'Doris Pilkington Garimara tells the story of her mother in Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence. She tells her own story in Under the Wintamarra Tree (2003), of her premature birth, under the tree of the book’s title on Balfour Downs Station, a pastoral lease and cattle station located about 132 kilometres north-east of Newman in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. She was so small when she was born that she could fit in a shoebox and it was believed that she would not survive. As her birth perhaps foretold, Doris’s life was not going to be easy. At the age of four she was taken, along with her mother and two-year-old sister, Annabelle, from Jigalong to Moore River Native Settlement. For Molly, Doris’s mother, this was not the first time she had been to Moore River, and that first visit – and Molly’s subsequent journey home with her younger cousins Gracie and Daisy – will become the heart of Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence.'