AustLit

Edna Tantjingu Williams was the daughter of Bamilya, whose English name was Nellie, and the white man Bert Paxton, but Mickey Fatt was "the father who grew her up". When she was a child, her family walked the land in the traditional way, and the journey to Ooldea, where Daisy Bates lived, was a part of this. The family lived in Coober Pedy not long after the first opal was mined there, and they moved to the various stations where Mickey Fatt found work. The story of how Williams, a light-skinned child, avoided being taken from her family by the "State people" is told in the book, Down the Hole, Up the Tree, Across the Sandhills : Running From the State and Daisy Bates.