She, along with her two half-caste cousins, Daisy and Gracie, are forcibly taken from their families and sent to an institution for Aboriginal children with white fathers. Molly, who would one day become the author’s mother, is known as a half-caste, the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a white man.

There are content warnings that go along with this early part rape and murder are, tragically, part of every story of colonization. Rabbit-Proof Fence highlights exactly how terribly, beginning with a few stories of the native community of western Australia before the white men show up, and then revealing how much the Aboriginals’ lives changed once these white men began to force them off the land their people had lived on for thousands of years. I will admit that I know very little about the Aboriginal community of Australia, other than, much like the Native population of the United States, they’ve been treated terribly (one of the books I read in the past few years contained the phrase, “Colonization is violence,” and it’s something I’ve never forgotten). Pilkington was born Nugi Garimara, an Aboriginal Australian whose mother, Molly Craig, is one of the girls she portrays in this book. My libraries didn’t have much in the way of what Book Riot suggested, but with a little digging, I discovered they did have a copy of Rabbit-Proof Fence: The True Story of One of the Greatest Escapes of All Time by Doris Pilkington (Hyperion Books, 2002). Task #8 is an #ownvoices book set in Oceania, which comprises the areas of Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Oh, Book Riot 2019 Read Harder Challenge, I’m getting SO close to finishing you!

Doris pilkington books