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Doris Pilkington Garimara uses family testimony to trace Molly, Daisy and a third girl's escape from Moore River Native Settlement along the fence home.
Removal policy rested on the belief that children of mixed descent were more intelligent than their darker relatives. So they were singled out to be separated and trained, but only as servants and labourers, which shows that the promised uplift had a low ceiling.
A structure built to control the land can be turned to their own use by the people it was imposed on. A fence put up to keep pests out, a fix for a problem the settlers caused themselves, failed at its purpose but gave runaways a line to follow home, so it became a sign of love and safety.
Removing children from their families can be presented as protection, schooling, or a better future, and that caring language lets cultural destruction go ahead without being called what it is. The stated aim was to take mixed-race children from their kin and land so they would be made white.
The longing for family and home can be instinctive and urgent enough to drive children across enormous distances with no maps, shoes, or supplies. Connection to kin and country is a survival force in its own right, not just a feeling.
Strangers can feed and clothe people on the run and then report them to the authorities, believing it is for their own good. Fugitives learn that even sympathetic outsiders can't be trusted, and that only their own people are safe.
The people targeted by removal had long adapted to everything around them in order to survive. That habit of adaptation carried over into how they resisted and outlasted the upheaval of colonisation.
When a removal is required by law, even the official carrying it out can feel it is out of his hands. That sense of inevitability spreads the responsibility so thin that no one feels they chose to break up a family.
Even unfamiliar rivers and landscapes made removed children aware they did not belong where they had been taken. Taking someone off their own country strips them of the knowledge and sense of belonging that come from knowing a place.
As farming and grazing grew, Aboriginal societies were broken down by being pushed off their traditional lands, by sexual exploitation of their women, and by murder and violence. Child removal came after this earlier damage.