My Place [Paperback]

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.