Critical Review My Place

CRITICAL REVIEW MY PLACE, SALLY MORGAN Sally Morgans My Place, published in 1987, is an autobiography about finding her Aboriginal roots and her identity with the focus on the lives of three generations of Australian Aborigines. Sallys family never talked about their recent and she was brought up thinking she was Indian. But she always felt different than her friends, their way of living was non the same, so her curiosity led her to realizing that she is Aborigine. And then her quest for knowledge of her past begins.My Place is actually a novel about womans search to find herself and her place in Australian society. The main themes argon discrimination, racism and Aboriginal culture. They are presented through devil different versions of autobiographical writing. One is Sallys first person narration, which is to a greater extent Western autobiographical and it focuses more on her individual quest to find her identity. The other focuses on the Aboriginal life and more on the comm unity and family life of Aborigines.The novel has 32 chapters, which are divided into four parts Sallys narration about her early life, education, family relationship, her perception of herself and her self-discovery Arthur Corunnas story, he is a brother of Sallys grandmother her mothers Gladys story and her grandmother Daisys story. Their stories focus on their life when they lived in Aboriginal society. The whole book is a combination of narration, dialogues, descriptions, stories within stories, anecdotes, and personal reminiscences from various characters and also humour.All that provides balance and harmony to the book. The book is easy to read, the language is quite simple, descriptions of the nature are rattling specific and with the use of metaphors, symbolism and personification, the reader gets a vivid picture of the place that is described. However the first part, where Sally describes her childhood is a little snack boring, because there are mostly descriptions and de tails about things not relevant to the theme of the book.But when she starts to investigate her family roots with her constant attempt to get slightly answers from her mother and grandmother, the book becomes more interesting. The parts where her family talks about their life are very emotional, the reader gets an insight into their hard life as universe black in the white world. Before Sallys book, not much was known about the Aboriginal life. She writes about the contact of two different cultures, Aboriginal and Western, so we get in touch with their history, their habits, way of thinking, historical background, injustice and struggles they had to fight.Other muckle always treated them as something little and because all the bad things that happened to them, they decided not to speak about it, they were forced to be silent. There are still a lot of secrets, that are not revealed in the book, because they are too afraid to speak about them, but we get to know some important inf ormation about their past from the people who wrote history on their own skin. So this is a really important book for Australian and Aboriginal culture, because it opens some important questions about racism and discrimination. ANA FURLAN