The director of Rabbit-Proof Fence was Phillip Noyce, an Australian film director born in 1950. This means that he lived through the time when Australians were still deeply troubled by Native Australian racial divisions, and witnessed the reform that roughly coincided with the American Civil Rights Movement.
In many of Noyce's films, including this one, he includes the act of espionage from a greater governmental force. The events in Rabbit-Proof Fence do not make up a plot dependent on espionage, but viewers do see that Mr. Neville is working for a government that has a bigger and secretive agenda for the population of Native Australians living in the country. Growing up, Noyce was deeply influenced by the wartime stories of his father in World War II, who experienced many of these things.
Noyce, although white, fought and still fights for the rights of the population of Native Australians. Like in America, white settlers tried to dislocate natives so that they could have their own land, and placed natives on what they called "Reservations". Despite the fancy title, these were places of poverty, and more closely and bluntly resembled internment camps.
After the release of Rabbit-Proof Fence, the Australian Government released a statement claiming that they did not treat Native Australians as harshly as the film portrayed. Noyce, with his activist attitude, told them not continue to deny the fact that they abused natives, but to simply apologize. In many ways, Rabbit-Proof Fence was Noyce's way of showing the Australian public of the crimes of the past, and how it is time to move on from a segregationist attitude because of its negative effects of the people that are segregated.
