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Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is a true story concerning the author's mother, as well as two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, in order to return to their Aboriginal families, after having been placed there in 1931. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being tracked by a white authority figure and an Aboriginal tracker.

The soundtrack to the film, called Long Walk Home: Music from the Rabbit-Proof Fence, is by Peter Gabriel.

Phillip Noyce's search for the Aboriginal actresses who star in the film is described in detail in the "Making Of" on the DVD.

Set in Western Australia during the 1930s, the film begins in the remote town of Jigalong where three children, sisters Molly, 14, and Daisy, 8, who live with their mother and grandmother, and the cousin Gracie, 10. The town lies along the northern part of Australia's rabbit-proof fence, which runs for several thousand miles.

Thousands of miles away, the "protector" of Western Australian Aborigines, A.O. Neville, signs an order to relocate the three girls to his re-education camp. The children are referred to by Neville as "half-castes", having one white and one black parent. Neville's reasoning is that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia are a danger to themselves and must be bred out of existence. The children are forcibly taken from Jigalong and taken to the camp at Moore River to the south. Half-castes that are of a certain age live at the camps and are taught to become servants for the whites living in Australia.

Molly, Gracie, and Daisy decide to walk back home to Jigalong and escape the camp. An Aboriginal tracker, Moodoo, is called in to find them. However, the girls are well versed in disguising their tracks. They evade Moodoo several times, receiving aid from strangers in the harsh Australian country they travel. They eventually find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing that they can follow it north to Jigalong. Neville soon figures out their motive and sends Moodoo and a local constable, Riggs, after them. However, though he is an experienced tracker, Moodoo is unable to find them. Neville spreads word that Gracie's mother is waiting for her in the town of Wiluna who finds its way to a man who "helps" the girls who then tells Gracie about her mother and that they can get to Wiluna by train, causing her to later break off from the group and attempting to go to Wiluna by train. Molly and Daisy soon walk after her, finding her at a train depot. They are not reunited however, as Riggs appears and Gracie is re-captured. Knowing they are helpless to aide her, Molly and Daisy continue on.



After several more weeks of following the fence, eluding their trackers and trekking through a vast expanse of open desert, the two sisters arrive close to Jigalong, it being implied that their mother and grandmother guided them there through ritual chanting. Though Riggs is waiting there, the town's women have been chanting heavily in the brush, a ritual that Riggs seems frightened of. As he moves through the brush looking for the girls, he encounters two of the women, Molly's and Daisy's mother and grandmother, one, their mother, brandishing a sharpened stick. Riggs is frightened away and Molly and Daisy find their family.

The epilogue of the film shows recent footage of Molly and Daisy. Molly explains that Gracie died by then; that she had never got to go back to Jigalong. Molly also states that she had her own two daughters who were taken from her and how she successfully escaped with one, Annabelle, in much the same manner as in her childhood; she walked the length of the fence back home. But Annabelle, when she was 3 years old, was taken away, much like her mother. Molly never saw her again. In closing, Molly says that she and Daisy "...Will never go back to Moore River. Never."