The film is about the journey of three half-caste sisters (children of mixed race by white construction workers and native Australian women)—Molly, Daisy, and Graci—who escaped from the settlement camps hundreds of miles away from their Outback community of Jigalong, west Australia. They were removed from their mother according to the Australian government, which, for more than half a century (from 1905 to 1971) carried out this appalling program of legalized kidnapping. ''Rabbit-Proof Fence'' is set in 1931, when the executor of that policy was A. O. Neville, a man so certain of its ultimate benefit to everyone involved that he makes Rudyard Kipling seem benign. In 1931 when malignant racial theories were in ascendancy throughout the world, Neville is the legal guardian of all Aboriginal people in that state. Convinced that the Aborigines are dying out, he is committed to hastening their disappearance by enforcing a law that forbids children of mixed marriages to marry full-blooded Aborigines. In one scene, Neville smugly pulls out a chart that supposedly proves how, in three generations after an interracial marriage, all Aboriginal characteristics have disappeared in the offspring.

Malignant racial theories also claim the white racial supremacy. According to Neville, the taken-away half-caste children would enjoy the civilized white culture. We see in the camps, they were forbidden to speak their native language and were indoctrinated into the religion and customs of the dominant white culture (food, singing, cleaning, and sleeping arrangement, etc.). Eventually they were integrated into the general population as domestic servants and farm laborers.

Racism in Australia, therefore, is played out in the relationships of culture (language and life-style), gender (men in charge vs. women as nursing or victims), and class (the mixed as servants and manual labors).

The film concludes with the success of Molly and Daisy, along the rabbit-proof fence, back to Jigalong after their mother and grandmother used a spear to scare a white male tracker away—a feminist episode to highlight a happy ending.

A possible question to discuss: How is malignant racism played out in terms of culture, gender and class?