The girls were Martu, members of the Western Desert peoples, and the desert was the one thing their captors had not reckoned with. For roughly nine weeks they walked, living off the land, sheltering where they could, keeping the fence on one side as a compass that could not fail. They covered something close to 1,600 kilometres on foot. Not all of them reached Jigalong: Gracie, the cousin, was separated from the others and never made it home. But Molly and Daisy did. They walked back into their own country and went into hiding with their mother and grandmother. Decades later, Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara, set the journey down in her 1996 book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, and in 2002 Phillip Noyce's film carried the story to the world - its premiere held, fittingly, here at Jigalong.

It matters that these were children, and that they were real. Molly Craig, Daisy Kadibil and Gracie were not symbols but a fourteen-year-old, a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old, taken from people who loved them in the name of a policy that the State of Western Australia and A.O. Neville called kindness. The children of the Stolen Generations, as they came to be known, were separated from family and country on the theory that they should be absorbed into white Australia. Molly and Daisy resisted that theory by simply walking out of it. Daisy Kadibil, the youngest, lived a long life and died in 2018, the last of the three to survive. The story endures because it belongs to a family - because a daughter wrote down what her mother had walked - and because Jigalong refused to let it be told as anything but their own.

Jigalong itself grew up around the very fence the girls would later follow. It was established in 1907 as a maintenance and ration depot for the workers building the rabbit-proof fence, that vast and largely futile barrier meant to keep rabbits out of the west. In the 1930s it bred camels, until the motor car made them obsolete. In 1947 the land passed to the Apostolic Church, which ran it as a Christian mission, and around the mission an Aboriginal community gathered. The Martu were among the last Aboriginal Australians to make sustained contact with Europeans; many walked out of the desert into missions and stations only in the 1950s and 1960s, some never having seen a white person before. For a time, Jigalong was a place people came to from the desert - not always by choice.

The land came home, much as the girls had. In 1969 the reserve passed back to the Australian government, and in 1974 it was granted to the Martu people, its traditional owners, now represented by the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation. Today Jigalong is a community of a few hundred on the western edge of the Little Sandy Desert, about 165 kilometres east of Newman. It has a school running from kindergarten to Year 12, a medical centre, and the long reach of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which flies the seriously ill 400 kilometres to Port Hedland. After generations of being moved and managed, the Martu returned to caring for their own country - the waterholes, the songlines, the desert their ancestors crossed for tens of thousands of years. Jigalong is no longer a depot or a mission. It is, again, home.