My Place

Rating:
Summary: A story with history behind it
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: A story with history behind it
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: my place on the shelf
Review: I have been forced to study this book for my HSC(final exams at high school)and have found the book to be poorly written and rather bland next to other books we could have studied. The story, while being a realistic view of what has happened in Australian history, would not have been published as widely with out the recent reconciliation issues in Australia.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly written but interesting
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing personal history of one woman's maternal family
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: My Place a story of discovery
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: fails the basic test of literature
Review: Stories about the historical oppression and continual discrimination against Aborigines should be told, but it is unfortunate that Morgan is one of those to do it. The book fails as literature simply because it is boring and very poorly written. As such, it does nothing to advance the Aboriginal cause here in Australia, and unfortunately, plays right into the hands of the redneck Hansonites and their views of white racial superiority.