Pam Johnston Dahl Helm: Lost to our Mothers (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘Sally Morgan: Aboriginal identity retrieved and performed within and without My Place.’
Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 18 (2010): 77-90. Spain. http://revistas.ucm.es/portal/modulos.php?name=Revistas2&id=EIUC ISSN 1133- 0392, 2010
Sally Morgan’s auto/biography My Place played an important but contested role in recovering the Indigenous heritage for the national self-definition at Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988, an emblematic moment of mainstream celebration which glorified the start of the continent’s British colonisation in 1788. My Place is strategically placed at a cultural and historical crossroads that has raised praise as well as criticism for its particular engagement with mainstream readership. Much Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic debate has been dedicated to the ways in which Morgan’s novel reaches out to mainstream readers in order to display the plight of the Stolen Generations, and whether, by facilitating mainstream identification with its not-so-white protagonist, it works towards an assimilative conception of white reconciliation with an unacknowledged past of Indigenous genocide. Two decades after its publication, these legitimate worries born out of the text’s hybrid nature may be put at rest. A sophisticated merger of Indigenous and non-Indigenous genres of story-telling boosting a deceptive transparency, My Place inscribes Morgan’s Aboriginality performatively as part of a long-standing, more complex commitment to a re(dis)covered identity. On the final count, My Place’s engaged polyphony of Indigenous voices traces a textual songline in the neglected and silenced history of the Stolen Generations, performing a hybrid Aboriginal inscription of Sally Morgan’s identity within and without the text.
The Portrait of Aboriginal Women in Sally Morgan ‟ s My Place
2019
The aim of this research is to explore the lives of Aboriginal women as it is reflected in an Australian novel entitled My Place. This novel is an autobiographical novel written by an Australian author, Sally Morgan. How the Aboriginal women struggled to search for their identity, how they were treated by colonialists, and how they were driven off from their homeland, are described in the analysis. This is a descriptive qualitative study done through library research. The approach used is a feminist approach which is underpinned by postcolonial theory stated by Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. The result shows that this research vividly uncover a clear picture of the life of Aboriginal women from three generations who experienced double colonization as the impact of European settlement in Australia.
Sally Morgan, born in 1951 of mixed Aboriginal and white Australian descent, wrote the autobiographical novel My Place published in 1987 by well-known mainstream Australian publishers Freemantle Arts Centre Press. My Place narrates Morgan's journey towards the recovery of personal and historic Aboriginal pasts and presents, through her own voice and those of her family. The book follows her quest to find and write of her Aboriginal identity; to voice life stories still denied a place in collective and private consciousness and conscience. Aided by once commonplace governance of denial and oppression, as indicated by a quote from archival evidence above, through My Place Morgan sought to reiterate her relative Arthur that the effects of colonialism are not “over yet” (above). My Place fast received critical acclaim across both national and international, and indigenous and non-indigenous audiences. Morgan's carving of a literary space across otherwise binary notions of genre, form and voice predominantly contributed to a widespread reception of, and audience for, autobiographical life writing in Australian Aboriginal experience, especially of the Stolen Generations. Often regarded as perhaps “the defining moment in Australian Aboriginal literature” (Wheeler in 2013: p.5), this essay will endeavour to explore the context and effect My Place has arguably participated in realizing within contemporary Australia: regarding literature, (re)writing of histories and reconciliation processes. It will also discuss some of the diverse critiques that My Place and Aboriginal life writing in general has faced, and still continues to, both within and outside of Aboriginal critical analysis. Through attempting to understand and analyse the emerging canon of Australian Aboriginal literature, this essay will briefly review other forms and examples of relevant literature and, further, archival records in contrast to offer a side commentary of discourses surrounding this vast nascent section of Aboriginality within contemporary Australian culture. Furthermore, notions of reconciliation through literature, both descriptive and prescriptive will be briefly explored, summarising some of the critiques surrounding them. Whilst My Place and the scale of its success has been critiqued through diverse analyses of Morgan's Aboriginality, authenticity and authorship, which will be explored in this essay, the main thesis will argue that Morgan holds a valid and important place in the canon of Australian Aboriginal Literature. Further that this place must be considered within a spectrum of audiences (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) and of approaches to Aboriginal literatures of the canon; contributing toward complex, varied and ongoing reconciliation processes across contemporary Australia. This essay will thus support that whilst My Place holds an important space within the canon, especially of its time, indeed also many of the critiques entail credible and well-founded perspectives, participating towards the pursuit of accessible alternative agendas, contexts and outcomes all vital towards voicing and de-homogenising reconciliation for a diverse, and diversely affected, peoples.
Writing the Aboriginal Women’s Auto/Biographical Experience: Jackie Huggins and Jeanine Leane
2017
Autobiographies by Aboriginal Women writers have gradually emerged for almost three decades now. Varied and interesting experiments are visible in the life-writing form by Aboriginal writers. In an attempt to write accounts of their own life and experiences, Aboriginal writers have employed different narrative techniques and methods. This chapter is a case study of life narratives by two contemporary Aboriginal women writers Jackie Huggins (Auntie Rita) and Jeanine Leane (Purple Threads.) The focus is on the different methods of writing while “recalling the past”. Interestingly, these narratives create “matriarchal spaces” of expression being written by women who are recalling either their mother’s experiences or Aunties’ stories. The chapter makes an attempt to relocate this idea of history from a feminist perspective.
2014