All countries have their shame. As individuals and nations, we all have dark secrets that we refuse to talk about, but few are as well hidden as the way Australia's indigenous people have been treated by white settlers since the colonization of the continent in 1788. Alongside this history, there has been a complex and unfavorable portrayal of Aboriginal people in Australian and global media. Although the films Walkabout (1970) and Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) belong to two distinct eras of Australian history and appear very different, both discuss the problematic treatment of Aboriginal people throughout history and today. These films show how a patriarchal and Western vision fictionalizes the reality of Indigenous life, distorts the values ​​of Indigenous culture, and dehumanizes people of color. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay 1993 represents a historic cultural shift in Australia. The Mabo land rights case that took place that year was based on the claim that Australia was legitimately colonized by Europeans because no one lived there or owned the land, which is the concept of Terra Nullius. Of course, that was wrong. Aboriginal people inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years before white settlers appeared. After ten years of legal battles, the court ruled in favor of the Native plaintiffs and passed the Native Title Act. Not only did this give the Aboriginal people one million square kilometers of land, approximately fifteen percent of the country, but it also caused a cultural shift in the Australian population's perception of Aboriginal people (Williams, 109-110). Walkabout and Rabbit Proof Fence are indicative of this cultural shift, one belonging to the pre-mabo culture while the other belongs to the more open post-mabo culture. Especially when you consider the stories these films tell and their production separately, it's clear how Australia and the world are changing their views of Indigenous people. The story of Molly, Daisy and Gracie, the protagonists of Rabbit Proof Fence, and the "Stolen Generation" as a whole is essentially a generation of well-intentioned cultural superiority. In an early scene of the film, MAO Neville, protector in leader of the Aborigines, described his plan to a group of white society women. As his title suggests, and as the government of the time maintained, it was his duty to remove mixed-race children, known as "half-castes." ”, and placing them in colonies supposedly created for their own good. The settlers justified this by dehumanizing the Indigenous people and deliberately portraying their way of life as dangerous and barbaric (Pascal Neville, et al.). Western society in general, believe that they must protect Aboriginal people and other indigenous people from themselves. Mr. Neville plays a semi-fatherly role, while the film implies that the Aboriginal characters live in a matriarchal world. We everywhere are expected to equate Indigenous people with femininity and matriarchy. The three main characters are women whose fathers are absent, and in the brief glimpses we see of their home in Jigalong, it appears that the settlement is populated entirely by women. In one of the film's first scenes, the main protagonist, Molly, directly tells a fence maintenance worker, "This is our side." This is the country of women. For Molly, at least, closure isn't justa simple fence, but a dividing line, protecting “us”, the Aboriginal people, from “them”, the Europeans who sought to destroy their way of life. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, we see the fence begin to become an important symbol. The fence that guides them home can also be seen as a symbol for all mixed race children. It is, as Doris Pilkington Garimara describes it, “a typical white response to a problem of their own making.” The settlers brought rabbits to Australia and prospered, so they built a huge fence dividing the country in two to protect the farmland. These settlers also brought disease, violence and rape to Australia and in the process many mixed-race children were born. In an attempt to reinforce white supremacy in an increasingly mixed-race society, these white settlers resorted to violence; they further brutalized indigenous communities, suppressed their culture, and attempted to slowly eliminate all signs of indigenous existence. In Rabbit Proof Fence, the fathers of the mixed-race protagonists are workers on the fence. Given the prevalence of rape and sexual violence against Aboriginal women, it can be assumed that these men contributed both to what they saw as the "problem" of a biracial Australian population through the fact that they generated the protagonists and the “solution” of the separation barrier through their profession. Yet the fence provides a lifeline for the girls; it’s an irreconcilable part of them. As they touch a fence post, a familiar theme swells in the score and the camera cuts back to the mother and grandmother touching the same fence singing for their lost children (Williams 117-120). However, the fence, as a symbol of patriarchal colonialism, is fallible. In one of the film's climactic scenes, Molly and Daisy lose track of the fence at a place where it broke. As the girls grow weaker, a bird that had previously been pointed out by their grandmother flies overhead to guide them home. Here we see the fallibility of patriarchy and protection of indigenous people, and therefore of matriarchy. This can be interpreted as indigenous spirituality and maternal protection coming forward to save girls in their time of need. Although she is portrayed as a young girl in need of protection from both the government and her family, Molly, the eldest daughter. and main protagonist, is actually close to the age of maturity for girls historically recognized in indigenous culture(Cain). She was engaged and would marry shortly after returning to Jigalong. Perhaps this wasn't so much an intentional change to the film as a Western misunderstanding. Regardless, it is Western myopia and not his objective age that is responsible for much of his mistreatment and inaccuracies in his portrayal. As we move forward in time to the filming of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, we continue to see this infantilization, this suppression of action and ability. By showing that the Native is only capable of conversing with the child and not with the “proper and civilized” young woman, the film implies that the Native is also a child. This is emphasized when the little boy plays with toy soldiers and gives one to the Native after his sister asks him, "Why don't you share, I suspect he doesn't have any toys of his own." . » These depictions of Indigenous people on the cusp of adulthood as mere children, or perhaps more accurately as children in their perceived primitiveness, are not only inaccurate, but offensive to their very way of life.Walkabout is, in many ways, an ethnographic film. to the extent that the Aboriginal person is “othered”, his primary function is to act and his culture is described as disappearing. It's obvious that we, the viewer, are meant to idealize his carefree life and limited understanding of the world without really caring about the problems he faces as a member of a culture that is being forcibly eradicated. One aspect of this spectacle created is the exoticization of the Australian landscape and wildlife. Walkabout, one of the first films filmed on location in central Australia, exploits viewers' ignorance of the reality of the setting and places animals from across the continent side by side, perpetuating this as truth (Sohat and Stam, 104). Roeg creates exotic landscapes populated by all kinds of lizards, snakes, birds, mammals and even camels, a species that is not even native to the continent. Furthermore, he manipulates this wildlife to present the landscape and all its inhabitants - including humans - as excessively harsh and violent. Lizards eat each other alive, snakes invade trees at all times, and vultures surround children as if waiting for them to die. At the moment when death seems most imminent, the Aborigine emerges from the heat mist, strong and mysterious, spearing lizards, dressed in a simple loincloth, his prey dead at the hip and an omnipresent swarm of flies surrounding him . The camera pans to different parts of her body, giving the viewer, under the cover of the naive eyes of white children, ample time to ogle her foreign and exotic body, claiming it from the first moments on screen as an oddity , an object for our greatest pleasure. Walkabout was one of the first films to feature a real Aboriginal actor, David Gulpilil, just three years after the blackface tradition ended in Australia (Walker, 98). Roeg chose Gulpilil not for his acting skills, but for his reputation as a dancer. He was basically hired just for his body. Gulpilil spoke very little English when he was cast; he and the director communicated through improvised sign language and the few common words they could share, similar to how the character Gulpilil converses with the boy in the film (Salwolke, 20). Additionally, even though he talks a lot in Walkabout, there are no subtitles which render all of Gulpilil's dialogue meaningless, nothing more than "wild chatter". Structured absences are intentional exclusions of minorities, with specific respect in this case for their language. Stam and Spence assert that "...the absence of the language of the colonized is also symptomatic of colonialist attitudes...the languages ​​spoken by 'Third World' peoples are often reduced to an incomprehensible jumble of background murmurs." ..” (Walker, 93 years old). This excellent example of structured absence promotes the idea that the Gulpilil Native is meant to be seen as a “creature” of action. Throughout the film, Gulpilil's character seems thoughtless, emotionless, and simply motivated by action: a key element of the "romantic preservation" of ethnographic film (Rony, 104). We are not even allowed to understand what little he says. He is not given any real personality or identity. Even the lack of a name for his character forces those wishing to discuss the film at length to refer to him simply by his race. Gulpilil might as well be playing himself, and perhaps that is the direction he was given (Rony, 118). Much of his screen presence is devoted to acts of "barbarism", killing and dismembering prey. Even the height of the character's emotion, where heseems to plead for the girls' understanding and affection, is conveyed through his physical prowess in the form of dance. This reiterates his superficial existence as a physical, not intellectual, being. After being attacked by hunters and exposed to guns for probably the first time, we are immersed in the thought process of the young native as he realizes that his culture is on the verge of extinction. It is intentionally a chaotic and unsettling place, full of repeated graphic images of death and decay. He lies motionless, seemingly lifeless on a mound of bones and rises, naked, painted skeletal to try to persuade the white children to stay with him, and when that fails, he dies. Although it is unclear whether he died of exhaustion, grief, or suicide, his death, and the supposed death of his culture, is intended to assuage any public fears of the "threat" of predominance of non-Western culture. In death, the audience and other characters in the story can continue to objectify him within a static, unchanging framework (Rony, 102). Additionally, the imagery of this death, positioned in a tree with arms outstretched, is instantly reminiscent of the imagery of the messiah on the crucifix, perhaps implying that his sacrifice was necessary to save the white children. The Native, as we are obliged to call him, is truly an idealized figure preserved in the young girl's memory. In the "epilogue" of the film, we see the girl as a young housewife a few years later. As her husband comes home to tell her about the tragedy at his office, her eyes glaze over and she begins to dream of her experience in the outback. However, the scene she describes never happened. This would have been contrary to her character, but the memory she chooses to escape to is idealized and free from the restrictive constructs of civilized society. She depicts a younger self lounging by a pool, in which Gulpilil swims naked, as strong and silent in death as in life. Walkabout clearly tells us that the Indigenous person, both as a character and in general, belongs at the bottom of the hierarchy of gaze and therefore of the global power structure (Kaplan, 64-65). If the act of looking is seen as a statement of power and ownership, then the relationships of looking in Walkabout are very complex (Sturken and Cartwright, 76). Shortly after the presentation of the native boy, we see a long shot of the young native's buttocks. He slowly turns to see if the white children are following him and the camera remains at waist level, his genitals separated from our direct view by nothing but a loincloth. We, the viewer, are meant to interpret this as the girl's gaze, as she shyly looks away and blushes in the following shot. This interaction is nothing more than healthy heterosexual curiosity. Compare this to the scene later in the film where the young native sees the white girl changing. His eyes widen and he begins a frenzied, almost animalistic "mating dance" (as the director himself calls it) while the girl cowers, covering her bare chest and trying to hide from him ( Gillard). Although similar to the previous scene, it is clear from these interactions that the right to look in a way that is depicted uncritically belongs to the white woman. However, the scene where the young woman swims, naked and serene in a pool of water, highlights the dominant male gaze of this film. Even if the three female characters in the film will be subjected to this sexualized gaze, it is this scene that seems the most disturbing to me. The young woman's omnipresent modesty and the idea that she isalone gives this minute of full-frontal nudity a strange, voyeuristic feeling. Through the eyes of the heterosexual, white director and cinematographer, we see her as an object. Despite this, she is still allowed to look at the black man in a way that he is not allowed to look at her. The Aboriginal person is placed at the bottom of this power structure. He is deprived of his individual identity, largely dehumanized and put on display for the sake of financial gain. The story of Molly, Gracie and Daisy has also been twisted in order to make it appropriate for a wider audience and, in turn, make it more accessible. more commercial success. Walk the Rabbit Proof Fence, written by Doris Pilkington Garimara, Molly's daughter, is the inspiration for the film Rabbit Proof Fence. Despite this, upon seeing the film, Molly declared that it was "not her life". She went on to explain that she meant that her life did not end with this triumphant return to her home and family in Jigalong. The film mentions, in simple text on a blank screen, that Molly and Daisy would be recaptured, that they would walk home with Molly's baby in her arms, and that her daughter would eventually be taken to Moore River as well. However, in this part of the story, most of his life is reduced to ten seconds, added at the end of the film. The story was obviously also dramatized in order to translate well to the big screen. Real-life stories, especially those of Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, rarely contain dramatic moments hiding in the woods from men who hunt you even once, let alone four times. Niils always contains satisfying and lasting reunions. The complex lives of these young women lacked the careful, succinct story necessary for cinematic success. Rabbit Proof Fence also uses structured absence under the guise of public comfort. These actresses begin the film speaking only in their native dialect. With subtitles, Molly sets some of the historical and personal context of the film. However, soon after, all the native characters switch to English. Once the three girls are brought to the Moore River Colony, one of the women working there makes a point of telling them that "only the Queen's English is spoken here...none of those chatter” although they were, and she would continue to talk. English even after escaping. Not only is this a plot hole, but it also westernizes and diminishes the specific, individualized pain of the Australian Aborigines and these three women in particular. Noyce assumed, perhaps correctly, that the majority of the audience would be white, would not speak the indigenous language, and would be disturbed by having to read two hours of subtitles. This specific knowledge of white audiences and desire to pander to them is antithetical to Noyce's goal of creating an open and honest dialogue about the "Stolen Generation" and the treatment of indigenous people in general. Many also claim that the real violence of that era, the deplorable conditions of the Moore River Colony, and widespread rape and sexual assault were glossed over in order to achieve a PG rating and broaden audiences (Simmons, 45- 46). The only direct reference to the prevalence of sexual violence against Indigenous women is in a scene with a mixed-race adult housekeeper who is "visited at night" by her white employer. The only direct allusion to his intention is his plaintive request to the girls to say, asserting that "If you leave, he will come back for me". For a young and naive audience, this could easily be misinterpreted. Considering that the sole purpose of removing children.