Back in July I scribbled a few words about Wandering Girl by Glenyse Ward and mentioned My Place by Sally Morgan as being an important book to read and now I know why I said that, it’s not that I’m prophetic or anything but because I was echoing other people.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother’s birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

I headed into this book knowing much about the Stolen Generation but knowing there was so much more I didn’t know. I could only guess on the impact it had on themselves and their families. I had read Wandering Girl and got one view but My Place gives a whole new dimension. Morgan is 15 and decides to find out if she really is Aboriginal and why her mother and grandmother kept telling her she was Indian, this became a very long and cathartic project for her and her family. Morgan was born only two years after Ward so it’s interesting to read the two books together and understand why Morgan was told she was Indian there was still a very real chance she could have been taken from her family.

The Stolen Generation was a dreadful time in Australian history. Aborigines were deemed ‘unsuitable’ to bring up their own children if they showed white blood and so the children were systematically taken from them, from this book it seems those who still looked thoroughly black were left with their families. Some were given to white families, some of whom brought them up well and others treated them dreadfully, some were put into missions. Morgan’s grandmother was one of those Stolen and she had to give up her daughter (Morgan’s mother) into the care of a mission as her work place wouldn’t let her have a child around. Where was the father? Morgans’s grandmother never said and while everyone said it was the owner of the property it was never proven.

This book is a brilliant piece, it is well written and gives a good general overview of the situation. It is very moving and I found myself in tears on far too many occasions. I can’t imagine being taken from my family at a very young age and then never seeing them again. Being brought up in someone else’s culture and having all those ties to one’s own culture severed like that just gives me the shivers.

One of the reasons this book is so important is because it was one of the very first books written by an Aborigine about the situation, it might even have been the first. If so, it started the whole process of bringing everything out into the open and having Kevin Rudd apologise. We have come a long way since 1987 when this book was first published but as white people have tried to commit genocide across the country since Captain Cook landed here and pretended Aborigines weren’t people I think we have a long, long way still to go.