To accept it Sally had to find out, first, whether it was true, and then, what it meant and why her mother and grandmother had decided not to tell them. She started asking questions and persisted with them against her mother and grandmother’s silences, evasions and refusals, and against their anger when she wouldn’t give up. Sally couldn’t understand why, if they were Aboriginal, they wouldn’t admit it. Why was it something to hide? After about six years of asking she finally got her mother to admit that yes, they were Aboriginal. That was a beginning; now the admission was made perhaps the past could be talked about.

My Place starts off as a fairly conventional account of growing up, with fragments of memories from early childhood, the illness and death of the father who had returned from the Second World War a broken man, the family’s struggle to make ends meet, the pranks and anxieties of school, and Sally’s reluctant progress through it. It’s all well told, there are lots of funny stories, and the dialogue, particularly between the mother and grandmother, is terrific; but there’s nothing to make it stand out from a score of other accounts of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. About a third of the way through, however, with the mother’s admission of their origins, the focus shifts from Sally and her growing up to the mother and grandmother’s lives and the book is transformed from an entertaining, anecdotal autobiography into a book of great courage and power. Sally’s vague sense of unease about herself, the main theme of the first part of the book, falls away as she embarks on a stubborn quest for the truth about her Aboriginal family. This quest is painful, particularly for her mother and grandmother as Sally forces them to talk about their lives and so gradually comes to understand why they had decided it was better for the children not to know they were Aboriginal.

The breakthrough comes when Nan’s brother, Arthur, starts visiting the family. He has had a happier, more independent life than his sister, Daisy (Nan), and is less defensive about being Aboriginal. Sally decides to write a book about her family’s history and tapes Arthur’s story. She also visits Alice and Judy Drake-Brockman, members of the family who had owned the station on which Daisy and Arthur were born and from which they were taken as children. Daisy had worked for the Drake-Brockmans for much of her life and was almost certainly related to them. Howden Drake-Brockman, the station owner, Judy’s father and Alice’s husband, was probably Daisy and Arthur’s father too.

Arthur is happy to pass on his story. ‘Aah, I been wantin’ to get this done all my life. Different people, they say, “Arthur, we’ll write your story”, but none of them come back to see me. Aah, I’m better off without them. It’s better your own flesh and blood write something like that.’ Eventually her mother and grandmother are able to tell their stories to Sally too.

People’s life stories are always moving, but these are particularly so, not just because of the painful events they recount but because of the long silences they break and the immense difficulty with which they are owned. It is only because of Sally’s constant urging that her mother and grandmother are ever able to tell their stories to Sally, and in telling them to her they tell them to each other for the first time. Gladys knew almost nothing about her mother’s family and childhood; nor had she ever talked freely to her mother about the loneliness of her own childhood in institutions.

Because these oral narratives are framed by Sally’s need to know about her family’s past, they have a tremendous dignity. I felt none of the unease about the relationship between the teller and the stranger/recorder, no matter how well-meaning, which I’ve so often felt when reading collected oral material. These stories had been entrusted to Sally, to care for and to pass on, and as a reader one feels enormously privileged to receive them from her. All good books are gifts to their readers, but this book’s debt to Aboriginal storytelling traditions positions the reader as a receiver of gifts more explicitly than most.

            Sally’s continual urging is driven not just by the desire to know, to discover the truth, but by the conviction that the past must be owned and the hope that her grandmother in particular will learn to be proud of being black after a lifetime of being ashamed. It also has broader, political goals. As Gladys says when she finally decides to cooperate, ‘People should know what it’s been like for people like me.’

Being in a family, belonging to people, is a value stressed again and again in My Place and it is just this that has been denied to so many Aboriginal people this century. Daisy and Arthur were taken from their mother when they were children and sent to Perth (Aborigines were not allowed to bring up children with white blood); Gladys was put into a home because her mother was not allowed to keep her with her, and anyway she was too busy looking after the Drake-Brockman children; Daisy and Gladys fear that if they draw attention to themselves in any way Sally and her brothers and sisters will be taken away from them. It is this, Sally gradually realises, that explains what she first saw as Nan’s irrational fear of anyone in authority. ‘You don’t trust anyone who works for the government. You don’t know what they say about you behind your back.’

The contrast between the Aborigines’ feelings for their families and the white Australians’ could not be stronger. After Sally’s father Bill dies, his parents do not want to know them; neither do the Drake-Brockmans to whom they are related claim them as kin. But when Sally, her husband, children, and mother go back up North to the area in which Daisy and Arthur were born they are welcomed as family. People talk with them about the past, pass them on to their relatives, help them place themselves in the four-part kinship system. They’ve found their place. This feeling of reconnection is mutual. Says one old full blood lady, ‘You don’t know what it means, no one comes back. You don’t know what it means that you, with light skin, want to own us.’ So the dedication of the book reads: ‘How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as whole people. We would never have known our place.’

While the stories told are of pain and suffering they are also of strength and achievement. Arthur buys a farm, something few Aborigines were able to do; Daisy works hard all her life and helps raise Gladys’s children; Gladys establishes a business and is able to keep and educate her children; Sally turns from the naughty, flighty child of the first part of the book into a young woman of talent and determination. And the book itself is a tribute to the family’s strength as it faces the past.

Like Koori: A Will to Win, James Miller’s history of the Aborigines of the Hunter Valley, this book is remarkable for its lack of bitterness. There is anger, particularly on Sally’s part, as she learns of the betrayals, losses, and humiliations that her mother, grandmother, and other Aborigines have suffered; but there is also forgiveness. She says of Alice Drake-Brockman, in her nineties when she saw her, ‘I was aware that it would be unfair of me to judge Alice’s attitudes from my standpoint in the 1980s.’

It’s harder for a non-Aboriginal reader to forgive. I wanted to know what the Drake-Brockmans thought, in particular what Howden Drake-Brockman thought, deep in his heart, about all his children. But I also felt, again and strongly, the need for proper reparations for the wrongs of the past. The evasions of white Australians about the history of our relations with the Aborigines continue, and while we refuse to face that history we will continue, unconsciously, to blame the Aborigines; a well-worn way of defending against guilt is to disown responsibility and blame the victims. But as Nan says as she concludes her story: ‘You know what I think? The government and the white man must own up to their mistakes. There’s been a lot of covering up.’ These are wise words, for while we keep covering up we stay guilty. Guilt is a loaded word in debates about the relations between Aborigines and whites and the Right has argued vociferously that there is no point to it. But most of the Right’s moves are denials of guilt and this is the problem. For the guilt is locked in, by refusal to admit the mistakes of the past, and relations between whites and Aborigines remain frozen in a racist framework of master and victim. The only way to transcend guilt is to admit mistakes and wrongdoings and make reparations. One can’t undo the past, but one can make a better future, and Sally Morgan’s My Place shows that many Aborigines have a far greater understanding than most white Australians of what is needed to free this society from the guilt of the past