Sally Morgan's My Place: Testimony, Trauma and Narrative

Australian Aboriginal life-writing explicates racial, class and gender exclusion from Australian mainstream social, political and cultural developments. Such attitudes usually result in the extermination or exploitation of particular groups of people as is manifest in the extreme form, the Holocaust. This paper focuses on My Place, the self-writing by Sally Morgan that attests the dehumanising policies of the Australian government leading to mental torture and the sense of hopelessness in the Aborigines; yet the aborigines have resisted the onslaught to retain native identity. In the course of the narrative, the futility of such practices that would evince permanent damage to society is lucid, and man's innate power to resist continual oppression is reiterated.