AustLit

'Many books have been written about Australia's Stolen Generations. There have been books of history and scholarship, of course, but among the most powerful and affecting books are the numerous works of life writing. Certainly, the best-known book about the Stolen Generations would have to [End Page 390] be Doris Pilkington's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, published in 1996 and adapted as a film in 2002. Pilkington was a member of the Stolen Generations, but Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of her mother's and aunts' escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, where they had been taken after being removed from their families. It is, therefore, an unusual book for being a secondhand account but told by a member of the Stolen Generations. It is also unusual for being Pilkington's second book; her first was a novel titled Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter (1991), which won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer. Among the many other works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations, it is more typical for these books to be an author's first—or even their only—book.' (Introduction)