Analysis Of Sally Morgan My Place

(Re) visioning Aboriginal identity and culture in Sally Morgan’s My Place

In the 1960s, the Aborigines were on their way to extinction. At that crucial moment in the history of Aboriginal people their literature which until then had been oral and graphic appeared principally in written form. As Aboriginal writers adopted strategies to recover their past and document their history and traditions a new era in which their object was to look into their cultural depth, define an identity which the Aboriginal groups could share and educate the Australian community at large.

Subsequently, Aboriginal women writers suggest the way for them to recover their identity. They also proclaimed that Aboriginal women should take both their material and their

In this context, the Aboriginal writer Sally Morgan’s My Place is a landmark in the history of Aboriginal literature and it has been one of the most successful Aboriginal works, both in Australia and on an international level. She (Sally Morgan) presents a story that is relatable to both Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians. She presents a book/history that forces both white and indigenous Australians to assess the past whether or not a correct Aboriginal history has been told in Australia. Morgan also confronts the indigenous reader with the idea of learning their past and accepting indigenous identity, even if it is painful. Consequently, Sally Morgan can be considered the pioneer of Aboriginal life stories of women writers; and over time, after her, many other women writers have used this literary genre as a form of denunciation of the brutalities and consequences of the Stolen Generations, exactly as she

For that reason, she embarks on a search for her roots, a journey that leads her to her people, to her place. In addition, the discovery of her aboriginality encourages her to travel to her grandmother’s birthplace and to write her life story and the life stories of her uncle, Arthur, her mother, Gladys, and her grandmother, Daisy. After all these historical and geographical journeys she is, eventually, able to rebuild her place. However, the meaning of place in the story seems to be much more than a geographical location since many aspects are related to it, such as displacement, selfhood, cultural belonging, ethnicity and history.

Besides, Sally Morgan’s My Place, is about a family who don’t acknowledge their aboriginality, who in fact don’t even know about it; the book is about their struggle to find out who they are and where, if anywhere, they belong; it’s about the resistance of Grandmother (Daisy) and Mum (Gladys) to this search; it’s about the eventual weakening of their resistance in the face of Sally Morgan’s determination; and it’s about the discovery of the links the family has in places far to the north of Perth, where Sally and her family go searching, and find some at least of what it is they