Praise for The Cherry Picker’s Daughter

A wonderful yarn by an Aboriginal Elder about a bygone way of life.

— Melissa Lucashenko, award-winning Goorie author, 2019 Miles Franklin award winner

The opening of this memoir is grounded in an acute sense of place and belonging. Kerry tells the reader: ‘Our families have been here for a long, long time, right from the very start’. This unbroken connection to place and people permeates the narrative as Kerry recalls a life of tremendous difficulty and stress, always with a sense of unflappability, courage, determination and humour. ‘You gotta laugh!’ is a mantra that appears throughout the work…

The Cherry-Picker’s Daughter is the book that all Australia needs to read for its testimony to courage, determination and resilience; and for what it says about activism that takes place a long way from public venues and media. As the statement at the front makes clear: This book is dedicated to Mummy. The life of Joyce Hutchings should signal a reassessment of the way Aboriginal activism has been viewed to date.

— Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri writer and academic

If you were touched by Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, you’ll treasure this book. The exquisite prose is simple, matter-of-fact yet intimate, like a child whispering secrets to a friend. Aunty Kerry, a Wiradjuri elder, an activist, poet and educator, sadly passed in July, adding poignancy. Everyone should read this, and ponder how we unjustly trap people within our judgements.

— Robert O’Hearn, Booktopia

The Cherry Picker’s Daughter: a childhood memoir brings alive a true story of a blended Koori family in New South Wales in the 1950s through the eyes of a young daughter, the author. A hardworking Koori family, ‘river people’, building bridges across rivers, love, towns, racism, truths and intergenerational trauma. The family’s survival shaped by seasonal fruit-picking and a constant fear of the ‘the welfare’s’ power to remove the children.

— Charmaine Papertalk Green, poet, writer and artist

Thank you, Kerry, for sharing your story—so much pain and hurt, but such life-affirming strength and love too.

— Kate Grenville AO, award-winning author

Kids bounce into this world with such capacity for hope and love and attachment; how painful it was to read the ways this was betrayed by an Australia that I wish had known better. This memoir felt important in my hands, historical, vital—and joyful. It described a childhood I needed to know, and filled me with deepest admiration and respect. I cried many tears for Kerry Reed-Gilbert and was so grateful for her wonderful Mummy.

— Sofie Laguna, award-winning author

An unflinching memoir of courage and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds by a remarkable Wiradjuri woman, that speaks to her spirit and strength and to the love and courage of the woman who raised her. An important book for all Australians.

— Joy Rhoades, author

At its heart, [The Cherry Picker’s Daughter] is primarily a story of mothers and daughters both present and absent. This is a story about the fearlessness of Indigenous women; a stirring ode to a woman who worked to the bone to care for her children and to protect them as best she could from a world that threatened, ostracised and abused them. To borrow from Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword, ‘the fighting spirit of senior Wiradjuri women is a mighty thing’.

— Georgia Brough, ArtsHub