Edith Willaway was born at Moore River Native Settlement in Western Australia. She was removed from her mother at the age of three and sent to Sister Kate's Home in Perth where she remained for fourteen years. Willaway worked as a house mother at one of the cottages at Sister Kate's Home, then in domestic work, before working at a hospital for thirty-four years. Willaway met her mother when she was eleven and again aged twenty-two.
Willaway's story was recorded by the National Library of Australia for the Bringing Them Home oral history project and appeared in the associated publication Many Voices: Reflections on experiences of Indigenous child separation, edited by Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich (2002).
