In this honest and frank account, Eualeyai and Kamillaroi woman, academic and award-winning author Larissa Behrendt looks at Rabbit-Proof Fence, the film adapted from Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

The film, set in the 1930s and based on a true story, tells of three Aboriginal girls aged between eight and fourteen, who were forcibly removed from their families to be trained as domestic servants. The girls escaped and, with authorities chasing them all the way, walked 1500 miles across the desert to get back home. Behrendt finds many resonances in this story of the need and desire to find a home, a sense of place and a sense of self, universal desires intensified for Aboriginal people taken from their families, making that search for home, that need to feel complete, extremely powerful.