My Place

This is the title of Sally Morgan’s first book.

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Sally Morgan is a Perth girl with Aboriginal heritage and My Place traces her awakening to the richness of family life in Aboriginal culture. She grew up thinking her family were from India, such was the shame of her family about being Aboriginal. The books covers The Stolen Generations, a subject that most Australians would rather not face. Our indigenous people were treated appallingly throughout the white history of this country and unfortunately a lot continues to this day.

The book is not without it’s detractors

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Place_%28book%29), which is a shame as I don’t think it was written as an academic project, on the other side of the fence is the following article (https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2010/05/my-place-fabricating-family-history/) which goes out of it’s way to disprove Sally’s family history.

Families are funny things, collections of people who will all remember different things as significant and will all remember incidents collectively in different ways, memories are fickle.

It is a sad read, but one that holds hope for a lot of Aboriginal Australia, I have laughed and cried my way through it more than once, it is one of the few books I can read again and again.

One thought on “My Place

  1. I finished My Place recently and decided to look up the people mentioned in it on the interwebs…I have been left very confused. The article http://www.stolengenerations.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=127&Itemid=103 paints a very different picture of Daisy Corunna’s employers and certainly leaves me more sympathetic with them and questioning of the memories included in Morgan’s book. I think that memories are fickle things, a dozen people can be witness to the same event and remember it in entirely different ways. My own experiences have borne this out. As a teenager and young woman, I was a prolific diary-keeper and rereading them presents the events as they happened and very different from what I remember 25 years later.

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