnapped by government decree as part of an attempt to “breed out the black”.
That eugenics-based policy was explained succinctly in 1937 when Auber Octavius Neville (played in the film by Branagh), chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, told a conference in Canberra: “We have power … to take any child from its mother at any stage of its life … Are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?”
The fence of the film’s title had been built from south to north across Western Australia in 1907 to protect the farmlands from a plague of imported European rabbits. The remote settlement of Jigalong, 665 miles north-east of Perth, was where Daisy’s forebears from the Martu people had settled after being driven off their land by Europeans; it became a depot for fence maintenance workers.
Speaking when the film was released, Molly recalled how “whitefellas took us from mother” in Jigalong in July 1931. They were bundled into the back of the first motor car they had ever seen and driven away. Through the rear window, Daisy could see her mother banging her head against a rock in despair.
They were taken by road 250 miles north to Port Hedland, by ship to Fremantle and road again to Moore River, a settlement north of Perth. It was a cheerless internment camp for mixed-race Aboriginal children, not unlike Oliver Twist’s workhouse. Any attempt at escape was punished with solitary confinement.
They had been there only one night when Molly woke the younger girls before dawn during a storm and told them that they were going to walk home to Jigalong, following the rabbit-proof fence, a landmark they had known all their lives.
“We’re gunna walk all the way?” asked Daisy. “Yes,” came her sister’s reply.
Their first challenge was to cross the flooded river. The girls had no map or compass, but they had been brought up with native bush skills. They crossed wet grass, sand dunes and heathlands, and they slept in rabbit burrows – after first catching, cooking and eating the previous inhabitants.
In the scorching desert of the Outback, two Aboriginal men gave them a lizard known as a goanna and a kangaroo tail, while on another occasion they caught and ate a feral cat. When their lacerated legs were weary, sore or infected by grass cuts, they gave each other piggyback rides.
Meanwhile, a statewide alert had been issued for their recapture, and when they saw an aircraft swooping overhead they dived into a honeysuckle bush known as a banksia tree.
Once the girls found the rabbitproof fence, they knew that they simply had to walk north. But they still had 500 miles to go. At the town of Wiluna, on the edge of the Western Desert, Gracie peeled off, but she was captured and returned to the Moore River settlement. Gracie later married and had six children; she died in 1983 without ever having returned to Jigalong or been reunited with her fellow travellers.
Eventually Daisy and Molly, close to collapse from starvation, dehydration and exhaustion, came across maintenance workers on the fence, who allowed them to take turns riding a camel the rest of the way to Jigalong.
“Everyone happy,” recalled Daisy of their return. “Proper crying.” Their epic odyssey had taken almost nine weeks.
She was born Daisy Burungu at Jigalong, on the edge of the Gibson Desert, in 1923. Her mother was a member of the Mardudjara people; her father, Thomas Craig, was an Englishborn fence inspector who sired several children with local women. Other than her brief stay at Moore River, Daisy had no formal education.
After returning to Jigalong, Molly became a domestic help and married Tom Kelly, an Aboriginal stockman, with whom she had two daughters; Daisy helped to deliver the older one, Doris, whose Aboriginal name was Nugi Garimara and who was born prematurely.
Molly was captured again in 1940 with her daughters and taken once more to Moore River. She escaped the following year but had to leave Doris, aged four, in the care of relatives, who transferred her to a Christian mission. There she was brought up to believe that her mother had deliberately abandoned her.
In 1962 Doris traced her mother and her aunt; in conversations with Molly and Daisy over the next three decades she gradually learnt the truth, verifying the facts using official records. Her book Follow the Rabbitproof Fence was published in 1996.
When Noyce, the Australian-born director of such action-packed Harrison Ford films as Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, received the screenplay at his Hollywood offices, his first instinct was one of disbelief.
“How could I know?” he said, when the film was released. “When I grew up, in the Fifties, there was no history about black Australia being taught at schools, no books, no discussion. The history books started with the time of British settlement and everything was from the point of view of white colonisers.”
When the world premiere of Rabbit-proof Fence, which boasted charismatic performances by three Aboriginal children and an evocative score by Peter Gabriel, was held in Jigalong, it was the first time that many local people had seen a film on a big screen.
Over the following months the film, marketed with the line “What if the government kidnapped your daughter?”, made an enormous impact on audiences around the world, taking the Audience Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival and moving hardened critics to tears.
Not only did it deal with the fundamental theme of the primal return to the mother, it also had a wealth of subtexts such as feminism, in the way that Aboriginal society is a matriarchal one; oppression of identity, when the children are beaten for speaking in their native tongue; and genocide, the project at the heart of Australian nationhood as the authorities discuss the need to “breed out” the half-caste third race.
The practice of resettlement continued until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did an official report by the national inquiry into the stolen generation publicly acknowledge that it had ever existed.
Although the report was criticised by some white commentators as an exaggeration, Noyce told The Daily Telegraph that to Aboriginal people it was in fact “a whitewash” and the truth was “much, much worse”.
In 2008 the Australian government apologised to the “stolen generations”.
Meanwhile, having been reunited with her mother, Daisy grew up and married a station hand called Kadibil. Molly died in 2004, while her daughter Doris died in 2014.
Daisy Kadibil had a son and three daughters.
Daisy Kadibil, born 1923, died April 2018