Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence

Doris Pilkington Garimara was born Nugi Garimara on the Balfour Downs Station near Jigalong, Australia in 1937. When she was about four years old, she was taken from her mother by the government and raised at the Moore River Native Settlement, which was an internment camp for cross-breed Aboriginal children. She was transferred to a Christian mission where she was educated, but also taught that her Aboriginal culture was evil. She grew up believing that her mother deliberately abandoned her, but finally reunited with her mother at the age of 25. She enrolled in the nursing aide training program at Royal Perth Hospital. She later studied journalism at Curtin University. She also worked as a nursing aide, a documentary film-maker, and a journalist.

Her book, Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter, won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, which was published in 1991. Her 1996 book, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, is the story of her mother and two other Aboriginal girls who escaped from the Moore River Native Settlement and traveled for nine weeks to return to their family. It was later made into a 2002 film called Rabbit-Proof Fence. The sequel, Under the Windamarra Tree, continues her mother's story into adulthood. Pilkington Garimara died of ovarian cancer on April 10, 2014 at the age of 76.

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