Customer Reviews

My Place (An Australian Classic)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Sally Morgan writes from the heart as she explores her family's hidden Aboriginal history in a book that spares no punches. My Place is all about identity and what racism and prejudice can do to a people. The white settlers who colonized Australia have systematically tried to bury the Aboriginal people and their way of life but somehow against all odds they have survived, and people like Sally Morgan are standing up to be counted as the descendants lost tribes of mixed race people who were never given a chance to choose who they wanted to live with. Sally Morgan writes with startling clarity as she describes her childhood with her half Aboriginal Grandmother who would never admit to being native, and often told her Grandchildren to lay claim to an Indian heritage rather than admit the truth. Sally's Grandmother's fears lay deep within her own childhood when she was taken away from her mother, and it was this fear she passed onto Sally's mother who was three quarter's white. Both women were terrified of white authority and the power it had to tear families apart. My Place is a haunting, true story of one woman's search for her roots in a country that saw Aboriginal blood as a taint rather than a celebration. We need more books like this on our bookshelves, and even more people to read them...

Reading the other reviews on here, I find it interesting to note that just about everyone gives it either 5 stars or 1 star, but there's almost nothing in between. It's quite true that it is a poorly written book - the writing is dull and prosaic, and there's little to recommend it from a literary point of view. Had I not had to read it for a class, I doubt I would have bothered finishing it. The narrative of searching and redemption which runs throughout is so predictable and cliché that I have the feeling that if this had been an American story it would have been snatched up by Oprah's Book Club long ago. Having said that, however, I think there are some important things about this book that probably need consideration.

More than the book itself, what I find interesting is that this was a huge bestseller in Australia. And I mean HUGE. She may well be the highest grossing Indigenous author in the country, although I'd be guessing. The fact that so many people read the book says something about the mood of White Australia over the last twenty years, with this country trying to come to grips with its shameful past. I've inclined to believe that most of this is an attempt to ease collective white guilt than actually taking steps to reconcile and compensate for over two centuries of oppression. Sally Morgan's book is popular, I think, because she doesn't actually challenge her audience to move much beyond their comfort zone, and the construction of Aboriginality that she presents is quite problematic, stereotypical, and firmly entrenched in the past.

The book has attracted quite a lot of controversy in Australia, mostly in academic circles, but occasionally this rears its head in the mainstream media (for example, the issue of the Drake-Brockmans demanding DNA testing to prove Morgan is not descended from their ancestors). The idea of the 'truthfulness' of the book is largely a question of genre more than anything else: is it an autobiography or a non-fiction novel? 'My Place' raises a lot of questions about how we define these categories, and about the nature of history and memory work.

People might be interested to know that the book also attracted a considerable amount of backlash from the Aboriginal community itself: she is often criticised for asserting an Aboriginal identity that, by her own admission, she did not grow up with. Unaware of her Indigenous origins for most of her youth, she claims her Aboriginality without ever having lived with what it really meant to be Aboriginal in the 1950s-70s. Because she has fairer skin than the stereotypical Aboriginal person, she had the luxury of pretending to be of a different nationality - an option simply not available to many Indigenous Australians - and was thus not subjected to the same level of prejudice which she might otherwise have been.

If you're interested in Australian history and Aboriginal issues you should probably read Sally Morgan's 'My Place', not because it's good writing, but because it has certainly been a landmark in the recent history of Australian literature. However, I also suggest trying to lay your hands on some of the material which critiques Morgan's work in order to gain a more balanced perspective of Indigenous Australia. Alternatively, for an all-round better account of what is now known as the Stolen Generation, try Doris Pilkington's 'Rabbit Proof Fence', or the film by the same name. If read with a critical mind, 'My Place' is worthy of a look, but it is highly problematic taken at face value.

My Place is an intensely personal account of Aboriginal history in Australia. We discover along with Sally what it meant and means to be an Aboriginal in past and present Aust. society as well as how their identity has been shaped and altered by the white pioneers. Being an Australian, I thought it was a necessary and enriching look into the largely untold history of Australia. It is certainly far from the history I got taught in school. Thoroughly recommmend it!

I enjoyed "My Place." As an American from the Midwest, the only things I knew about Australia were what I learned in a college foreign politics class centered on Australia and New Zealand. I never sought out more information until I met an Australian friend who inspired me to learn more about his country. And he suggested this book.

I've started reading but just can't seem to finish "The Fatal Shore." But Sally Morgan's book gave me a feeling of reading fiction with some history behind it. I know that all her "facts" aren't to the tee. While I am not Native American, I live in South Dakota, where the Native Americans have been subject to much of the same treatment. This really opened up my eyes of what it must be like to live as Aboriginal, or part Aboriginal, Native American or part Native American in the modern day world. And how we've progressed to get where we are...if you can call it progression.

I think Sally Morgan does a great job of getting you in the story of her growing up, and then tying it all together with the dictated stories from her great uncle, mother and grandmother.

Reading "My Place" has made me eager to learn more about the Aboriginal culture, maybe a deeper knowledge. I believe I really enjoyed this book because it wasn't a straight history book. While it isn't as thick, it reminds me of another text that tells the history of London through a handful of families.

I recommend "My Place." From someone who doesn't have time to read 400+ page books, this one kept me turning the page. It was enlightening

Sally Morgan, a young woman growing up in Perth, Western Austraila in the 50's is intreaged by her heritage. Her mother had always been shy of it and told Sally to say to her friends that she was Indian when she was asked about her origins. It was only when she was in her late teens that she discovers that she is Aboriginal. The book is separated into 4 sections; Sally's Autobiography and the biographies of her mother; her grandmother and her grandmothers brother. Facinating reading

Imagine growing up and not being aware that you were part aboriginal until the age of fifteen, having been told by your mother that the reason your grandmother was black was because she was Indian. Sally Morgan grew up in Perth, Western Australia in the 50s and 60s, and this is the story of how she eventually went back to discover her grandmother's origins in 1982, and thereby found her "Place". A moving and enriching book, which will have you in tears one minute and laughing the next

This book is so powerful that I nearly came to tears at the final chapter. I withheld them saying to myself, "she's going to a better place, her place". Being part-caucasian, asian and black, I can very deeply relate to this novel. Black people around the world (particularly Africans) can relate to this because it deals with the discrimination blacks have had to suffer over the past two centuries! It's something that unfortunately due to institutionalized racism will not be taught in schools but through Sally's novel everyone can learn more about the Australian Kooris(Aboriginals). Not only does she uncover the truth ever so gradually but one gets a sense of loss and pride for every moment of recovery and discovery of Sally's life. I hope Sally goes on-line often and reads this because I'd like to say that I too have had a hard time coping with my "black side" and she has given me the courage and strength to love myself and search for the truth. That's how powerful her novel is! It changed my life and it certainly will change yours! Please don't take for granted who I find is the world's greatest writer, Sally Morgan. We can all learn from each other!

There are some one- to three-star reviews for this book which suggest that it (a) is boring, (b) a lie (no one could remember as much of her childhood as Sally Morgan does), (c) raises her family to sainthood

I'm not an Australian and don't have any interest in the reconciliation issues that one reviewer says are the "only reason" for publishing this book. Yet I couldn't put the book down.

Certainly, if you're looking for a harrowing story of a aboriginal oppression, you won't find it here (for the first half of the book, Sally Morgan believes what her mother tells her: the family is from India). Primarily what you get is the story of a lower class Australian family dealing with adversity.

To suggest that Ms. Morgan creates heroes out of her family also misses the mark--much of the book describes the inability of her father to deal with life after the war and the frustration that she faces dealing with her mother and grandmother.

What you do get in this book is a story of a terrifically interesting family. I found myself pulled through the book, eager to see what these people would do next. It's possible that if I were Australian I wouldn't have found the book so interesting (it's possible that much of what I found interesting would be commonplace to someone from Australia). But for a Canadian, it was a eye opening book about life in Australia.

Another review comments that some aboriginals feel that Sally Morgan should not claim an aboriginal identity because she didn't grow up in an aboriginal community. In the book she talks about how her schoolmates tell her she isn't a "real Australian" because her skin is the wrong color. Apparently, some feel she isn't "dark enough" for others. This tells us more about the reviewers desire to reject her experience than the value of the book. Anyone who reads the book can decide for themselves how much of an aboriginal identity the author is claiming and/or should be allowed to claim.

As for remembering so much of her childhood: Many other autobiographies spend far more time (and detail) on their youth. The first third of Gorky's autobiography ("Youth"), for instance, is almost 400 pages long. The 100 or so pages that take Ms. Morgan to the end of high school doesn't seem excessive.

One of Fremantle Presses literary triumphs, the other being Faceys, Fortunate Life. There are similarities between them also. Whatever, we gave this another burl around the fire in Easter Sicily this Easter, to introduce our 7 yr old to the facts of Australian indigenous dispossession. It is rambling in parts, but the figure of the old granny is a humourous and sad pivot to the tales. Morgans book was in the forefront of the move to have the stolen generation recognised, and whatever the literary shortcomings of the book, it does have a heart and a deserved place in mainstream considerations of continuing indigenous plight in the country.

I find My Place to be a powerful story about a passionate person trying to find more about their past. The book gripped me and gave an amazing feeling; It was like being suffocated but breathing air fresher than you have ever breathed. I have grown an admiration for Sally Morgan. She had courage, curiousity and she managed to explain feelings never explained before and to introduce new ones.
When I read this book I feel overwhelmed that it has at last been written. For it is original and really showed me My Place.