Home to Mother (July 2006) by Nugi Garimara (Doris Pilkington)

**Published early July 2006**

Earlier this year, Nugi Garimara (Doris Pilkington) was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to Indigenous literature. Born in 1937 on Balfour Downs Station in the East Pilbara (encompassing Marble Bar and Jigalong, names which have been etched onto the national psyche during the past decade), she was stolen from the station and removed to the Moore River Settlement, reliving the trauma of her mother a decade before her. Her mother was Molly Craig, another name that now haunts the national psyche as much as Robert Tudawali, Truganini and Max Stuart. Molly was the eldest of the three girls who, in 1931, escaped the same Moore River Settlement just north of Perth, and trekked 1600 km north, back to the East Pilbara, Marble Bar and Jigalong. This is the story for which Nugi Garimara is most famous; after the initial publication of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence in 1996, and the 1997 release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report Bringing Them Home, the story achieved international fame and recognition upon the release of Philip Noyce's film adaptation in 2002. European Australians could no longer, in good conscience, convince each other that the story was unimportant. (That they then did so in bad conscience, under the guidance of their Prime Minister, is historically significant.)

Now, Garimara has published a "younger reader's" edition of her 1996 book under the title Home to Mother. While this continues a recent marketing-driven trend in children's book publishing (think of the board book editions of Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar, Mem Fox's Possum Magic and Where is the Green Sheep?, and the sickening proliferation of Sam McBratney's Guess How Much I Love You franchise), there is much in Home to Mother that is intrinsically valuable, above and beyond the cynical marketing worldview. One can imagine it as the perfect "class novel" for years 3 and 4, as a framework for a discussion of the ambiguities of Australian history, and the personal experiences of Indigenous groups and individuals. [Russell]