So begins the phrase that opens Dee Brown's classic historical work, ‘Bury my Heart at Wounded knee.’  In the introduction the author encourages his audience to read his work not facing westwards as in other accounts of the American West but facing East, from the viewpoint of the victims.

That comment was passed onto myself some years ago by a man who would probably prefer not to be named. The person who made that particular comment would in all likelihood cringe at the term 'redneck.' He is a loving father and husband who I would best describe as a philanthropist - a decent hard working Australian. The foundation upon which this country was built , if we are to believe the myth makers who have written our history for the last two hundred years. His comment is similar to many I have heard over the years from Australians and with the current debate over land rights and Republicanism it seems as though a kind of mass hysteria has taken over the country. The current politcal climate is still recovering from the Hanson blitzkrieg of a few years ago. The recent Republican defeat is yet another example of a news media masquerading as comtemporary historians, more interested in kowtwoing to politicians than investigative journalism upon which our media was founded.

It is therefore imperative to our survival as a nation that we begin to find the middle ground, the road less traveled. In Sally Morgan's 'My Place' we have a work that has the unique opportunity to work such a miracle, for history is a strange creature with multiple heads. As with the mythical Hydra of Greek mythology, every time we cut off one head another two seem to sprout from the wounds. Thus interpreting history depends very much upon whose eyes you are looking through.

Most historians would agree however that a smoky pall of desolation hangs over our early formative years. As the acrid smokescreen of history parts, we catch brief snapshots of the bloodshed and carnage that heralded the beginnings of white settlement. For the most part the aborigines are hidden by the flimsy webs of pious deceit drawn over them by infantile empty-headed mythmakers. To see through the eyes of another however, is perhaps the greatest moral code to which we humans can aspire and with Morgan's work’ we have the opportunity to do just that.

'My Place' is unlike other works regarding the aborigines and I would cite such works as; ‘The Other Side of the Frontier’ by Henry Reynolds and ‘Triumph of the Nomads’ (Blainey). His works, alongside Blainey's, Manning Clark's and John Pilger's are crucial, as whites begin to look back at the damage done to the indigenous inhabitants of this country. Gone are the days when we could watch 'Dances with Wolves' and shower abuse on the 'yanks' for their blindness in the midst of 'Manifest Destiny.' We had our own form of Manifest Destiny, a kind of tacit unwritten agreement that the aborigines were somehow less than human, a little lower down the evolutionary scale.

Morgan has painted a picture of Aboriginal life that is far removed from our preconceived ideas and prejudices. There are no abandoned cars in shantytowns filled with broken bottles in My Place, no trips to the courthouse or prisoners languishing in jail. The desolation is still there however but it is in a setting that most of us find uncomfortably familiar. Morgan's alcoholic father and an eccentric grandmother who seems obsessed with keeping the family skeletons in the closet. Her mother struggling to raise children without a father, something many women in this country would identify with.

The voice is familiar and it is only halfway through the narrative that Morgan's Aboriginality comes to the fore. Before that it is hidden away in a closet lest the authorities find out. The further down the beaten track we go the more similarities we find with the apartheid we have so roundly condemned. Arthur's removal to the mission school at Guildford has macabre overtones of imperialist Britain or America. His account of Coulson's beating has a Deep South feel to it with his.

With Arthur, the traditional image of a passive race unable to defend itself against the depredations of marauding whites is shattered. A landowner from Muckinbudin who worked and cleared his land and that of his neighbours, who struggled through the Great Depression, just like the whites around him. His view of white Australia is poignant and cuts through current Republican and Monarchist debates.

Arthur's statement above, taken from the closing page of chapter twenty-six is direct and to the point, it makes reference to the bible, taking up the very Scriptures that are the foundation stone of the great freedoms we know today.

He throws it back in our face and asks us to read it for ourselves before we try and read it to him. Religion does not come under a favourable light in My Place in chapter sixteen. One of the deacons at the church she was attending calls her aside and asks her not to play with his daughter anymore. The Baptist denomination would most likely have been the church she attended, the charming guise of religious piety masks an ocean of bigotry and pride as Dante quotes in Canto XX of the ‘Inferno.

My Place is different from other works by Aboriginal artists in that it has a happy ending, which we seem to find anathema in our culture. There is no great climax but rather a series of resolutions between various members of Morgan's family; a resolution between hearts and minds that the truth cannot and must not be suppressed. She has embraced the freedom of speech we take for granted here in Australia and led us on a journey into our own dead heart, the Uluru of our collective consciousness and gently yet firmly shown us our wrongs, the tyranny of silence that blanketed us for so long. She does not cast off the blanket suddenly to leave blinking naked in the light but rather draws it slowly and carefully from us until we are used to the subtle change in perception.

It has come in for criticism from Aboriginal writers such as Mudrooroo for using white man's language. In all deference to the above-mentioned however no one could be expected to read a French translation of ‘Les Miserables’ unless they had first learned the language.

The English language is a complex one that has numerous local dialects within any given country and one end of the country can be as foreign to the other as French or Chinese would be to us. It is vitally important that Sally Morgan be allowed to speak her mind using whatever language she desires. Her work is an educational piece that needs to be read not just by her own people but by us, the 'white indigenous natives.'

My Place reads like an Australian version of 'The Color Purple,' a haunting narrative that records the journey taken by a family, of whom I can only call battlers in the true sense of the word. The question we are left with as we turn the final pages is, do these things still happen today or is this history that we can conveniently forget and leave to somebody else to work out.

Sadly it is not ancient history or even recent history. It is a documentary account of what is happening all around us today. As a younger man I traveled North with a mate in tow to see this big wonderful brown land. We eventually wound up with an old war veteran from WW II in Bathurst. It was there I was exposed to the ugly side of Australia as he proudly told us that the townsfolk were determined to drive out a family of Aborigines who had moved into town. Who were these 'useless bloody abos'?

A family just like any other family, the father worked in town from what I can recall and the mother stayed home to raise the children. I left Bathurst at the age of nineteen with the distinct impression that I had somehow mysteriously passed through a time warp and wound up in the Deep South or perhaps Soweto.

On the way back to Victoria, I was to encounter a truck driver who was proud of the fact that he had run down an Aboriginal and killed him. Idle boastings and concocted stories? Or is it just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to racism in Australia?

We pride ourselves upon being egalitarian and fair-minded. Racism is always repugnant to our noses until the 'wogs' or 'slopes' move in next door and then suddenly we find ourselves muttering obscenities under our breath. It is no longer removed from us but has come to live with us. Before we march headlong into the third century of white occupation of this continent is it too much to hope that we can lay our burdens at the foot of an Aboriginal cross? For it is only in acknowledging our guilt that we can ever hope to achieve the pardon we so sorely need if we are to become a Republic in more than just name.

Perhaps Sally Morgan had Hamlet in mind when she penned her remarkable story as his ghost cries into the night.

‘But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.’

ACT I SCENE V. Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Shakespeare.

Written by A. Rosie © 18\4\97.
Subject; Literature Analysis.
Teacher; Carolyne Lee.

Take me back to the contents please!
 
 

Brown Dee ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.’

Vintage London, 1991.

Anon

Reynolds Henry. ‘The Other Side of the Frontier.

Penguin Aust 1995.

Blainey Geoffery. Triumph of the Nomads.

MacMillan Sth Melb 1982.

Musa, Mark (TR) The Divine Comedy VlI Inferno.

Penguin UK 1984.