Tripping Over Feathers: Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams: A Narrative of the Stolen Generations

by Peter Read

Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams was a member of the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. She was taken from her mother at birth and put into a home for white girls. As an effected adult, she spent ten years in court suing the Australia's State Government for negligence. Not only did Joy lose the case, but lost two separate appeals. Several years later she was found dead, alone, in her Primbee flat in New South Wales. In this book, Peter Read - an award-winning author and prominent historian of Aboriginal history - tells Joy Williams's story, which exemplifies the detrimental effects of Aboriginal children removed from their mothers at birth. Joy suffered abuse, anger, violence, and mental illness. The book is a new style of biography, written in direct speech and dramatized, often using Joy's own words, with a reverse chronology from death to birth. Tripping over Feathers offers rare historical insight into the institutions, street life, and Indigenous and urban culture from 1942 to 2006. Also included are many of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams's poems.

149 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

Peter Read is an ARC Professorial Fellow at the Department of History, University of Sydney, and Adjunct Professor, Department of History, ANU. Currently he is researching a history of Aboriginal Sydney, and is slowly building the website A History of Aboriginal Sydney.

Peter Read coined the phrase 'the stolen generation', first used by him as a title for a magazine article. In 1981 he helped create Link-up, an organisation to bring Aborigines who had been abducted back to their parents. It went on to become a major force leading to the Stolen Generation enquiry. On the way Peter wrote many influential publications, including The Lost Children (1988), Charles Perkins: A Biography and Lost Places (1997).