"Plains of Promise" by Alexis Wright.

Wright's debut novel of 1997 is the story of a mother and daughter who never meet. The first part of the novel deals with Ivy Koopundi, a child who is born to St. Dominic's, a missionary in the Northern Territory that her mother was sent to. Shortly after her birth her mother commits suicide, sparking a range of suicides all over the missionary and causing the tribe to believe that little Ivy is cursed and needs to be returned to her own people. When Ivy herself has a child, the result of an overindulgent priest, the newborn is taken away under the pretense that it is ill. Years later Mary Koopundi, Ivy's daughter, returns to the camp in an attempt to find her place and a home for her daughter which forms the second part of the novel.
Throughout the novel there is this overriding sense that no-one wants Ivy Koopundi or even knows what to do with her. She is haunted by this idea that she is cursed,  bringing tribes, mental hospitals, women, homes, families and goats around about her and she is sent from pillar to post around Australia. Mary, as a victim of the Stolen Generation, is on the hunt for her discovered Aboriginal heritage and joins an organisation trying to bring about a pan-Aboriginal movement. Wright uses these women to show how the treatment of Aboriginal women over the span of the twentieth century has hardly changed.
This book is most certainly not an optimistic novel, when mother and daughter do finally meet it is under such circumstances that they do not know who each other is. Wright seems to be suggesting that this is a situation that needs more than just tracking down a place, people have become so isolated from their ancestry that a mother and daughter can't recognize each other. Throughout the novel there is this overriding sense that people are trying to forget the past, forget what happened and move on, but there doesn't seem to be anything for them to move on to, instead they are trapped in this place of unknown that is reflected through the loss of the mother/daughter relationship.
Although a little book, particularly in comparison to her later novel "Carpentaria", "Plains of Promise" is a beautifully written novel that tackles some huge issues with relation to Australian policies, the Stolen Generation and how the ideas relating to these issues hasn't changed very much. Definitely recommended reading.