Doris Pilkington Garimara
1937–
One day in a clearing close to the fence, the girls spied an emu and a family of six tiny black and white striped chicks strolling along behind him. While Daisy stood perfectly still behind some trees, Molly and Gracie chased and captured a chick each. The old man emu turned on them but gave up when he remembered that the other four chicks were unprotected.
The three girls waited in the seclusion of the small acacia bushes to see if anyone would come to investigate the commotion, but no one appeared, so they plucked and cooked the emu chicks for supper, accompanied by damper and washed down with black bitter tea; there was no sugar left.
This excerpt is from a book called The Rabbit-Proof Fence, written by Doris Pilkington. Daisy and Gracie were Doris’s aunts. The girl named Molly grew up to be Doris’s mother. Long before that happened, the three cousins had an escapade they would always remember. Doris later heard the story from her aunt and wrote it down. Another book, Under the Wintamarra Tree, tells about her own unusual and harrowing youth.
“I began writing on a typewriter,” Doris said. “I had to teach myself with two fingers.” Family stories are often the first place a writer looks for inspiration, but few writers have material to match Doris’s.
Doris’s family lived in Australia, members of the Mardu group of aboriginal people who have inhabited the “bush” in the Pilbara region for centuries.
In 1788, long before Doris’s story begins, the first white people settled in Australia—seven boatloads of convicts transported from England, watched over by red-coated soldiers. Although the English were delighted to claim this new land ahead of the French or the Dutch, they paid little attention to the indigenous people who had been living there for at least twenty thousand years.
Arthur Phillip, governor of the penal colony, came up with the name ab origine—Latin for “original,” or “first”—ironically ignoring the implication that the natives had prior claim to the land. Instead, the British government preferred to ignore the existence of the entire native population.
Many of the convicts had been transported from England for the crime of poaching (shooting or snaring game on land not their own). But when they arrived in Sydney Cove, no one thought twice about hunting and fishing on territory that was already inhabited. The “savages” were considered to be “mischievous” when they demanded, or simply took, what they assumed was their due from the game or fish the English had shot or netted.
The aboriginals’ weapons were sticks and stones, or spears held together with tree gum. The only thing they killed was their dinners—kangaroos, emus, and fish. Until the arrival of the British, not one of them owned—or had ever seen—a gun. It was the guns that allowed the newcomers to tame these “savages” and to push them out of the way, slowly taking over the valuable coastal regions and lush farmland for themselves.
As time went by, white farmers and ranchers had more to worry about than displacing the aboriginals. Those five rabbits, originally brought over from England in 1787 with the First Fleet, had adapted happily to the climate and vegetation in the southern hemisphere. They had flourished, and reproduced so rapidly that by the early 1900’s there were millions of them plaguing the continent, causing serious damage to crops. Their attempted solution was to build barriers to protect Western Australia from the intruding vermin.
For the indigenous people living in the Australian bush in 1901, the construction of a “rabbit-proof” fence cutting across the country north to south, from sea to sea, must have caused confusion and alarm. Their territory had already shrunk because of the white man’s cities and farms. Now it was being cut up into fenced pieces as well. Even well-meaning white landowners apparently saw no irony when they offered “camps” as safe havens for the nomadic tribes who were threatened by the white man’s encroaching civilization. But the camps made the Mardu and other kinship groups more vulnerable to another threat: their families could be found and dispersed more easily.
By the time the rabbit-proof fences, the longest in the world, were finally completed in 1907, the rabbits had easily crossed the boundary and were prolific on both sides. Government policy failed to restrain rabbits, but was far more successful in controlling the lives of human children. While the fence was being built against pesky rabbits, the Aborigines Act of 1905 was passed in Western Australia. This law, in an effort to place controls on the aboriginal population, determined that any child having one white parent and one dark-skinned aboriginal parent—a “half-caste”—could be forcibly removed from his or her family and placed in a Native Settlement to be educated. The government’s hope was to prevent the expansion of a third race. The white men who enforced this policy were content to let full-blood aboriginal children remain in the care of their parents, but those with “mixed blood” were to be contained in state-run institutions, in the hope that they would eventually forget their heritage and native language and grow up as whole-hearted products of a white education. It was further intended that with careful monitoring of marriages and birthing, it would be possible to “breed out the colour” (a popular political term at the time) of the descendents of the half-caste population. The children taken from their families during this time became known as “the Stolen Generations.” These were the dreadful years when both Molly and her daughter Doris were born.
The Rabbit-Proof Fence tells us that Molly’s life began peacefully, in the midst of a large extended family. Her father, Thomas Craig, was a white man who worked as an inspector on the famous fence. Thomas had moved away, but Molly’s mother, Maude (affectionately called Bambaru in Doris’s memoir), had many siblings and cousins to help raise her children. “Daisy and Gracie were called muda-muda because, like Molly, their skin was not as dark as the other Mardu children. Their mothers were Molly’s aunts. Their fathers were [also] white stockmen.” Doris explains that being muda-muda often meant feeling like an outsider, even in their own camp.
Along with family memories, Doris introduces the reader to a feast of details about the traditions of the bush people, the beautiful landscape of Western Australia, how food was gathered and prepared, observations of animals and insects, and a familiarity with the flowers, bushes, and trees that signal the passage of the seasons. Sprinkled throughout her books, Doris uses many words of Mardu wangka, the language of her people, and helpfully provides a glossary, so the reader is certain to understand.
Molly and her cousin Gracie … could join the women in the search for bush fruit and vegetables and digging for goannas, honey ants and longkis, known also as bardies, a tasty grub found in the roots of the Acacia trees. They used the digging stick as their main tool. If it was needed for protection, the same stick, or wana, was used as a weapon. Boys used boomerangs and spears when hunting emus, kangaroos, and wild turkeys. Nobody had guns.
But the white men (or wudgebulla in the Mardu language) had guns, and used them to control the aboriginals—to round them up, to decide where they should live, who they should marry, and to reclaim whichever children they thought would take Australia one step closer to being an all-white country.
Molly was a durn-durn, a girl who had reached puberty. She would already have been married, except that the man she’d been promised to had selected a different bride instead. She was fourteen on the terrible day when her life changed forever.
Mr. A. O. Neville, was the official Chief Protector of Aborigines, and, through the Act of 1905, legal guardian of all aboriginal children. Under his orders, an officer named Constable Riggs arrived at Molly’s family camp near Jigalong. He had come to take “three half-caste girls” to the Moore River Native Settlement. Molly, with her cousin Gracie and sister Daisy, was swiftly removed from the only community she’d ever known.
“A high pitched wail broke out” as they departed. “The cries of agonized mothers … and the deep sobs of grandfathers, uncles and cousins filled the air.… Behind them, those remaining in the camp found strong sharp objects and gashed themselves and inflicted wounds to their heads and bodies as an expression of sorrow. This reaction to their children’s abduction showed that the family were now in mourning.”
Mr. Neville seems to have truly believed that once the Mardu of mixed blood understood the white man’s intentions, they would be grateful for the opportunity to relinquish the nomadic life they’d grown up with. He later wrote: “The native must be helped in spite of himself! Even if a measure of discipline is necessary, it must be applied, but it can be applied in such a way as to appear to be gentle persuasion … the end in view will justify the means employed.” Mr. Neville’s definition of “gentle persuasion” certainly did not coincide with that of Molly’s family.
Included in Doris’s book are copies of several documents and telegrams written by various officials. One letter, from a local Superintendent at the Government Depot at Jigalong, was sadly ignored: “These children lean more towards the black than white, and on second thought, [I] think nothing would be gained in removing them.” This sentiment was echoed in a letter by an inspector in South Australia: “The natives have as much love and affection for their children as the white people have,” he wrote, adding that the government’s actions were “nothing short of kidnapping.”
Once the initial shock of separation had subsided, the girls’ journey was actually full of novelty and astonishment. They traveled for several days: by train, on a boat, through the huge city of Perth—all things they’d never done before. The trip took nearly a week, but arrival at their new home was even more dismaying than they’d expected. The children slept in dormitories, were given strange food, and were forced to wear shoes and cover themselves up with uncomfortable clothing, which felt very unnatural. The so-called caregivers did not seem to care at all.
Within a few days of arriving, Molly saw that the weather was ideal for escape. It was chilly and drizzling, meaning that the rain would soon wash their tracks away. Molly told the others to save the bread crusts usually scorned at breakfast. “They snatched up their meager possessions and put them into calico bags and pulled the long drawstrings and slung them around their necks. Each one put on two dresses, two pairs of calico bloomers and a coat. Then they left the coats behind, too heavy to carry.”
Their first obstacle was the rain-swollen river that bordered the settlement’s property. But Molly kept to the banks until they found a fallen tree that acted as a bridge. The other girls “followed her muddy footprints in silence without any questions, trusting her leadership totally.”
Once they were across, Molly said, “We go kyalie [north] now all the way.” She figured out that if they could find the rabbit-proof fence, it would lead them home to Jigalong.
On their first night out, they came across an empty rabbit burrow and Molly decided it would make a good camp.
Crouching on their knees, they dug furiously with their elbows almost touching each other’s. Very soon they managed to widen and deepen a deserted burrow to make a slightly cramped but warm dry shelter.… Crawling in one at a time, they cuddled up together in the rabbit burrow, wriggling and twisting around until they were comfortable.… The next morning very early, the three girls were awakened by the thump, thumping of rabbits from adjoining burrows.
Gracie was quick to catch and kill one, but because they had no matches to light a fire, they reluctantly abandoned the dead rabbit and kept walking.
During the next several weeks, these three brave girls passed through territories they’d never seen before: wet grasslands, more rivers, open landscape, giant marri gum trees with thick trunks, prickly dense undergrowth, white sand, tidy farms, and heath lands carpeted with blooming flowers.
They had encounters with many strangers, some who helped and some who hindered their flight. Early on, they met a pair of Mardu men returning from a hunting trip who gave them a roasted kangaroo tail to share, and the greater treasures of matches and salt, along with a warning that the officials from Moore River were still searching for the girls. “ ‘They got a Mardu policeman, a proper cheeky fullah. He flog ’em young runaway gels like you three.’ ” This was a good reminder to Molly that she’d need to be cunning to outsmart an aboriginal tracker. The gift of matches meant that the next time they caught rabbits, “they made a huge fire in a hole in the ground and cooked the rabbits in the ashes, after gutting them roughly by using a sharp point of a green stick.”
The girls faced plenty of reasons for their spirits to slip—rain, rain, and more rain, scary giant kangaroos, search planes passing overhead, tired feet, and infected sores on their legs.
Weary and weak with hunger, they one day warily approached a farmhouse and were rewarded with what seemed like a feast from a woman named Mrs. Flanagan. She also told them the dismal news that they were walking in the wrong direction! She supplied them with mutton and tomato chutney sandwiches on crusty bread, fruitcake, and sweet, milky tea. She filled brown paper bags with tea leaves, sugar, flour, and salt, along with more mutton, bread, cake, billycans, and coats. She dug out some old wheat bags to use as rain capes.
After the girls had continued on their way, Mrs. Flanagan must have worried that they wouldn’t survive. She broke her promise to Molly and reported the visit to the authorities. Molly, however, had already guessed that no one should be trusted, least of all a midgerji—a white woman. She led Daisy and Gracie in the same wrong direction for a couple of hours before doubling back to continue the right way. They used this trick whenever they neared a farmhouse—approach from one direction and leave in another, always sneaking around later to follow the right path.
At last they spied the rabbit-proof fence. Not knowing that after eight hundred kilometers they were still only halfway home, Molly “greeted the fence like a long-lost friend, touching and gripping the cold wire.… It would stand out like a beacon that would lead them out of the rugged wilderness across a strange country to their homeland.”
When the younger girls began to suffer intolerable leg pain, Molly carried them in turns. They encountered an aboriginal man riding a bicycle, who informed the searchers where he’d spotted them. But luck was again on their side; heavy rains erased their footprints so that the tracker couldn’t follow. They stopped lighting fires and took more care, knowing that even as they crept closer to home, they were still in great danger of being caught.
Gracie, the eleven-year-old, finally faltered. When a farmwife told her that her mother had come searching to a nearby town, Gracie insisted that she detour to find her mother instead of continuing to Jigalong. Molly argued fiercely to convince her of how dangerous this might be, but Gracie insisted. The girls said good-bye to each other near the train station in Wiluna. Molly and Daisy would not know until later that Gracie was captured within a day and returned to Moore River. They now pressed onward, more determined than ever to make their way home.
Molly and Daisy arrived at the house of Molly’s stepfather’s sister. They were welcomed with open arms, a real bath, and hot beef stew, though their stomachs had shrunk during their ordeal and they were not able to eat very much. After a day’s rest, they began the final part of the journey. They didn’t have to walk the last few miles home; their uncle let them ride his camel.
Nine weeks and 1,600 kilometers had passed since they had been torn away from their family. They were welcomed like long-lost heroes, but slept there only one night. Early the next morning, the whole group moved to a distant camp in the desert—no one wanted to risk the recapture of the two brave girls.
Molly managed to roam with her family and remain hidden from the authorities until she was safely beyond sixteen, the age when children were no longer eligible for the re-settlement program. She had a white sweetheart, and then a half-caste boyfriend, before an arranged marriage with an aboriginal husband named Toby. Toby and Molly worked for Bill and Mary Dunnet at the Balfour Downs station, a ranch where sheep and cattle were raised.
Baby Doris was born early and came as a surprise. No other women were around so Molly’s eight-year-old cousin helped to deliver the baby. Molly found a place under a wintamarra tree, laid down a blanket, and gave birth. She cut her own umbilical cord using a butcher’s knife.
Molly named her daughter Nugi Garimara. But her employer, Mary Dunnet, told her, “That’s a stupid name. Give her a proper name. Call her Doris.”
The new baby weighed just three pounds and looked “like a tiny skinned rabbit.” Her first bed was a shoebox and her first milk was given through an eyedropper. No one, including the doctor, expected her to live more than a few days, but she gained weight and grew into a strong little girl. She was particularly attached to her grandmother, Bambaru, who had become blind several years earlier from an affliction related to the sand that blew in the desert. Despite her very young age, Doris became her grandmother’s seeing eyes, watching the fire, gathering bush foods, and even helping to roast freshly killed kangaroos.
When Doris was three and a half, with an eight-month-old baby sister named Anna, her mother had an attack of appendicitis. Molly could not go to the local hospital because it did not treat aboriginal people. The Commissioner of Native Affairs saw an opportunity to “recover” two more children and gave approval for Molly to get treatment at the hospital in the town of Perth, as long as the “black husband” got left behind. To avoid Molly’s objections or even disappearance, she wasn’t told about the plan until the mail truck showed up to transport her to the train. In a traumatic repetition of history, she was dragged away from her home and circle of relatives, this time with her daughters, too.
“Having his wife and two daughters taken from him was too much for Toby to bear. Beside him, wailing louder than the rest, was Bambaru, whose bright red blood poured from a self-inflicted wound on her head, which was her people’s traditional way of expressing deep mourning for the loss of loved ones.” Bambaru, broken-hearted and missing her beloved granddaughter—and eyes—died a year later without ever meeting her again.
Once Molly had recovered from the removal of her appendix, she learned the distressing truth—that she would not be permitted to take her daughters home. They were now the “property” of the government. Molly immediately applied for a job as a cook at Moore River so that she could be near her precious girls while she considered what to do. “Women were permitted to talk to their children but physical contact was not allowed.”
Each day Doris would wait for her mother’s visit in a particular place beside the high steel interlock fence that separated the kindergarten children from the others. “She knew what time to sit down and wait, she was told to watch for a certain time of the day when the sun reached a special place in the sky.”
One day, Molly and Anna did not appear. It was over a year since they had arrived at Moore River. All that time the authorities had kept careful watch over Molly, knowing she had escaped once before. Finally they had relaxed their guard, giving Molly the chance she’d been patiently waiting for. Ten years after her original notorious escape, Molly sneaked away again, carrying baby Anna. She had no choice but to leave Doris, trapped behind that high wire fence.
This time, Molly was luckier than during her childhood escapade: halfway home, she met a sympathetic fence worker who gave her a lift in his jeep the rest of the way. But of course her troubles were not over.
The Commissioner of Native Affairs was irate about Molly being a runaway, mostly because he wanted to hang on to her child. He wrote to the Balfour Downs Station that although Molly would be allowed to live with her husband again, “the little girl Anna is too white to remain in the native environment. She will have to be brought back to Moore River.”
Molly managed to stay out of reach for two more years, but then she and Anna were admitted to hospital, both with eye infections. Anna’s infection was severe and she was detained a long while, during which time Molly worked at the hospital, intending to stay close by. Finally, though, Anna was taken away by officials and installed at the Sister Kates Children’s Home in Perth. Molly never saw her again.
And what happened to Doris during all this time?
Fortunately, when Doris got left behind at the Moore River settlement, her Aunty Gracie was one of the caregivers assigned to look after her. This helped a bit with the panic and sorrow of separation. She had a few friends by day, but the nights were miserable—in a cot with bars instead of snuggled with Bambaru or Mummy. The explanation given by some of the people in charge was “Your mother doesn’t love you.”
The dreadful food served up in the institution was just the same as in Molly’s day: porridge full of weevils (a kind of small bug), and watery stews. Doris and her best friends, Tony and Andrew Onslow, had grown up in the bush, accustomed to helping their elders forage for food. Now, they occasionally did some gathering of their own. Doris records incidents of eating dried out carrots or banana skins—things that would have been entirely acceptable “bush food” among their families. But she and the boys were jeered at and called “rubbish eaters.” Doris couldn’t understand how “rubbish” food was any worse than what was offered on the settlement tables!
Part of the effort to assimilate the children into the white community was to forbid them to use their native languages. Doris, as Molly had before her, struggled with this. “ ‘You’re a very naughty girl, you must not talk blackfella language again,’ yelled Nurse Hannah,” to Doris.
Slowly, Doris began to lose her connection with her own past. She recalls one day when she saw a blazing bonfire on the grounds of the settlement. She raced toward it, vivid memories stirred up of Bambaru and her childhood. Her moment of joy led to severe punishment, part of the vigorous routine to erase cultural ties for aboriginal children. After the fire incident, Doris consciously decided to suppress her memories because they only led to getting smacked.
Meanwhile, the government made another decision that would affect her future. The Moore River Settlement School was closed, and Doris was sent, with thirty-one other girls, to the Roelands Native Mission.
“Then one beautiful spring afternoon, Matron handed Doris a letter; and because the mail was opened and censored, she had no idea where it came from. Doris fought back the tears as she read the letter; her first letter from her own mother.”
They began to correspond, but were not yet able to meet. Doris finished school and trained as a nurse. Finally, after she was a wife with four small children of her own, Doris traveled back to Jigalong. The train ride was a long one, followed by a tiring walk. She stopped to ask directions and was told, “ ‘Your mother is camping at that last house.… You’ll know her; she’s the only half-caste woman there.’ ”
Doris spoke her first words to her mother after twenty-three years: “ ‘Do you know me?’ ” Then she asked, “ ‘Why did you give me away, Mum?’ ” Her mother was quick to answer: “ ‘I didn’t give you away! You were taken …’ ” Doris had not realized until that minute that their separation had been against her mother’s will.
Meeting her father was just as emotional.
“ ‘This is your Daddy,’ said her mother tenderly.” Holding her baby daughter, Doris embraced her father. “His hand brushed the hair from Doris’s cheek. His fingers traced her brow, stopping at the indentation, the identifying mark, made so many years ago in the attack by the cattle dog at Balfour Downs. His child, Nugi, had come home.”
Centuries earlier, Margaret Catchpole had come to the place that Doris’s people called home, a reluctant trespasser from her native land. But even in her own country, Doris, too, was made to feel like a stranger, forced to live inside another culture. Both these women, along with the others in this book, used words to map unfamiliar territory until their stories—fictional or factual—became part of history.