Belonging to Family and Place in Peter

Belonging to Family and Place

In Peter Skrzynecki's Poems and Rabbit-Proof Fence

Belonging is a powerful motivator, and can give people the strength to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. The sense of belonging derives from warmth, love, and protection by one's family or a place that one is attached to. We belong to our communities by virtue of memory, longstanding participation in the life of a place or a group of people (Ilcan 2002). As Skrzynecki's poetry so effectively demonstrates, we can even belong to places that do not exist anymore, and we can cherish a sense of belonging for a community that has changed radically or even ceased to be. The film Rabbit-Proof Fence also illustrates the power of belonging in the family and culture of origin even when one's culture is treated as alien and unwanted by the dominant population (Read 2000). Below, I will discuss some of the ways in which belonging is played out in the poems "Jeogla" and "Crossing the Red Sea," and in Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Molly's character in Rabbit-Proof Fence deals the most closely and consciously with belonging. From the first scenes of the film, she is given the most feedback about what it would mean to belong to her home culture. She is the one who sights the hunted lizard, she is the one whose spirit bird appears in the sky pointed out by her mother, she is the one for whom a marriage has already been arranged that will further cement her belonging in the Jigalong community. Gracie's character deals with belonging in somewhat more conflicted ways. Gracie is the last of the girls to really latch on to the idea of escaping from the Moore River settlement house. Because the journey does not return her to her own mother, Gracie is not sure if she really belongs with Molly and Daisy, so she is not as fully committed to going home to Jigalong.

The characters' actions are not the only elements of Rabbit-Proof Fence that convey a sense of belonging. The language used by the Aboriginal characters and the costume choices towards the end of the film also provide clues to where the girls believe they belong, and what that belonging means. Belonging in the white Australian world clearly means speaking English and wearing clean, starched western-style clothing. In the scenes in which the girls are with the community they truly belong to, they speak their native language (Martu Wangka) and wear worn-in clothing that has been refashioned to be more practical in the bush. Even if this is an autobiographical film, the filmmakers' deliberate choices call our attention to the girls' sense of belonging in both Moore River and Jigalong.

The poems "Crossing the Red Sea" and "Jeogla" describe the 'longing' part of belonging. Writing about the immigrant experience in "Crossing the Red Sea," Skrzynecki invokes Biblical imagery that makes his parents and their shipmates into Israelites fleeing Pharaoh for the promised land. His personification of the migrants as a group -- "Themselves a landscape" -- shows that they carry their place of belonging with them. In the same way that the half-caste children in Rabbit-Proof Fence are neither white nor "colored," Skrzynecki's migrants are "neither master nor slave." The shipmates' growing sense of community is given poetic life as they begin to share their stories of hardship and joy, and their hopes for the new land, after "Silence fell from its shackles." By contrast, "Jeogla" conveys a sense of empty nostalgia for a place known intimately that no longer exists today. The poet explicitly asks "where is the house that I once lived in?" The place of memory has fallen into disuse and been reclaimed by nature -- the purple flowers "trying to escape" and the rusted axe are the most poignant examples of this theme.