The woman whose 1,000-mile childhood trek across the Australian outback inspired the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence has died in the country's far north-west.

Molly Kelly was just 14 in 1931 when she led her eight-year-old sister Daisy and 11-year-old cousin Gracie on a nine-week journey through some of the harshest country on earth to return to their home in Jigalong, in Western Australia's Pilbara mountains. It was there that she died during an afternoon nap on Tuesday, aged 87.

Her story has become emblematic of the sufferings of the stolen generation, Aboriginal children who were separated from their parents by government policy until the 1970s.

"Any person who was a member of the stolen generations owns their story," said Doris Pilkington Garimara, Ms Kelly's daughter and the author of the book on which the movie was based.

As mixed-race children - the sisters' English father, Thomas Craig, had worked on the fence - Molly, Gracie and Daisy were taken away from their mothers in 1930 to be trained as domestic servants at the Moore River native settlement north of Perth.

The state's "protector of Aborigines", AO Neville, played by Kenneth Branagh in the film, told a 1937 conference: "Are we going to have a population of 1 million blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?"

During their escape from the camp the girls evaded search parties and Aboriginal trackers, and lived off food they caught or were given by sympathetic farmers and hunters. They slept under bushes and in dug-out rabbit warrens, coped with infected sores and scratches, and took turns carrying each other on the long trek. They oriented themselves by following the fence - an important landmark for their clan, the Mardudjara people - which had been built to keep the rabbits out of Western Australia.

Molly's daughters were also to become members of the stolen generation after she was taken back to Moore River nearly 10 years after her escape. Again she made her way home to Jigalong, this time carrying her 18-month-old daughter Annabelle, but leaving the four-year-old Doris at Moore River. Annabelle was taken from her mother in 1943.

More than 20 years after Molly's second trek Doris was reunited with her mother, but Annabelle found it difficult to accept her ancestry. The two women never saw each other again.