Doris Kartinyeri's memoir when she was just a month old, her mother died, and before she could return to her family she was taken into the Colebrook Home, becoming one of the Stolen Generations. 

Kick the Tin traces the consequences of that act across an entire life: institutionalisation, domestic servitude, fractured identity, illness, and the long, uneven work of reclaiming memory, family and self. It is written without spectacle. The force of the book comes from its refusal to separate personal experience from the systems that produced it.

Kartinyeri writes with remarkable generosity towards the ordinary moments that survive alongside trauma. Childhood games, family stories, humour, music and Country remain present throughout, refusing the colonial logic that Indigenous lives can only be understood through suffering. The inclusion of poetry and reflection gives the memoir an almost conversational rhythm, allowing memory to move between testimony, grief and celebration rather than following a strictly chronological account.

First edition, Spinifex Press, 2000. Paperback. Covers show light shelf wear. Interior is clean and bright with a firm binding. A few passages have been lightly underlined in pencil.