Beyond the pale

Philip Noyce has found an extraordinary story to tell in the outback of Depression-era Australia in the 1930s. But he's walked away from the more interesting part of it. Maybe he'll find my judgment harsh. His account of three aboriginal children trekking 1,200 miles over highly unfriendly terrain to get back to their parents would seem to be where the drama lies. But it's not - or not quite.

The man who sent them on their obsessive quest for the family from which he had "stolen" them is a figure of far more psychological interest and political controversy.

Played by Kenneth Branagh with oiled hair and banker's suits, he was a real-life English immigrant and Australian bureaucrat called AO Neville. The aboriginals understandably confused his name with Devil. He was their official Protector, a title now fatally loaded with Third Reich connotations.

Branagh correctly plays him not so much as a wicked man but a self-deluded one. Neville believed in transporting halfcaste children, abandoned by white fathers, a thousand miles and more to an isolated desert facility where English was enforced, their folkways were eroded and their "aboriginality" was "bred out" over three generations of intermarriage until they were virtual "whites."

The race problem could thus be solved by reducing it to vanishing point. Crude and maybe crackpot: but philanthropic in intent, if cruel in practice. The Australian government continued to apply it right up to 1970.

I wish the film had told us more, much more, about it. But, except intermittently, Noyce leads us away from the balefully fascinating and influential Neville. He hooks the story onto the populist option: the child trio, sisters Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), aged 14 and eight respectively and cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan), aged 10.

Early in their freedom march, they realise the wire fence running from north to south across Australia to keep rabbits off the farm crops will lead them back to campfire, wattle hut and mothers.

On their bare heels comes an aboriginal tracker played by the same David Gulpilil whose numinous instincts brought salvation to an abandoned pair of white children in Nic Roeg's Walkabout 32 years ago.

Now in his mid-fifties, his cheeks pleated into furrows of weathered experience but his hair still wavy and black, Gulpilil continues to irradiate his scenes with mute but ascendant authority. He's given disappointingly little to do, though, and drops out of view after letting respect for the fugitives' hard trekking overrule his own pride in the pursuit.

All, therefore, depends on the children, and how they fare. The three girls don't have to act, only be themselves: this they do satisfactorily. The trouble for dramatic purposes is, everyone they run across is an ally, feeds them, gives them warm cast-offs, shows them how to frustrate Neville's ambush plans.