Doris eventually found and reconciled with her mother, but Annabelle never saw or spoke to her mother again and, by Ms. Pilkington’s mother made her way home, the state took away her two daughters - Doris and Annabelle - because their light skin color made them targets for assimilation.Īs they grew up, the girls were told they had been abandoned by their mother.

The outstanding virtue of the work was that when it became a film, it hit Australians not in the head but in the heart.”įor all its power, the film did not address the traumatic postscript to the story. Pilkington “took an issue which Australians felt deeply uncomfortable about - and by and large were unprepared to talk about - and made it so personal that people had no alternative other than to start talking about it. In an interview on Tuesday, Rudd said Ms. He also launched a state and federal agreement to dramatically improve health and life expectancy among the indigenous. It was a crucial factor in then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s decision to issue a formal apology in 2008 for “laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on. Her 1996 book, “Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence,” traced her mother’s escape at 14 from a government-approved native settlement and her audacious, 1,000-mile trek home through the harsh wilderness in western Australia.ĭirector Phillip Noyce’s acclaimed 2002 movie version of Ms. The history of the stolen generations began to emerge more widely in the 1980s, triggering a painful national debate about the morality of what had been done in the name of education and social welfare.ĭoris Pilkington Garimara - who died April 10 in Perth, Australia, and was believed to be 76 - wrote perhaps the most gripping and personal narrative about the assimilation process. The policy ended by the early 1970s, thanks to changing social attitudes and political will regarding aboriginal rights.

In Australia, they were sometimes called “the stolen generations”: the tens of thousands of half-white, half-aboriginal children who, by government fiat, were forcibly separated from their parents and assimilated into white society.Ĭhurch groups, welfare officials and the police enforced the effort in the belief that they were saving the children from a life of poverty and ignorance.

Doris pilkington