Born: 1937, Australia
Died: 10 April 2014
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Nugi Garimara, Doris Pilkington
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
As in other countries where white colonisers sought to exterminate not only Indigenous populations, but also their cultures, Australian history features a dark chapter: the Stolen Generation. This refers to a decades-long governmental practice of essentially kidnapping Aboriginal children from their families and forcing them into “schools” where they were often mistreated and their cultures and languages indoctrinated out of them. One of the best-known accounts of these experiences is Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996), a non-fiction book written by Doris Pilkington Garimara about the escape from such an institution by her mother, Molly Craig, Molly’s half-sister Daisy and their cousin, Gracie. The girls were aged around 8 to 14 at the time and, although Molly and Daisy made it home after more than two months travelling by foot, Gracie gave up, was recaptured, and never returned home. The book was adapted into an award-winning 2002 film, Rabbit-Proof Fence.