Doris Pilkington

Doris Pilkington Garimara was born in 1937 at the Balfour Downs Station near Jigalong, her family’s ancestral home. As a young girl, Doris and her baby sister Anabelle were removed from their home while their mother, Molly, was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy. They were sent—just as their mother had been—to the Moore River Native Settlement in order to be “properly” educated and kept isolated from their indigenous family. Molly joined her daughters at the camp, but after just a year there she absconded from the camp once again, with Doris’s younger sister Anabelle in tow. Doris was left behind with her aunt Daisy—who had, just like her sister Molly, been sent back to the camp as an adult. Doris grew up believing that her mother had given her away, and the truth emerged in snippets as she grew into adulthood. Working as a nurse and raising six children, Doris began to compile her aunt’s stories (and, eventually, once they were reunited in the 1960s, her mother’s) and composed a series of books describing the torment of the Stolen Generations—the children of Australian Aboriginal descent, especially children of mixed race, who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and forced into internment camps. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is Garimara’s best-known book, having been adapted into a 2002 film starring Kenneth Branagh. Garimara passed at the age of 76 in Perth, Australia, due to complications from ovarian cancer.