Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Lucie Wanderburgová
The Depiction of the Stolen Generation in My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D.
2009
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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2
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D.,
for her kind help, valuable advice and guidance of my work.
3 Table of Contents
1. Introduction 5
2. An Outline of Aboriginal Life Writing 9
3. General Questions after Publishing of the Works 14
3.1 Readership 14
3.2 Motives of Narration 17
3.3 Reasons for Success 20
4. Aboriginal Situation in Past Decades 25
4.1 Aboriginality 25
4.2 Historical and Political Background 28
4.2.1 Stolen Generation 30
5. Aboriginal Identity and the Stolen Generation in the Books 44
5.1 My Place 44
5.2 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 53
5.3 A Brief Comparative Study 58
6. Perception of the Works 63
6.1 Common Readership 66
6.2 Critics, Historians and Theorists 69
7. Conclusion 79
Abstract 83
Resumé 84
Bibliography 85
4 1. Introduction
In my Master‘s Diploma Thesis, I will analyze two works by Aboriginal women writers, namely My Place (1987) by Western Australian writer and artist Sally Morgan, and Doris Pilkington Garimara‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). I will especially concentrate on the concept of the Stolen Generation, which applies to both books. I will look at this issue not only from the point of books‘ analyses but I will also consider the historical background to the encounter of settler Australian citizens with
Aboriginal people. The aim of my thesis is an insight into how Sally Morgan and Doris
Pilkington perceived this dark period in Australian history and portrayed it in their works. I will base the research on reading various critical essays and articles published by cultural and literary theorists and historians who have treated either My Place or
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. I will also take into account the reception of the works by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal common readers. I will attempt to examine if there is any consequence regarding the books‘ readership, genre and date of publishing the novels. In other words, if the cultural, political and historical situation of particular periods influenced the authors‘ style of writing and ideas they decided to present in their works.
As I have already mentioned, the concern of the present thesis is to show how the official Australian history and the concept of the Stolen Generation are depicted in
Aboriginal literature that is represented, among others, by Morgan‘s and Pilkington‘s works. It has struck me that there were such cruelties practised on innocent children who were completely discouraged from the family contact, educated only on the elementary level, and severely punished for breaking the rules. Many Aboriginal memoirs tell stories of a forcible child removal from their families by government
5 officials from the early 1930s until the late 1970s. For my research on the Stolen
Generation, I have chosen My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence particularly because they have much in common. Both works share the genre of an auto/biographical narrative or life writing, which means that they fulfil the function of both the historical and literary textual discourses. What is important for all the protagonists in both books are questions of national identity and the sense of belonging, both to a place and to people. The place in the title of Morgan‘s book refers both to her place in her extended Aboriginal family and to the place of Aboriginal people in
Australian history which they have been previously denied on the familial and social level (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 25). The sense of belonging and a search for identity are ideas that have captured readers‘ imaginations all over the world. The simple and direct telling of the stories has affected almost everyone who read the books. Both works are filled with the spirituality of Aboriginal culture, its most common aspects, its ways of representing the world, and its traditional concern with storytelling, a deliberate technique within the Aboriginal literary production. Both
Aboriginal writers under consideration in this thesis choose to explore themes such as family bonds, courage and determination, and relationships with the land. The last but not least thing shared by both works is the search for meaning and emotional elements of experience like love, suffering and displacement. Of course, the main theme of the works differs in several points. Briefly to say, whereas the topic of My Place is the author‘s discovery of her Aboriginal ancestry, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence deals with the harsh fate of being an Aboriginal child. More specifically, the argument of my thesis is that the works comprise a slightly different view on the issue of the Stolen
6 Generation, with a different impact, but still rising from the same source―a forcible child removal from their families by government officials.
My thesis starts with the chapter on the overview of Aboriginal life writing in general. I will consider Stolen Generations narratives today and their absence in earlier
Australian literature. Until recently, Aboriginal people had a limited ability to influence the writing of Australian history and literature. It has not been public knowledge how
Australia was invaded and how Indigenous people were treated because such facts were simply not included in Australian histories.
The thesis continues with the chapter dealing with the most important issues that have appeared after the publishing of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Firstly, there is a question of the readership which is divided between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Then I will discuss the authors‘ reasons for retelling such life stories and finally, I will be interested in the widespread success of both books and their influence on other Aboriginal writers.
The next extensive chapter is, according to me, very important since it gives us an awareness of historical and political background of Australia. Because both works are set in the context of Western Australian history and deal with the relationship between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers, some insights into this topic should be given. In this part of the thesis, I will also examine what the term
Aboriginality meant for European colonisers at the beginning of the twentieth century and for government officials from the 1930s until the 1970s, and how Aboriginality is understood today. However, the fundamental section of this chapter is devoted to the explanation of the Stolen Generation and its impacts on the population of Aboriginal origins. Both these aspects—Aboriginality and the Stolen Generation—occur widely in
7 the books I am analyzing and discussing. Only when we have a clear concept of these terms and have a general idea about the historical and political context can we understand their portrayal in Morgan‘s and Pilkington‘s books.
In the following chapter, I will be engaged in the analyses of both My Place and
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence considering the content of the books. I will take into account the protagonists‘ experience with the assimilation policies and the ways the concept of the Stolen Generation is depicted in them. Furthermore, I will provide a brief comparative study of these works and emphasize the most important differences and similarities between the books.
In the sixth chapter, I will be occupying myself with the impacts both books had on the future debates across the whole continent. I will discuss the affirmative perception of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence provided by common readership. However, the criticisms about the books have not always been positive. I will mention what literary, history or cultural critics have argued about the content and style of the books, and what they have condemned about the works.
It is important to note that in the present thesis, I will focus my attention primarily on My Place because Morgan‘s text was published earlier than Pilkington‘s
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence and is regarded as a landmark in Aboriginal literature.
8 2. An Outline of Aboriginal Life Writing
First of all, it is suitable to remark that Aboriginal stories were being created long before they became worldwide known due to the increased interest of the readers in injustices practiced on Aboriginal people in the twentieth century. Philip Morrissey expands this idea by claiming that Aboriginal life stories give Indigenous people a sense of their own history:
The psychological and physical brutality which attended the expansion of
European interests in Australia into the 20th century is being documented in
increasing detail and thoroughness in contemporary histories . . . [They] not
only depict the events which accompanied the subjugation of a nation but also
. . . introduce ‗history‘ into Aboriginal life (Morrissey 11).
Aboriginal history, accounts of the treatment of Aboriginal people and the concept of the Stolen Generation have not always been included in Australian literature and have been long hidden from public awareness. Historian Peter Read attempts to explain the presence of Stolen Generations narratives today and their absence earlier. In the first two thirds of the twentieth century, according to Read, the removal of children was ―neither the subject of many stories told in Aboriginal communities nor central to their historical consciousness‖ (Read qtd. in Attwood 185). One of the most important reasons for that is a lack of historical knowledge because Aboriginal history was commonly not included in official Australian histories that attempted to erase
Aboriginal memory and identity on both individual and communal levels. The history of colonisation of Aboriginal people has been suppressed not only from white histories but also within Aboriginal families, including Morgan‘s. During the 1940s and 1950s both
Morgan‘s mother and grandmother felt ashamed and fearful of identifying themselves
9 as Aboriginal. They denied their Aboriginality and attempted to repress their memories of painful and humiliating past events. Another reason may thus be seen in the fear of the removed people to talk about their harsh and sad life experience. Australian historian Bain Attwood cites from Peter Read‘s book A Rape of the Soul: ―They believed that maybe their parents had not been able to care for them properly, or worse still, didn‘t want them, and felt this reflected badly on themselves or their families‖
(Read qtd. in Attwood 187). Many separated Aborigines later denied their background and tried to forget their past lives.
Aboriginal stories were once told only in Aboriginal communities and scarcely known beyond this domain. Now they have become historical narratives so widely disseminated that the discovered history is now central to Indigenous collective memory and Australian consciousness. Bain Attwood in ―‗Learning about the Truth‘: The Stolen
Generations Narrative‖ suggests:
stories of the separation of Aboriginal children, which had previously been told
in various ways by some Aboriginal people and largely in local or community
setting, increasingly became a more homogeneous ‗stolen generations
narrative‘ that was produced and circulated in regional and national forums.
(Attwood 195).
What is also important to emphasize is that prior to the creation of the Stolen
Generations narratives, ―stories had focused on historically specific instances . . . and took the form of family or community histories‖ (Attwood 200). Whereas earlier
Aboriginal storytelling was supported by historical research, where the removal was placed in a broader historical context, now it became treated separately as a phenomenon. Moreover, the Stolen Generations narrative which was previously only a
10 collective memory for Aboriginal people, has now become a symbol of the history of colonisation of Australia for non-Aboriginal Australians as well: ―On the one hand it constituted for indigenous people a condensation of their experience of dispossession and displacement, on the other it provided settler Australians a focus for their sense of shame as the descendants of a white Australia responsible for this history‖ (Attwood
206). Awareness of the Stolen Generation began to enter the public arena in the late
1980s through the efforts of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists, artists and musicians. The biggest role was, however, played by women writers of Aboriginal descent. Since the time Indigenous stories entered the consciousness of non-Indigenous people, some of them started to perceive the Aboriginal history with different eyes.
After the situation in literary means of expression has changed, there appeared books in the form of autobiographies or family histories that described either government policies or the removal of children itself. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue: ―Until the 1970s . . . there were no published life narratives or a supportive publishing industry to enable the transmission of stories‖ (Schaffer and Smith 85). A wave of autobiographically based narratives by Aboriginal women began to appear in the late
1970s but has gained a more vivid impulse a decade later. The works I am analyzing in my thesis, namely My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, are both part of the literary transformation mentioned above. Both works have received the widespread acclaim and achieved commercial publication, and not circulated only among friends and families in local areas.
What is also quite interesting is the fact that most of the narrators of the Stolen
Generation issue have been women and that the best known testimonies regarding removals have been autobiographical works. The first notion cannot be simply assigned
11 to the higher number of girls than boys separated from their families. I would rather be inclined to think that women are by nature more compassionate, merciful and caring; and that they are more affected by the injustice practiced on the Aboriginal population.
The important notice that emotionally drafted stories were written especially by women is in contradiction to the earlier perception of women as outsiders who usually stay at the margins of the society. In my opinion, such women writers occupy central rather than marginal positions in the debate on the Stolen Generation. In his essay ―Perception of Australia, 1965-1988‖, Bruce Bennett summarizes Australian literature of the second half of the twentieth century by claiming that ―writers and social groups previously considered marginal in Australian culture have pushed themselves closer to the centre of attention, calling into question the notion of a central tradition‖ (Bennett 434).
Moreover, the growth of the awareness of images of Aboriginal people, their relations with the white population and Australian landscape ―signify a remarking of Australian cultural history, in which professional historians and social scientists as well as fiction writers, film-makers and others have played their part‖ (Bennett 435). Ethnic and national interests have become particularly evident, and writing by women has become increasingly prominent partly because of the ability of women to achieve goals and partly because of their creativity.
I would also like to stress Bain Attwood‘s statement that ―stolen generation narrative [in general] became (and remains) very important because . . . it came to constitute a collective memory and to be a vehicle for the construction of identity‖
(Attwood 199). The organized resistance work began in the 1960s during which
Aboriginal people developed a sense of common interest and group solidarity. In the
1980s, Aboriginal resistance to assimilation reached a critical point represented by an
12 idea of united identity. Aboriginal activists had access to mainstream media and to processes of decision-making at a state level (Whitlock 155). The sense of united identity and Aboriginality ―became fundamental to the development of an effective counter-discourse, which could challenge the principles of white nationalism‖
(Whitlock 155). Thus, autobiographical writing has become very important in the process of the resistance to colonialism and later to policies of assimilation. In the analyses of both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, we will see that a sense of belonging to a certain place and a search for identity play a vital role. Anne Brewster affirms that ―constructions of Aboriginality have an important role in the rewriting of
Australian history from an Aboriginal point of view and in the articulation of Aboriginal people‘s culture and political goals‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My
Place‖ 3). Aboriginal identity is among the most important concepts that were gained through telling and writing Aboriginal life narratives in the second half of the previous century.
13 3. General Questions after Publishing of the Works
This chapter offers some information on crucial questions that have appeared in the public when considering both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence after their publishing. Firstly, I will ask who have become interested more in the stories, whether Aboriginal people or non-Aboriginal Australians, and at what kind of readership the books were principally aimed by the authors. In the second subchapter, I will observe the most guiding motives for revealing personal experience of Sally
Morgan and Doris Pilkington. Finally, I will state how successful the books have become and what spheres of life they have influenced.
3.1 Readership
Various questions and doubts arise surrounding the composing and publishing of both works. Firstly, we may ask for whom the books were written and to whom they were directed. In the case of My Place, Jackie Huggins, an Australian Aboriginal leader and activist for reconciliation in Australia, points out that the title ―sold over 300,0001 copies and there aren‘t even that number of Aboriginals alive today, for heaven‘s sake—so someone else‘s got to be reading the book‖ (Huggins 61). Huggins further adds that ―it cannot be denied that among those who have read My Place are (usually patronising) whites who believe that they are no longer racist because they have read it.
It makes Aboriginality intelligible to non-Aboriginals‖ (Huggins 61). It seems to me that Huggins is right when assuming that there must certainly be many non-Aboriginal readers that have become captivated by Morgan‘s story. I am not sure if reading such
1 Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith mention the number of 500,000 copies sold worldwide (Schaffer and
Smith 95).
14 life experience may cause non-Aboriginal people stop thinking in racist ways, although
I am not denying that racism which is deep-rooted in them may not be weakened. What is certainly true is the fact that Morgan has forced non-Aboriginal readers to recognise the racist basis of their own society and to listen to the voices of Aborigines, although, it seems to me, present-day Australians are not responsible for the abuse that occurred in the past.
In the article ―Engendering the Bicentennial Reader: Sally Morgan, Mark
Henshaw and the Critics‖, Wenche Ommundsen regards My Place as primarily aimed at non-Aboriginal readers (Ommundsen). Gillian Whitlock also supports the idea that ―it stands as the most accessible and familiar ‗making‘ or ‗articulation‘ of Aboriginality for non-Aboriginal Australians‖ (Whitlock 158). However, there emerges a question if such an audience is fully able to comprehend Aboriginal lifestyle, and identify themselves empathically with the Stolen Generation experience. Non-Aboriginal readers can find the texts useful in learning about the harsh and long-hidden Australian history. Moreover, in recent time, Indigenous literature has become conductive to
Australian culture, especially for those who are curious about the issues of Aboriginal reconciliation and racism in Australia. Storytelling plays the role of educating principally non-Aboriginal people about those parts of history that have remained invisible. Anne Brewster in ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place,‖ claims:
These stories are not merely for our edification and entertainment; they are not
told simply for white people‘s consumption; at the very point that they resist
consumption these stories reveal the existence of other knowledges, some of
which remain inaccessible to non-Aboriginal people (Brewster, ―Aboriginality
and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 24).
15 My Place became part of an Aboriginal Studies programme and belongs to the compulsory literature for Australian students in public schools. The importance of the work is also proved by an article dealing with the education of Australian children called ―My Place: The Remaking of Images of Country and Belonging in Australian
Youth.‖ The authors of the text stated that ―the book was exceedingly popular and was taken up by many schools around the country as required reading in the secondary years‖ (Gill and Howard). Doris Pilkington once proclaimed the necessity to let the
Australian population know about the concepts like the Stolen Generation: ―We want it made a compulsory part of the history curriculum of all schools‖ (Pilkington qtd. in
Betros). It is evident that My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence have gained a status as classic texts for secondary and tertiary curricula.
In my opinion, both Sally Morgan and Doris Pilkington have written their works with reliability and passion, and according to the words by Anne Brewster: Indigenous literature is ―pedagogic and informative for both indigenous and non-indigenous readers‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalisation: Doris Pilkington‘s
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence‖). The opinion that Aboriginal stories are read by all kinds of the readership is also held by Gillian Whitlock who has made an interesting observation saying that ―conventions of Western popular fiction—the detective story and quest narratives, where there is a mystery, a destiny and search for ‗truth‘, all of which require resolution—ensures that My Place appeals to a wide popular readership‖
(Whitlock 157). Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers were made to admire and pity the protagonists of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence because such writings are able to impress the readership with their readability. We can thus assume that Aboriginal life stories and auto/biographical narratives attract both Indigenous and
16 non-Indigenous readers although they perceive the issues discussed in the books in different ways.
3.2 Motives of Narration
Another question emerges in connection with the reason for publishing the stories. The crucial question is why it was so challenging for both authors to retell their experience and to interpret and record what happened to their Aboriginal families. I think it is important to understand the reasons for recording such harsh personal stories.
Concerning My Place, Robin Dizard suggests that ―Morgan‘s effort at turning secrets into a book are the means women use to get their revenge on patriarchy‖
(Dizard, ―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 160).
However, it seems to me, it is not a question of vengeance or feeling of resentment towards men regarded as ruling representatives of twentieth century‘s society. The reason for recording Sally Morgan‘s family history rather lies in the fact that the author seems to be quite angry about the fact that there was almost nothing written about
Aboriginal history. Morgan once said to her great-uncle Arthur Corunna: ―All our history is about the white man. No one knows what it was like for us. A lot of our history has been lost; people have been too frightened to say anything‖ (Morgan, My
Place 163). The cultural critic and leading Aboriginal scholar, Marcia Langton, confirms in the ―Foreword‖ to The Way We Civilise that ―few Australians know the history of their nation as it is told by the colonial files and memoranda‖ (Langton,
―Foreword‖ x). Sally Morgan further explains why she has begun to write the history of her family and of Aboriginal Australia in general as such:
17 Our own government had terrible policies for Aboriginal people. Thousands of
families in Australia were destroyed by the government policy of taking
children away. None of that happened to white people. [Nan] thinks I‘m trying
to make trouble, but I‘m not. I just want to try to tell a little bit of the other
side of the story (Morgan, My Place 164).
Later on, in the interview with Blanch Lake for Arts Law Centre of Australia in 2004,
Sally Morgan answers the question why she is interested in Indigenous writing: ―I see it as a vehicle to give people a voice, for people to be heard, a vehicle that can tell our family stories and give a deeper balance and insight into the past as well as the present.
I have been helping people to tell their stories‖ (Morgan, ―Professor Sally Morgan: The
Importance of Stories‖). I think that it is safe to say that My Place is really a milestone in Aboriginal literature and has influenced other Indigenous writings: ―The success of
My Place is often interpreted as indicative of a new freedom for Aboriginal writers‖
(Newman 70). However, not only professional writers adopted this new model of writing; the book also encouraged ordinary people to tell more personal stories of their families.
In my view, the reasons both books have been created lie in letting the world know about the cruelties of past lives. The authors did not want to remain silent any more and took courage to support other Aboriginal people to come with their own personal stories. However, it is possible that there was not such a strong intention to display their autobiographies. Maybe they just wanted to open their hearts, release themselves from the stress and gain a sense of belonging. Sally Morgan comments her feeling ―that a very vital part of me was missing and that I‘d never belong anywhere, never resolve anything‖ (Morgan, My Place 106). Daisy Corunna, Morgan‘s
18 grandmother, also bitterly remarks: ―that‘s the trouble with us blackfellas; we don‘t know who we belong to (Morgan, My Place 325). As I have already mentioned, autobiographical narratives of that kind served to deal with the past traumatic experience and to rediscover Aboriginal identity. All these aspects are largely connected with the healing effects Aboriginal narratives had on the Aboriginal population.
As regards Pilkington‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the reason for presenting such a kind of personal story could be understood from the inscription at the beginning of the book. The work was composed simply ―for inspiration, encouragement and determination‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence i). This gives some hope to those who wish to identify themselves, know about their family relations, and find some facts about the Aboriginal history. We might say that this is a story of faith. It both elicits real emotions and creates a sense of realism and remembrance of Australia‘s inglorious history. Anne Brewster, for example, calls the book a ―history of heroism, triumph and survival against all odds‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginal Life Writing and
Globalisation: Doris Pilkington‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence‖). Doris Pilkington herself, in the interview with Kelrick Martin, talks about her motives to write Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence and other biographical novels:
I‘m hoping that through my writings others, who have been taken away from
their traditional areas, would be encouraged to go back and reconnect with their
land, reclaim their language, culture and identity. It took me over 10 years to
really sit down and say ‗I belong to this land, the land belongs to me‘. I had to
go through a lot of relearning (Pilkington, ―Doris Pilkington: Reunion‖).
The task of both Sally Morgan and Doris Pilkington is to solve the mystery of what happened in the past and read the new-found past in terms of the politics of identity.
19 3.3 Reasons for Success
The third question of this chapter is why My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence have become bestsellers and the authors have earned a worldwide reputation and fame. I will concentrate especially on Sally Morgan because her work was published nine years earlier than Doris Pilkington‘s book and is rightly considered one of the best literary works based on the issue of the Stolen Generation. I will begin this subchapter with Joan Newman‘s words: ―Although it is always difficult to predict the future critical assessment of any literary work, it seems likely that Sally Morgan‘s My Place will long be regarded as a landmark text in Australian writing‖ (Newman 66). Marcia Langton reflects on the debates and controversies that appeared around Morgan‘s My Place and
Aboriginal identity in general in her essay ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖. Langton speculates why Sally Morgan‘s work became so important and struck such a large readership. She speculates that the reason should lie in weakening ―the guilt of the whites, especially white women who were complicit in the assimilation program and the deception into which families like the Morgans felt they were forced‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation‖ 116-
117). In her critique of Morgan‘s text, Langton has emphasised the wrong supposition that autobiographical narratives of that kind may encourage readers to examine their past assumptions and their prejudices. However, it seems to me, that acknowledging the racist and prejudicial views might at least slightly contribute to the success of the book.
Another reason (though less probable) for the successful perception of My Place is the fact that the readers ―might also find, with a little sleuthing in the family tree, an
Aboriginal ancestor‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖ 117). The most plausible reason My Place has become such an
20 exclusively successful text in Australia consists in the fact that after reading the book many Indigenous people realised their heritage and began to feel Aboriginal again.
However, this explanation may sound too simple because, according to Jackie Huggins,
―Aboriginality cannot be acquired overnight. It takes years of hard work, sensitivity and effort to ‗come back in‘‖ (Huggins 63). This argument is in discrepancy with Sally
Morgan‘s statement at the end of the book that ―we had an Aboriginal consciousness now‖ (Morgan, My Place 233). Brewster points out that Morgan‘s journey in search for her identity means that, ―Aboriginality is a continuing process of negotiation and redefinition‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 15). Peter Read in the introduction to his book The Lost Children suggests that ―Aboriginal identity is recoverable‖ (Read qtd. in Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 16).
The impression of identity is not easy to gain; we have to search for it through investigation of past events and family‘s genealogy. It is also suitable to quote Joan
Newman‘s observation:
Although some may reject Morgan‘s text as an expression of Aboriginality,
believing the author‘s lack of first-hand experience of severe discrimination
disqualifies her from claiming an authentic Aboriginal identity, or feel that the
text is insufficiently political, others will feel that they gain some insights into
Aboriginal culture (Newman 73).
It seems to me that understanding of Aboriginal cultural history is a notion that was very important for other Indigenous people who identified with the protagonists of My
Place. Newman assigns the success of My Place to ―a shift in critical perspective, a re- evaluation of certain literary works as significant cultural events, and even a renewed questioning of the meaning of identity in Australia, especially those grounded on race‖
21 (Newman 66). In my view, Sally Morgan was successful in her task to find her roots and identity not only of her own but also of a broader Aboriginal community. The affirmation of her Aboriginality is fundamental for her selfhood.
Another reason for such a success may originate in the narrative style of Sally
Morgan‘s story that is narrated with certain lightness. My Place reveals, in a detective- story fashion, the suppressed Aboriginal past. The detective fiction element of Morgan‘s structure is seen in ―her own attempts to uncover family history [that] leads the reader, with the narrator, to follow the trail which culminates in the three stories‖ (Lever 116).
My Place lets us see Australia from an Aboriginal perspective using humour and compassion. The narrative‘s tone is nostalgic but triumphant, showing little anger or bitterness. The humour serves here as a means of relieving tension and stress, of coping with anger and pain of the past and sometimes even as a parody of the systems of authority. Many readers have identified with the author in one or more issues, and praised her for her courage and ambition. In pursuit of scraps of information about her heritage, Sally Morgan did not hesitate to go such far as her grandmother‘s birthplace in remote North Western Australia, in Corunna Downs. This visit proves to be a revelation and a turning point for Morgan and her family because it affirmed their Aboriginality after a long period of denial. Sally Morgan‘s love for her own spiritual and racial roots and her attempt to uncover them led her later to establish the Centre for Indigenous
History and the Arts, which helps Indigenous people find their lost identities, reunite with their relatives and reconnect with their Aboriginal culture. Many Stolen Generation people contact the centre when needed advice related to human rights. Sally Morgan have encouraged descendants of ―lost‖ Aboriginal children not only to narrate their life stories in terms of the historical framework but also to become Aboriginal either
22 through making their past genealogical connection to Aboriginal families, or by working for Aboriginal cultural organisations.
Doris Pilkington‘s success of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence has been gained thanks to the authenticity of the work. It retells experience of Pilkington‘s mother with the government policy and its training facility. Pilkington recounts her mother‘s story of running away from the Moore River Settlement and walking back to her home near
Jigalong mission in the east Pilbara, using hundreds of kilometres of a rabbit-proof fence as a guide. This biographical work is based on the true story, and this is what makes it very remarkable. It helps us understand not only the sufferings the Indigenous children had to undergo but also the motivation of the policy-makers. We become more concerned and shocked about the circumstances of that time. Pilkington dedicates her life to spreading the story of the Aborigines of Western Australia, centring her works on the reconciliation between black and white inhabitants. Pilkington now works with the
Reconciliation Council and her work consists in giving lectures to various groups of people on the history of the Stolen Generation and how it affected her own life.
(Watson). Pilkington was not just the teller of her mother‘s story, she was one of the
Stolen Generations herself, having been taken from her mother at a young age and taken to the Moore River Settlement north of Perth. She has said in the interview for ABC
Radio National‘s Indigenous Arts Programme: ―I can even learn anything about my own culture, language, cultural history, where my people came from, and who they were. I‘m more fortunate than most now that I have an identity, an Aboriginal name‖
(Pilkington, ―Doris Pilkington: Reunion‖). We can thus speculate that the success of her book results from the achievement of the lost identity of her community of Indigenous people and, of course, from the influential pattern of the text. I should not forget to
23 mention a drama film Rabbit-Proof Fence based on Pilkington‘s book and directed by an Australian film director Phillip Noyce. The film has highly contributed to the international acclaim of Pilkington‘s book, and has aroused more attention of the issue of the Stolen Generation and Aboriginal history in general.
24 4. Aboriginal Situation in Past Decades
As I have already suggested, my analysis of the significance of both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence would not be complete without the presenting of the
Aboriginal situation of the time in which the plots of the books are placed. I will briefly try to explain what is meant by Aboriginality and how the perception of Aboriginal people was changing throughout the twentieth century. In the second subchapter, I will concentrate on the historical and political background of the situation in Australia which also comprises the definition and discussion of the Stolen Generation.
4.1 Aboriginality
Let me start the following chapter with the explanation of the notion of
Aboriginality. The label ―Aboriginal‖ has become one of the most disputed terms in the
Australian language. Marcia Langton has observed that ―for Aboriginal people, resolving who is Aboriginal and who is not is an uneasy issue, located somewhere between the individual and the state (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖ 116). It seems that Aboriginality as a concept was unknown until the
1780s when a British explorer, Captain Cook, discovered Australia to Europeans who immediately began to colonise the Australian continent. In an attempt to assimilate or integrate Aboriginal people with their very different culture into non-Aboriginal culture, government policies have defined what Aboriginal people were and how they should behave (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 13). On the website dedicated to Sally Morgan and created under Fremantle Arts Centre Press, we can find a reference to the Golden West, Perth annual journal. In 1906, an article was published in this newspaper which dealt with opinions on Indigenous people. They were seen in a
25 very negative light: ―The West Australian Aborigine stands right at the bottom of the class to which we belong. The native black has no intelligence. . . He is as a general rule
. . . brutish, faithless, vicious . . . a natural born liar and a thief. . .‖ (Fremantle Arts
Centre Press). The government officials ridiculed personalities of Aboriginal people:
―The Australian black may have a soul, but if he has, then the horse and the dog are infinitely the superior in very way to the black human‖ (Fremantle Arts Centre Press).
Sidonie Smith deals with the stereotyping of Aboriginal people saying that it was common to see Aborigines ―infantilized, represented as unruly children, naive in their systems o belief, not yet emergent from a state of nature, still unclothed, unmannered, uneducated‖ (Smith 527). From these excerpts we can clearly see that at the beginning of the 20th century, such attitudes were common among people of white population in
Australia. The stereotypes of Aborigines circulating within Australian society and popular culture have been also summarised in the essay by Marcia Langton: ―‗All
Aborigines are dirty, drunk and useless, and they‘re going to die out anyway‘, say some white people without hesitation and qualification‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film:
The Politics of Representation‖ 120). Doris Pilkington has admitted these stereotypes from her own experience in the interview for ABC Radio National‘s Indigenous Arts
Programme: ―We were taught that our culture was evil, that our people and practices were devil worshipers and evil doers‖ (Pilkington, ―Doris Pilkington: Reunion‖). Many stereotypical suppositions often govern the thinking of non-Aboriginal people who have defined Aboriginals simply in terms of skin colour or by mathematical equations of blood (Newman 73). Gillian Whitlock has observed that My Place replaced ―the long- held notion that wholeness and authenticity in Aboriginal identity reside in colour, blood and physical characteristics‖ by ―more contemporary and flexible notions [of
26 Aboriginality] . . . as a spiritual tie with the land, which passes on, undiminished, through generations‖ (Whitlock 158). The reception of Indigenous people by non-
Indigenous Australians changed with the wave of Aboriginal autobiographical narratives that entered the literary world.
To define the term Aboriginal and its meaning is not an easy task. Langton observes that scholar John McCorquodale has distinguished between sixty-seven definitions of Aboriginal people in Australian law, and that most of definitions cause confusion by ―inappropriate characterisation‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The
Politics of Representation‖ 116). The views of the government, of course, completely differ from the opinions of Aborigines on their own community. The nature of
Aboriginality and the way Aborigines define themselves change over time because there is also a change in the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. As
Brewster points out, ―this relationship was defined in terms of segregation in the first few decades of this century, then in terms of assimilation from the late 1930s through to the mid 1960s, then of integration in the 1960s, and self-determination from the early
1970s to the present‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 16).
Marcia Langton continues with the definition by stressing that the Commonwealth defines Aboriginality on a social rather than on a racial level, an idea typical of the assimilation period (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation‖
116). Aboriginal people prefer a definition that was stated by High Court: ―an
Aboriginal person is defined as a person who is a descendant of an indigenous inhabitant of Australia, identifies as Aboriginal and is recognized by members of the community in which he or she lives as Aboriginal‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film:
The Politics of Representation‖ 116). To me, the label of Aboriginality applies not only
27 to the Aboriginal ancestry, but also to social aspects like traditions, daily customs, language, and kinship system. Langton has finally expressed quite a complex definition of the concept of Aboriginality:
Aboriginality arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people
and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in
actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person
watching a program of Aboriginal people on television or reading a book
(Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation‖ 118).
This means that the dialogue between the two communities is important for understanding the issue of Aboriginality. Only when non-Aboriginal Australians have the first-hand contact with Aborigines, could the familiar stereotypes and myths about
Aborigines be forgotten. Langton‘s statement also proves that film industry and literature are very powerful media, which often serve to inform non-Indigenous
Australian audiences from diverse locations about Indigenous people. However, there appears a question whether watching a film or reading a book dealing with the
Aboriginal issue like the Stolen Generation could ―re-educate people to be non-racist and eliminate racism‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖ 120). In my view, such a media often has a strong effect on those who earlier perceived Aborigines as inferior; nevertheless, it depends on every individual if he or she changes the attitude to Aboriginal people and their culture.
4.2 Historical and Political Background
The thesis continues with the subchapter on historical and political background of Australia. I believe it is an important thing to know before we observe and apprehend
28 the phenomenon like the Stolen Generation. The Aborigines Protection Act of 1897 allowed the authorities to provide ―for the care, custody, and education of the children of Aboriginals‖ and prescribed ―the conditions on which any Aboriginal or half-caste children may be apprenticed to, or placed in service with, suitable persons‖ (Reynolds
198). Half-caste children (children of mixed racial inheritance whose mothers were
Aboriginal and whose fathers were white) were the first to experience the legislative cruelty of attempts to destroy Indigenous life through this Victorian colonial government‘s act. This political setting must be known before we can understand the books‘ plots I am analyzing in my thesis. It is also important to have some knowledge of the historical background of Australia. Aboriginal people were treated harshly right from the beginning of the colonisation of Australia by European settlers. After the arrival of white people on their lands, Aborigines have been subjected to many forms of violence and the situation has not changed even with the start of the twentieth century.
In 1905, the Aborigines Act was passed in the Western Australian Parliament that discriminated against Aboriginal people. This strict act was later amended twice, in
1911 and 1936. It removed the legal guardianship of Aboriginal parents and made their children legal wards of the state, thus, no parental permission to raise their children was required. The government also repressed severely human rights to Aboriginal people:
―Their travel, whom they associated with, whom they married, whom they might work for, what property they acquired and their family life generally were strictly monitored and supervised‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 11).
Aborigines were forbidden to enter hotels, they had to obtain permission before they could travel, or they could be involuntarily placed in institutions like the Moore River
Native Settlement. Aboriginal people could not apply for bank loans, or obtain financial
29 help from any institutions except the Aborigines Department of Native Affairs which was the norm for most Aborigines and part-Aborigines (Curthoys 128-144). Sally
Morgan‘s great-uncle, Arthur Corunna, describes his experience with racist behaviour on the side of white Australian authorities: ―I should have had sheep; they wouldn‘t give me any, because my colour wasn‘t right. Everybody else got them, not me. I was on my own, a black man with no one to help him . . . You see, the white man gets greedy, he wants to take everything‖ (Morgan, My Place 207-208). In an interview in February 2002, in ABC Radio National‘s Indigenous Arts programme, Doris
Pilkington talks about her experience with the government:
My mother had been suffering with appendicitis for many months and in those
days Aboriginal people weren‘t admitted into public hospitals. They were
taken to hospital if there was a medical problem and [only] if there was a
―Native Ward‖ attached to that hospital (Pilkington, ―Doris Pilkington:
Reunion‖).
Aboriginal life was fully controlled by government authorities. We can see that just because of different race, Aborigines were marginalized in various ways and were not given the same rights and laws as white Australian people. Aboriginal people were discriminated by the white pastoral industry until the second half of the sixties when the conditions improved. Before 1967 Aboriginal people were classified as wards of the state rather than as citizens. The same year a constitutional referendum decided that
―Aborigines were belatedly recognised as members of the Australian community‖
(Rickard 238) which means they were finally awarded Australian citizenship.
Moreover, it was not until 1965 that Aborigines were given the right to vote.
30 4.2.1 Stolen Generation
The issue of the Stolen Generation has become the subject of fierce debates in
Australia mainly because of the nature of historical knowledge. The greatest part in defining the removal of children and naming this event the Stolen Generation was played by the historian Peter Read (Attwood 189). It was used by him first as a title for a magazine article which was later followed by a book, The Stolen Generations (1981).
From the end of the nineteenth century to the late 1960s / early 1970s, state governments have been removing mixed-descent Aboriginal children from their families. They placed them under Church mission control or sent them into government- run institutions. Those children usually were between the ages of two and four; and, in some cases they were removed just hours after birth, as is shown by Doris Pilkington:
Every mother of a part-Aboriginal child was aware that their offspring could be
taken away from them at any time and they were powerless to stop the
abductors. That is why many women preferred to give birth in the bush rather
than in a hospital where they believed their babies would be taken from them
soon after birth (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 40-41).
The omnipresent anxiety of being Aboriginal and constant fear of government authorities is also expressed by Sally Morgan‘s mother in the interview with Mary
Wright: ―I was always worried people would find out I was an Aboriginal . . . I was very scared of authority. I was always scared I might have the children taken away. That would have destroyed me . . . I was always frightened to bring any attention to us . . . If the kids had gone, they probably would all have been taken to separate places‖
(Morgan, ―A Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan‖ 107).
Once being placed in institutional care, it was of no avail to escape from there and hide
31 in the bush because territories government officials usually found the young refugees.
The officials were labelled as ―protectors‖ and their task was to control the lives and the geographical location of Aboriginal people of mixed parentage.
As has already been mentioned, Aboriginal people were considered morally inferior and incapable of bringing up children of non-Aboriginal fathers. Since
Aborigines were regarded as a ―dying race‖ by legislative power, ―full-blood‖ people were usually confined to the settlements and left to die. A prominent Australian political writer, Robert Manne, also expressed his opinions on the Stolen Generation issue. One of the settled scientific facts was, according to Manne, the view ―that the full-blood tribal Aborigine represented a dying race, doomed in the fullness of time to extinction‖
(Manne). However, a feminist writer, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who has discussed in her essay both general observations on ill-treatment of Aboriginal women and children and a deeper look on sufferings they had to endure, has a different opinion. In ―Telling
It Straight: Self-Presentation Within Indigenous Women‘s Life Writings,‖ she mentions that in 1937, ―it became obvious that the Indigenous population was not dying out but continuing to increase due to white men either raping or having consensual sexual relations with Indigenous women‖ (Moreton-Robinson 7). The common belief of that time was that half castes were smarter than full-blood blacks. Pilkington has also expressed this stereotypical viewpoint in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence: ―part-
Aboriginal children were more intelligent than their darker relations and should be isolated and trained to be domestic servants and labourers‖ (Pilkington, Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence 40). Aborigines were considered sub-normal and not capable of being educated. On the one hand, the government thought that only children with fairer
32 skin are able to be trained. On the other hand, the half-caste children were regularly seen as deprived, having only half the qualities of a full-blood white.
Children from families of mixed parentage were thus kidnapped from their mothers, compulsorily sent to government or religious institutions and forced to conform to European ways. In a minority of cases, the removals of children were voluntary as mothers, believing they could not raise a child, surrendered him or her.
However, it is evident that many children were removed from their parents rather forcibly and brutally than voluntarily, without even giving the parents the right of appeal to a court of a law. Sometimes the caring parents were incorrectly and unjustly described by the government officials as not being able to properly raise their children.
Legislation impacted heavily on the lives of the removed children because the government officials tried to raise them white. Children were often separated from their siblings in order to erase any memory of their previous lives. They were denied the right to visit their relatives, and forbidden to speak the language of their Aboriginal families.
This was called a ―strategy of alienation‖ (Trees, ―My Place as Counter-Memory‖).
Arthur Corunna describes the conditions in the institution:
There was always a boundary between the girls and the boys. They had to sit
one way and we had to sit the other . . . When the girls were older, they were
put into service as housegirls and maids for anyone who wanted one. Once the
boys reached adolescence, they were completely separated from the girls and
put in a nearby orphanage. I suppose they were worried we might chase them
(Morgan, My Place 184).
By giving the half-caste children lessons of English, they were forced to lose the connection with their communities. Once placed in the government institution, it was
33 difficult to re-establish family contacts because letters from children‘s relatives were often hidden by nurses who took care of them. Sometimes children were even told that their parents had died and another time parents were told that their children had died, even though this was not true. This impact of the estrangement between family members is recorded also in My Place when Gladys acknowledges the loss of closeness between her and her mother: ―we‘d been apart too long to get really close. I knew she loved me and I loved her, but, for all my childhood, she had been just a person I saw on holidays‖ (Morgan, My Place 279). The loss of contact with parents was one of the continuing consequences of separation. Conditions in the settlements were very poor and orphanages usually became places of misery. Children were not only improperly clothed and sheltered but they also experienced ill treatment with frequent beatings and psychological and sexual abuses. A common aspect of the removals was the failure of the institutions to keep records of the child‘s parentage or such details as the date or place of birth. This fact, of course, contributed to the loss of Aboriginal identity and of awareness of genealogical roots of many people.
The assumption of white superiority over the Aboriginal population was common in those days. It is a well-known fact that the government authorities tried to make the children ―whiter‖ and Christian: ―colour, and therefore identity could be
‗bred‘ out of Indigenous people by whitewashing them with ‗superior‘ European blood‖
(Birch 124). The secondary effect of the assimilationist policy is that, under the white pressure, Aboriginal people began to perceive themselves as inferior and assess their society as subordinate. Moreover, the white Australians took their superiority for granted: ―Soon, Aboriginal people all over the state learned to acknowledge the white man‘s brutal strength and their cruel use of superior weapons and were forced to accept
34 the white system of justice and punishment‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence 15). Rosanne Kennedy has pointed out that Morgan‘s aim in My Place was to
―show how her grandmother has been denied subjectivity by the dominant culture, and to restore her subjectivity‖ (Kennedy 255). White society also denied the half-caste children any relationships with their Aboriginal families, even when it was sure that a mixed-blood child is a son or a daughter of a white father. White Australians strictly rejected the existence of any illegitimate siblings of their ancestors.
It is quite surprising that the law that children fathered by white men could not be looked after by their Aboriginal mothers operated still in the sixties even though it was not enforced as rigorously as it used to be earlier. It has already been mentioned that Aboriginal parents were not the legal guardians of their own children. This function was performed, in Western Australia, by the Chief Protector of Aborigines who believed the policy of separating a child from his or her parents and home culture did not appear cruel and inhuman. In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Chief Protector A. O.
Neville, in fact a real historical figure, who was in this position from 1915 to 1940, seemed to be concerned very much about the idea of ―breeding out the colour‖
(Manne). Robert Manne characterizes Neville as ―an amateur but enthusiastic anthropologist and a particularly authoritarian bureaucrat who exercised detailed control over the lives of the Aborigines under his care‖ (Manne). Novelist and historian, Tony
Birch, calls him ―a man obsessed with issues of miscegenation and the (literal) purity of skin‖ (Birch 117). Sally Morgan‘s great-uncle Arthur Corunna, who has personal experience with Mr Neville, sees him in a very negative way: ―Any blackfella that had dealings with Neville got no good word to say about him. He wasn‘t protectin‘ the
Aborigines, he was destroyin‘ them!‖ (Morgan, My Place 211). It was Neville who
35 was responsible for the violence committed against Aboriginal communities during his administration. He supported theories of biological control that was aimed at exterminating an Aboriginal identity and culture in Australia. In the 1930s, A. O.
Neville got the permission to protect full-blood people; which, however, meant that they could not contract marriages with half-caste people. To solve the ―problem‖ of half- caste children, they installed a policy called ―the breeding out of colour‖ which was later renamed as ―the policy of biological assimilation or absorption‖ (Manne). In 1937, there was a conference in Canberra which had to discuss the ―breeding-out‖ programme. The audience was told that the solution of the problem lay in the importance of the child removal: ―Neville could openly boast that he had the power under the act to take any child from its mother at any stage of its life, no matter whether the mother be legally married or not‖ (Birch 124). What was adopted at the conference was the so-called policy of assimilation aimed at absorbing Aboriginal people of mixed origin into the white society. Such policies of assimilation were not practiced only in
Western Australian but ―organized the management of indigenous populations across
Australia‖ (Whitlock 155). Half-caste children were encouraged to ―grow out of their
Aboriginality and assimilate into settler society by adopting the appearance, the identities, and the values of the colonizers, they could leave behind their ‗primitive‘
Aboriginality and become modern subjects of history‖ (Smith 527). The outcome of the assimilationist policy was stated in the report emphasizing that ―the destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end‖ (Peterson 57). This means that the assimilation was believed to be accomplished by supporting an integration of mixed-descent Aborigines into non-
36 Aboriginal society and by allowing them to marry Caucasians rather than Indigenous people. The legislation allowed Neville to implement his policy which practically meant that ―uncontrolled sexual relations between Europeans and Aborigines [were made] a punishable offence. It required Aborigines to seek a permission of the Native
Commissioner to marry. It more or less forbade marriages between half-castes and full bloods‖ (Manne). Policy-makers were confident that they were acting in the best interests of Aboriginal people and thought that they were rescuing them from racial degeneration in the tribal society (Cochrane, Jones and Manning). When taking part-
Aboriginal children, the authorities continuously persuaded the parents that it was for their children‘s good to remove them to government institutions; however, there remains a question why they were interested only in ―half and quarter caste‖ children and left full-blood Aboriginal ones at home. It seems to me that the factual reason lies in the aim of the policy theory to breed the Aboriginal race out of existence indeed. If the policy were really about giving children a better life, then all children would have been taken by the government officials. I conclude this debate with words by Robert
Manne suggesting that ―all this was done . . . not as a social welfare measure, but as an attempt to break the cultural connection between children of mixed descent and their
Aboriginal families and cultures . . . They also wished, in part through the child removal policy, to help keep White Australia pure‖ (Manne).
Social consequences of the forcible removals of children were really severe.
Even though the stated intention of the government was to assimilate Indigenous people into modern society, there was no improvement in the social position of Aborigines, particularly in the areas of employment and education. In contrast to the earlier beliefs of supporting child welfare, today most people see the policy as a human rights
37 violation as it caused extensive family and cultural damage. A government inquiry estimates that at least 35,000 children were ―stolen‖ from their families, although the number may be much higher because formal historical records were only poorly kept.
Peter Read asserts that ―those who had been removed suffered a common plight: they did not know who they were‖ (Read qtd. in Attwood 190). This statement is certainly true since children taken from their parents have usually lost their data, such as a birthplace or awareness of their familial relationships. Children raised on government reserves and Church missions were denied access to their cultural knowledge and traditional heritage. Thus, they were disconnected from their Aboriginal past and later it was difficult to become conscious of their own identity. Bain Attwood adds, ―‗The problem‘ they had lay in their ‗loss‘ of Aboriginality, and so the answer resided in their
‗searching‘ and ‗finding‘ or, more commonly, ‗recapturing‘, ‗recovering‘ or ‗re- establishing‘ their ‗real self‘ or ‗real identity‘, that of being Aboriginal‖ (Attwood 190).
Among the negative impacts of white assimilation is thus the loss of identity, loss of kin and culture, opportunity and self-esteem. According to Peter Read, ―‗Aboriginality‘ was a thing they had previously ‗lost‘, but was now an ‗identity‘ they should―and needed to―‗regain‘‖ (Read qtd. in Attwood 192). In an interview for the ABC, Doris
Pilkington recalled her removal from her mother at the age of three or four. She was not reunited with her mother until she was 25 and, until that time, she believed that her mother had given her away. When they were reunited, Doris was unable to speak her native language and had been taught to regard Indigenous culture as evil (Pilkington
―Doris Pilkington: Reunion‖). The pain and trauma of the past had deep effects on
Aboriginal people: ―They suffered long term mental, physical, emotional, social and economic consequences as a result of their separation, including a loss of empowerment
38 and responsibility for their own affairs‖ (Schaffer and Smith 105). Many people of
Indigenous origin now continue to suffer the devastating effects of the destruction of their identity, disintegration of family life and Aboriginal culture. People of Aboriginal origins suffer from poor health and housing standards, high rates of infant mortality and deaths in custody, domestic violence, poor education, low life expectancy, feelings of despair, and high levels of stress that even leads to high youth suicide rates. Moreover, it seems to me, many Aboriginal people who today are alcoholics, drug addicts, psychologically damaged or imprisoned were in their childhood removed from their families. Furthermore, the descendants of the Stolen Generation have now problems in terms of their own parenting, because they did not have parents themselves. Pilkington has admitted in the interview with Christine Watson: ―I had no idea how to bring up babies . . . Life was so idealistic, dreams of what life was going to be, you were going to meet a man and have all sorts of wonderful experiences. I was never prepared for the hardships‖ (Watson). The factors such as the disintegration of traditional family and kinship structures have really played a crucial role in the future. Even though most testimonies recall the pain of separation and the unhappiness, there are also some
Aborigines who
remembered pleasant time as well, even telling funny stories about their
experience . . . some expressed love for those who cared for them, or observed
that there were non-Aboriginal people who had tried to prevent their removal
or later protested, or remarked that some children had been removed because of
neglect; a few blamed their mothers for removals; and still others expressed
gratitude for being removed (Attwood 199).
39 We have to admit that Sally Morgan sometimes tells the story of her quest for identity with humour and little irony and Doris Pilkington expressed a kind of victory over the government; however, in my view, this notion is rather exceptional.
In the early 1990s, the concept of the Stolen Generation entered a wide public domain and also penetrated its politics. An idea of national reconciliation, whose aim was to improve relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, appeared and was officially inaugurated in 1991 by an act of parliament. According to Gillian
Whitlock, reconciliation is ―a policy which sets out to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past, restructuring the nation‘s sense of itself‖ (Whitlock 173). To reconcile Aboriginal Australians it was fundamental to understand Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander history and culture as such. Labour Prime Minister, Paul Keating, gave a speech to accept responsibility for past discriminatory policies and to acknowledge all injustices practiced before on Aboriginal people:
[Reconciliation] begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it
was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed
the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We
committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced
discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our
failure to imagine these things being done to us (Keating qtd. in Attwood 201).
Before the process of reconciliation can occur it is important that the truth about past experience is spoken about and acknowledged by all Australians. The practice of forced removals of half-caste children was fully brought to public attention with the release of the Bringing Them Home: A Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, which was
40 commissioned in 1995 and tabled in 1997, and which contains figures of the Human
Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (Schaffer and Smith 104-108). This important event in the Australian history commissioned by the Keating government
―changed the conditions for the reception and reading of My Place‖ and other autobiographical narratives written by Aboriginal people (Kennedy 237). Both works I am dealing with in my thesis highlight many of the themes and issues raised in Bringing
Them Home. In this report, authors spoke to more than five hundred Aboriginal people whose lives have been directly affected by the child removal policies. While the stories of submissions differed according to the person or place they grew up, many Aboriginal people had common experience that is outlined in the Bringing Them Home community guide. Bringing Them Home Inquiry includes testimony and narration specifically about racial oppression and debates about race relations. This report also strictly condemned the policy of disconnecting children from their cultural heritage (Schaffer and Smith
104-108). We do not know exactly how many children were victims of the forcible removal; but, the report suggested that somewhere between one in three and one in ten
Aboriginal children were separated from their families.2 I tend to consider this number so high that it is almost unbelievable that non-Aboriginal people were not able to protest against this cruel practice for such a long time. It seems to me that one of the most important aspects of Bringing Them Home was to see the permanence of the grief many
Aboriginal mothers experienced. The report also concentrated on family reunions and parenting programmes, and it called for a number of reparations, including financial compensation. The conclusion of the report states,
2 The information about the number of removed children is taken from Celermajer‘s article ―The Stolen
Generation: Aboriginal Children in Australia‖.
41 Indigenous families and communities have endured gross violations of their
human rights. These violations continue to affect Indigenous people‘s daily
lives. They were an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out Indigenous families,
communities and cultures, vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of
Australia (Reconciliation and Social Justice Library).
Many commentators regarded testimonies from Bringing Them Home ―as historical evidence, calling for them to be treated as first-hand and true accounts of history, and nearly all asserted or assumed that Australia had to accept the stolen generations as a
‗fact of history‘ if the nation was to ‗move forward‘‖ (Attwood 207). In general, the whole process of the inquiry caused a proliferation of Aboriginal literature dealing with the concept of the Stolen Generation because such narratives were useful to reveal the history of Australia and the impact it still has on the lives of Aboriginal people. It encouraged them to give oral testimonies and written submissions, and the discussions of Indigenous rights and physical and psychological abuse in Australia have become more frequent.
On 26 May 1998, as the result of the report of the Stolen Generation inquiry into the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, an annual National Sorry
Day was instituted. The aim was to commemorate the history of forced separation and to acknowledge the damage that had been caused to Indigenous families, so that the healing process could begin and a lost identity of Aborigines could be rediscovered.
Many politicians participated, with the notable exception of the Prime Minister, John
42 Howard3, and his conservative coalition colleagues who consistently rejected calls for a formal Australian federal government apology that should have admitted the responsibility for the effects of assimilation on Indigenous lives. It is difficult to answer a question whether the National Sorry Day is enough to make amends to all who suffered in past decades thanks to government regulations. Rosanne Kennedy points out that ―the damage and suffering do not end . . . In these sad stories of forced separation, there are no happy endings‖ (Kennedy 250). Sally Morgan, in the interview with
Victoria Laurie from 1999, admits that the injustice practiced on Aborigines was so big that nobody can ever recompense the grief and harm they underwent:
For my grandmother, it would be a meaningless gesture because the loss was
too great. When I wrote My Place, we thought Nan had only one child. We‘ve
since found out that she had at least six children, and they were all taken away
. . . So I think for people like my grandmother, there‘s nothing that could
compensate for that scale of loss (Morgan, ―Victoria Laurie: An Interview with
Sally Morgan‖).
Despite institutions that help Indigenous people to cope with past experience and conform to the present situation, the racist attitudes Morgan‘s family and many others encountered will remain in their souls forever.
3 John Howard was the Leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007.
He became famous for his resolute refusal to provide the apology to Indigenous Australians recommended by Bringing Them Home report.
43 5. Aboriginal Identity and the Stolen Generation in the Books
First of all, I will do an analysis of both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence to understand some details of the books‘ plots. Regarding My Place, I will briefly present the protagonists, the setting, and the relationships of Sally Morgan to the most influential family members, such as her mother Gladys, her father, her great-uncle
Arthur and her grandmother Daisy. I will define the first steps in the investigation of her
Aboriginal roots and principal problems the author had to confront. As regards, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, I will portray Pilkington‘s method of storytelling and her view of Western Australian history. Then I will describe the successful and victorious journey home which the three little Aboriginal girls had to undergo, and finally, I will mention how the book has inspired film-makers. In a comparative study of the works at the end of this chapter, I will suggest some differences and similarities between the books.
5.1 My Place
As I have said in the Introduction, My Place is Sally Morgan‘s autobiography written in 1987. The principal narrator is the author herself. Morgan retells the interactions with various people throughout her life and remembers numerous events from her childhood. The main theme should be stated as a quest for knowledge of her own family‘s past, because the author has been brought up under false pretences provided by her relatives. They lied to her that she was of an Indian origin. The quest for the place of origin and for self-understanding shapes the entire book (Dizard,
―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 150). The setting of the story revolves around Morgan‘s hometown Perth where she spent her childhood
44 between the 1950s and the 1960s, and Corunna Downs in the Pilbara Region. Sally
Morgan did not know about her Aboriginality until she was about the age of fifteen. In her book, she tries to describe her attempt to learn more about her roots and to portray the difficult family‘s situation throughout her life. As Morgan‘s father, David Milroy, an abusive and clinically depressed World War II veteran of Scottish heritage, was often sick, her mother Gladys was obliged to take several jobs at a time to provide her children at least with food and clothes. It looks like her father played an important role in Sally‘s life and definitely contributed to her white formation. Sally as a child listens eagerly to her father‘s stories from the war and even learns to sing the Italian
Communist anthem. Sally‘s mother says of them that in some ways, her husband and her daughter were similar because they were both rebels (Morgan, My Place 304).
Sally‘s father sometimes seems quite dangerous since he often loses control and then menaces his wife and children, even though he would never kill anything including the chook for Christmas. Despite his poor health, he is a good storyteller of adventures from the war where he was imprisoned and mistreated by Germans and from where he later escaped, founding a shelter in an Italian family. David Milroy‘s nightmares, his mental instability, and his excessive alcohol drinking finally lead to his suicide. Although
Morgan speaks about her father with certain tenderness and respect, she admits that his death is a moment of relief for the whole family. She feels empathy for him because he is simply part of her. Rosanne Kennedy points out: ―the death of her white father also introduces a new kind of fear and instability, because once the white father disappears from the domestic scene, the light-skinned children become vulnerable to being removed by welfare authorities‖ (Kennedy 253). However, it seems to me, non-
Aboriginal fathers were quite powerless as regards removing their half-caste children
45 into government institutions. They often thought the decision of authorities was appropriate and agreed with the policies of assimilation.
Nevertheless, the most influential person in Sally Morgan‘s life was her grandmother Daisy Corunna called Nan: ―Nan influenced us greatly when it came to our attitudes to the wildlife around us (Morgan, My Place 56). When Sally starts to go to school, her classmates continuously ask her why she looks so different and which country she comes from. Until that time, the girl has not realized her appearance and her background. Sally Morgan‘s grandmother calls attention to her blackness and the pain caused by her sense of exclusion from the family by crying ―you bloody kids don‘t want me, you want a bloody white grandmother. I‘m black. Do you hear, black, black, black‖
(Morgan, My Place 97). It was exactly at the time when Morgan begins to question her own identity: ―For the first time in my fifteen years, I was conscious of Nan‘s colouring.
She was right. She wasn‘t white. Well, I thought logically, if she wasn‘t white, then neither were we (Morgan, My Place 97). Whereas Morgan later identifies herself with the Aboriginality, her grandmother does clearly condemn it. In fact, Morgan never succeeds in making her grandmother proud of being Aboriginal. Her dark skin has perhaps shaped her lived experience, and her sense of herself as ―other‖. Although
Sally‘s mother tells her children that her family was from India, the secret of their heritage that her family was refusing to accept for many years is later divulged. Robin
Dizard in the book‘s review observes: ―Convinced that welfare officials would break up their family to save the children from un-English habits like sleeping five in a bed,
Sally‘s resolute parent and grandparent decided to tell the children they were Indian‖
(Dizard, ―My Place and the Healing Art of Autobiography‖ 135). This white lie is, however, revealed by Morgan‘s sister who was at that time, as Sally Morgan admits in
46 an interview published in Aboriginal Culture Today, ―much more socially mature than
[her], and so she was always more aware of things like that‖ (Morgan, ―A Fundamental
Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan‖ 94). After it is confirmed that
Sally is a half-Aboriginal, a descendant of the Palku people of the Pilbara, Sally Morgan insists on finding out more about the history of her family members. She acknowledges several times in the book that she needs some information about her ancestors to understand herself and the way her family interacts with each other. Sally has a strong feeling that they do not fit into the community because their origins are not only hidden but also mystified. After her schoolmates observe she is in fact of Aboriginal origins,
Sally Morgan remembers: ―I felt different from the other children in my class. They were the spick-and-span brigade, and I, the grubby offender‖ (Morgan, My Place 26).
It was not easy for her to identify with being Aboriginal, as she remarks: ―What did it really mean to be Aboriginal? I‘d never lived off the land and been a hunter and a gatherer. I‘d never participated in corroborees or heard stories of the Dreamtime.
I‘d lived all my life in suburbia and told everyone I was Indian. I hardly knew any
Aboriginal people. What did it mean for someone like me?‖ (Morgan, My Place 141).
Sally Morgan, her mother Gladys and her grandmother Daisy grew up under different historical circumstances which influenced their acknowledging of Aboriginal identity.
Daisy‘s effort to deny her Aboriginality and to pretend being white reveals a profound sense of powerlessness: ―Gladys wears the mask of the white-identified black person
(Kennedy 251). For her daughter Gladys identity was also a matter of acting the roles and trying to live in a white way of life. In her childhood, Gladys finds the perception of herself as ―other‖ strange because she plays with white children and eats with them in the dining-room whereas her mother (as a servant) eats in the kitchen: ―I was suddenly
47 very unsure of my place in the world, I still ate with the family in the dining-room, but I felt like and outsider‖ (Morgan, My Place 270). In response to her feeling of exclusion,
Gladys fantasizes about being white and rich. After the visit of her remote relatives,
Gladys acknowledges her heritage: ―All my life, I‘ve only been half a person‖ (Morgan,
My Place 233). Rosanne Kennedy concludes: ―Whereas Daisy has lived in the shadows of white culture as an illiterate servant, Gladys has been educated to occupy the margins of European culture‖ (Kennedy 250). Sally‘s younger sister Jill observes that the parents of her non-Aboriginal classmates do not want ―mixing with you because you‘re a bad influence. [They] reckon all Abos are a bad influence . . . It‘s a terrible thing to be Aboriginal. Nobody wants to know you‖ (Morgan, My Place 98). It is obvious that the recognition of her ancestry brings experience with racist views of Morgan‘s personality.
Sally Morgan also demands to know why her mother and grandmother have been scared of authority figures all their lives: ―I was often puzzled by the way Mum and Nan approached anyone in authority, it was as if they were frightened . . . Why on earth would anyone be frightened of the government?‖ (Morgan, My Place 96). The truth that Aboriginal people profoundly distrust the government and state institutions, such as the hospital or the housing bureau, is projected in a well-known fact that they are naturally suspicious of any kind of authority, including that of doctors. In an interview with Mary Wright, Sally Morgan admits: ―we didn‘t understand the social circumstances of [the grandmother‘s] life. As we got older and started to see the effects of her life―she was quite bitter, and afraid of authority, for example―we began to wonder why she was like that‖ (Morgan, ―A Fundamental Question of Identity: An
Interview with Sally Morgan‖ 96). Such a fear of authoritarian institutions was natural
48 and common in Aboriginal people‘s lives. They were even afraid to acknowledge their origins because of the distrust in the government and its policies. Especially Morgan‘s grandmother carefully hides the family‘s Aboriginality because she perceives it as a sign of marginality and ―terrible things will happen to you if you tell people what you are‖ (Morgan, My Place 279). Aboriginal parents were afraid that the children would be taken if they were discovered to be of Aboriginal descent because to identify oneself as an Aboriginal is to risk inviting the interference of the law.
Morgan is eager to make her family members begin to tell their stories; however, she is constantly met with resistance. Morgan‘s mother Gladys reproaches
Nan: ―You won‘t tell us anything. Whenever we ask you about the past, you get nasty. We‘re your family; we‘ve got a right to know‖ (Morgan, My Place 148). The first one who finally desires to make his history known and provides Morgan with crucial genealogical information is her great-uncle Arthur Corunna, Nan‘s brother: ―I want my story finished. I want everyone to read it. Arthur Corunna‘s story! . . . You see, it‘s important. Because maybe they‘ll understand how hard it‘s been for the blackfella to live the way he wants. I‘m part of history, that‘s how I look on it. Some people read history, don‘t they?‖ (Morgan, My Place 213). Arthur Corunna is keen to tell his life story before he makes his journey back to his home country to die, not only so that his own family will know of the past, but so that white people will know the
Aboriginal version of history. When Sally hears Arthur‘s sad experience, she decides to record it onto her cassette machine and then transcribe it in the form of a biographical narrative. Although Sally‘s grandmother denies telling her life story for a long time, finally she is willing to say at least some of her personal experience, however only on the condition that she will keep her ―secrets‖ (Morgan, My Place 162). Sally Morgan‘s
49 desire to identify with her grandmother‘s past and the painful nature of the history is becoming reality. In her book, she narrates the plunge into her family‘s history by collecting memories of her relatives and old family‘s friends. Morgan questions people who knew the family; she collects evidence relating to the family‘s history and reads about policies practiced on Aboriginal people. After she begins to seek for documents from the libraries and oral recollections, forgotten incidents come back. Sally Morgan also travels through the whole continent just to know some pieces of the family‘s story.
What is really important and encouraging for her is the fact that, during her investigation, Sally Morgan has met forgotten but interesting people that have helped her create the history. She talks about it in the interview with Victoria Laurie:
we met our relatives, our extended family, we met grandpas and grandmas and
uncles and aunties and cousins and that was fantastic for us because all of a
sudden we had a context, we had a big family, we weren‘t just this small
isolated family in the non-Aboriginal community, we were part of this huge
family and that really gave us a sense of belonging (Morgan, ―Victoria Laurie:
An Interview with Sally Morgan‖).
The reuniting with her ancestors gives her strength to investigate more about her own personality and Sally suddenly feels that her position in the world is less uncertain.
However, the new history is not easy to accept. Everyone in the family has to deal with the situation. The biggest problem in searching for her past is the encounter with the wealthy upper-class colonial pastoralist family of the Drake-Brockmans. The female members of the family renounce any kinship with Morgan. They cannot concede that
Howden Drake-Brockman, the owner of Corunna Downs station, fathered both Sally‘s grandmother and later forced incest on her, fathering Sally‘s mother. The family of
50 Drake-Brockmans has strictly disowned their half-sister and brothers because they wanted to protect their money and their own secrets, namely the adultery, incest and pederasty they committed. Such things were, though, very common in the history of
European colonialism, as Penelope Andrews proves in her article ―Violence against
Women in Australia: Possibilities for Redress within the International Human Rights
Framework‖:
Colonization deprived [women] of their status and role within their respective
communities. Their status as women also made them more vulnerable to sexual
exploitation from the settlers . . . Young Aboriginal females [were] subjected to
rape, incest, and other forms of sexual abuse by a variety of male family
members (Andrews).
The investigation is even more difficult for Sally Morgan because Nan regards the issue of incest and rape as a secret until her death. She always speaks in a neutral way and never admits her own experience: ―we had no protection when we was in service. I knew a lot of native servants had kids to white men because they was forced. Makes you want to cry to think how black women have been treated in this country‖ (Morgan,
My Place 337). Sally Morgan talks in the interview with Mary Wright about her grandmother‘s pregnancy and incest: ―there were a couple of really crucial things; I‘d asked her if she‘s been pregnant before. That was a terrible thing, it was agony for her
. . . she couldn‘t talk about it, but her look gave me an answer‖ (Morgan, ―A
Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan‖ 108-109). Rosanne
Kennedy discusses the rape in her article and comes with an interesting observation:
The trauma of Daisy‘ life cannot, however, be considered simply in terms of a
female experience of sexual abuse; rather, sexual abuse must be seen as part of
51 the lived conditions of ‗the colonial experience‘, which dictated that poor black
women were available to white men on their terms. Sexual abuse was simply
one of the many forms racism took in the lives of black women (Kennedy 245).
Sally Morgan in her book demands that the sexual contact history of Europeans and
Aborigines be acknowledged in the present. However, when she discovers the unpleasant facts about the past of her family and of many Aboriginal women in general, she admits: ―We all felt shy and awkward about our new-found past. No one was sure what to do with it or about it, and none of the family could agree on whether I‘d done the right thing‖ (Morgan, My Place 137). In my view, Sally Morgan really made a good decision to retell her family‘s history because the family members including her have become aware of the importance of their lives. In the interview with Mary Wright,
Morgan says when talking about her grandmother: ―It gave her a sense that she had a value as a human being; she had something to say that other people might find meaningful‖ (Morgan, ―A Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally
Morgan‖ 95). Sally Morgan‘s mother Gladys evaluates her daughter‘s attempt to write an auto/biography of her family by adding:
What I‘ve always hated is people feeling sorry for me, and I would hate that to
happen, because when I think of it, I‘ve really had a fantastic life. I‘ve got so
many memories. I‘ve managed just lately to be able to talk about where I was
brought up; up until now I haven‘t been able to, so it‘s good (Morgan, ―A
Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan‖ 97).
According to me, Sally Morgan was very brave to publish such a kind of story.
Although her grandmother did not agree with releasing the truth and was rather conservative in her views, Morgan was determined to show the injustice practiced on
52 the Indigenous population to the public. The fact is that many people had never heard of children taken from their mothers, of fear, slavery, exploitation and cruelty towards
Aborigines just because of a different skin colour. It is also possible that this influential book helped improve the relationships between white Australian people and Aborigines.
For a good coexistence, it seems very important to share knowledge and experience.
The concept of the Stolen Generation is depicted in My Place especially through the stories of Morgan‘s older family members, such as her grandmother and her great- uncle. They both give the readers information on how they were treated in the government institutions by describing the living conditions and behaviour of non-
Aboriginal authorities towards half-caste children. All members of Morgan‘s family, including Morgan herself, have experienced in some form racism and abuse at the hands of non-Aboriginal people and are, therefore, regarded as victims of the Stolen
Generation.
5.2 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
When writing Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Doris Pilkington used her family‘s memories, newspaper reports, letters, telegrams, and various official documents about the Nyungar people, the Aborigines inhabiting the Southwest of
Western Australia. Her key sources were her mother, Molly Craig, the oldest of the three trekking girls; and Daisy, her aunt. Doris Pilkington writes at the beginning of the book: ―The task of reconstructing the trek home from the settlement has been both an exhausting and an interesting experience. One needed to have a vivid imagination‖
(Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence xi). Pilkington has returned to her childhood to gain memories of the countryside and the settlement to describe the
53 scenery. She admits: ―By combining my imagination and the information from records of geographical and botanical explorations undertaken in the area in the early 1900s and later, I was able to build a clearer picture of the vegetation and landscape through which the girls trekked‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence xii). The task for Doris
Pilkington was more difficult since she has not retold the story from her own experience. She returned to the 1930s when her mother was a child and rewrote the story according to her aunt‘s remembrances.
The first three chapters of the book provide readers with historical perspectives on early Western Australian Indigenous experience and contact with Europeans. The author gives an insight into how the Nyungar people of the Great Southern region responded to the arrival of the first Europeans and how the early settlers displaced the
Indigenous people from the Swan River region: ―it was the destruction of their traditional society and the dispossession of their lands‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-
Proof Fence 13). By undermining their traditional ways, I mean excessive consumption of alcohol and immediate rush of money. European settlers interrupted hunting and gathering customs, polluted water and damaged Aboriginal sacred sites. Elderly people from the tribes remember that, ―where there was once bush, there were now tents, huts or houses‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 14). Aboriginal people were also forbidden cultural practices, such as performing their traditional dances like corroborees and practicing ceremonies that were crucial to their cultural life. Their traditions were not only broken by government officials, but also ridiculed and disparaged: ―warriors with painted bodies and plumes of feathers on their ochre-covered heads would become faded images, buried in the past‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 16). Land was made available for reserves and missions, and these were managed by local police
54 or government managers. Such introductory words are supplied at the beginning of the book before Doris Pilkington starts with the emotive story of three little girls.
In 1930, the constable Riggs kidnaps Molly, aged fourteen, from her community in Jigalong in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. Despite the fact that
Molly‘s father is Thomas Craig, an inspector of the rabbit-proof fence, she is taken to the Moore River Native Settlement together with her half-sister Daisy Craig Kadibil and their cousin Gracie Fields. This place should become ―their home for several years . . . where they would be educated in European ways‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence 61). The government is persuaded that ―they will grow up with a better outlook on life than back at their camp‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 47). After the arrival, the girls are forbidden to speak their native language, only sometimes they talk whispering in Mardu wangka. Other girls in the dormitory warn them not to ―talk blackfulla language here . . . you gotta forget it and talk English all the time‖
(Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 72). The girls are also forced to abandon their heritage and taught to be culturally white, which means that they can be ―saved‖ from their own ―primitive savagery‖. In the settlements, all children are given several dresses to wear, which is against their customs: ―They tell us we gotta cover everything, the wundgebulla4 don‘t like to see naked fulah‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence 31). When entering the dormitory for the first time, they notice, ―the door [is] locked with chains and padlocks‖ and ―the uninviting weatherboard and latticed dormitory [have] bars on the windows . . . just like a gaol‖ (Pilkington, Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence 63). The room is uncomfortable and the girls find it unpleasant ―to
4 A Mardujara word meaning a ―white man‖.
55 sleep on the hard mattress . . . feeling cold and lonely‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-
Proof Fence 64). Children suffered from the lack of means of subsistence:
Instead of residential school, the Aboriginal children were placed in an
overcrowded dormitory. The inmates, not students, slept on cyclone beds with
government-issue blankets. There were no sheets or pillow slips except on
special occasions when there was an inspection by prominent officials. Then
they were removed as soon as the visitors left the settlements and stored away
until the next visit. On the windows there were no colourful curtains, just wire
screens and iron bars. It looked more like a concentration camp than a
residential school for Aboriginal children (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence 72).
Being treated harshly in the settlement, Molly sees the only option to escape from the authoritarian rule and rejoin her family. Molly is aware of the consequences if they catch them, but she is prepared to take the risk. The punishment for running away is very strict, as their friend retells experience of other girls trying to escape: ―seven days punishment with just bread and water. Mr Johnson shaved their heads bald and made them parade around the compound so that everyone could see them. They got the strap too‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 71). Despite this warning, one day, during a rainstorm, Molly, Daisy and Gracie set off for a long journey back home on foot. Without any maps and barefoot, they are guided only by a rabbit-proof fence, one of those constructed across the continent in an attempt to keep rabbits from destroying the farmlands.5 The girls were clever enough to avoid routes near larger towns and
5 In fact, the rabbit-proof fence was a ―typical response by the white people to a problem of their own making‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 109).
56 ―knew that they would have been too exposed to the white population and their whereabout would have been immediately reported to the local police‖ (Pilkington,
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence xiv). Their familiarity with the landscape meant they could find and prepare food easily. However, dragging across the desert is physically demanding and the girls are often close to collapse with heat and hunger. During their
1,600-kilometre walk through the harsh Australian landscape, they are continually followed by Native Police and search planes. The story of their journey acknowledges the goodwill of non-Aboriginal people who gave them food, tins and jackets. The girls are also helped by a cattle station Aboriginal maid but still evading capture from the government. Finally they succeed in finding the way home except Gracie who is recaptured. Molly and Daisy are very strong youngsters and as it is stated almost at the end of the novel, ―these two girls had overcome their fears and proved that they could survive. It took a strong will and a purpose—they had both‖ (Pilkington, Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence 119). In fact, most half-caste children never saw their parents again and thousands of people are still trying to find their roots.
As I have already mentioned, the book has inspired film-makers; six years later, the film based on the novel‘s story appeared. Charlotte Observer‘s reviewer, Toppman
Lawrence, in his ―‗Fence‘ Tells Story of a Stolen Generation‖ argues that ―the members of the Australian government have been embarrassed‖ by the film, persuaded that it
―should never have been made, since it re-opens relatively fresh wounds‖ (Toppman).
Nevertheless, it is obvious that being silent about this kind of racism in Australia‘s past does not make the results of it evaporate. In his article, Chris Betros has mentioned words once expressed by Doris Pilkington: ―we want them to recognize the plight of the
Stolen Generation and the effects it had on us and accept it as part of our shared history‖
57 (Pilkington qtd. in Betros). It is clear that the past is very important to Australian people because it is part of their identity and Noyce‘s film is the first one that explicitly treats the subject of the Stolen Generation.
5.3 A Brief Comparative Study
In this part of the thesis, I will stress the similarities and differences between the books that may already be clear from the analyses of the works above. By having analyzed the content of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, we may assume that the books bear a lot of identical signs as well as some slight differences. Although the books were published in different decades, they both treat the same theme―the
Stolen Generation. The removal of the girls in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is very similar to those of Morgan‘s family members in My Place. The skin colour or position of half-Aboriginal fathers did not play any role; children were removed without any exception. The experience with harsh conditions in the settlement of the three girls in
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence concords with the experience of, for example, Morgan‘s mother and grandmother as children. We can see from the testimonies and memories from the childhood that the protagonists of both books were given no real education, inadequate food, and were subjected to punishments when placed in government institutions. They were being educated to think and behave in European ways and made to forget their native languages. Both Morgan and Pilkington have discussed issues such as the sexual use of Aboriginal bodies, the enforced denial of family rights, and restricted communication with family members. Both authors wanted to show that
Aboriginal people did not have equal opportunities in Australian society. The books highlight the despair experienced by mothers whose children were taken to the
58 orphanages. They also show the terror and confusion of children detached immediately from familiar surroundings and forced to adapt to European ways.
One of the essential differences is the method the authors utilized to depict
Aboriginal history in the first decades of the twentieth century. Sally Morgan does not simply record her own individual life experience. She also documents ―the interconnections and disjunctions of Aboriginal oral history‖ (Trees, ―Counter-
Memories: History and Identity in Aboriginal Literature‖ 55) because she has relied on testimonies of her family members. Except for her first-person written narrative, she includes first-person spoken narratives of three other people. My Place thus contains the transcribed oral autobiographical accounts of Sally Morgan‘s mother Gladys, her grandmother Daisy, her great-uncle Arthur Corunna and her own. Although each one is an individual narrative, they are all interrelated and connected to each other. Sally
Morgan provides the stories of her family members with her own focus. Susan Lever has described Morgan‘s style in her essay ―Life and Art: Helen Garner and Sally
Morgan‖ saying that ―My Place relies on careful narrative structuring, and attempts to replicate the voices of its different storytellers who mostly rely on techniques from oral tradition to make meaning‖ (Lever 119). On the contrary, Doris Pilkington included a brief summary of the history of assimilation to the dominant white culture at the beginning of the book. Pilkington‘s narrative does not depend on her own life experience but derives from a good knowledge of land. Watson adds that ―her mother‘s story did not just describe a physical journey but also exemplified the importance of the relationship between land and the maintenance of Aboriginal cultural identity and memory‖ (Watson). Pilkington has not depicted her own life experience but transcribed the story of her relatives according to her aunt‘s memories. Pilkington‘s account of the
59 journey ―combined both the archival record and the oral record . . . which she derives mainly from her Aunty Daisy‖ (Hughes-D‘Aeth). Before she began to write, Doris
Pilkington had to do a lot of research in terms of knowing the landscape and types of plants and animals. In the interview with Christine Watson, Pilkington explains her process of recording Aboriginal cultural memory. She connects the journey with her own sense of responsibility as a witness to Aboriginal history: ―I see my role as reporting social and cultural history for my people, from an Aboriginal woman‘s perspective‖ (Watson). Pilkington wanted to record the importance of her mother‘s childhood journey as a story of resistance against authority. She experienced the story through her mother‘s eyes, as Christine Watson argues: ―Pilkington became her mother‘s witness both literally and narratively as she explains: ‗I was my mother‘s eyes‘‖ (Watson). We have seen that the writings differ due to Pilkington‘s absence of her own autobiographical narrative and her addition of a short overview of the encounter of settler and Aboriginal communities in the past.
It seems to me, however, that the biggest discrepancy between the two works lies in the intention and aim of the authors. While My Place gave many Australians their first meaningful picture of contemporary urban Aborigines and helped the readers understand circumstances that impacted on Aboriginal people of the Stolen Generation,
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, published nine years later, only reminded Australian population of the racism against Aboriginal people. Robin Dizard points out that the aim of My Place was to ―exhibit . . . a common origin in struggles to retrieve repressed memories from personal silences and install them in the center of public memory‖
(Dizard, ―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 147).
She adds that Morgan ―aims to save herself, her family and all her readers from white
60 lies‖ (Dizard, ―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖
150). Pilkington‘s goal was, according to me, the celebration of the acquired freedom and, of course, to show the victorious return of the trekking girls home without the capture of government officials. We may perceive this book as a true story of a journey of survival that tells us about the desire of Aboriginal people to free themselves and to go home. On the contrary, Daisy Corunna from My Place, for instance, cannot transform her history of exploitation, slavery and sexual abuse into a tale of individual triumph over oppressive conditions. Whereas My Place concentrates on self acceptance, respect for other, and concern for Aboriginal rights, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence deals with attitudes of the non-Aboriginal population towards the policy of assimilation.
Both books try to explore the rational behind the government policy of removing children. Although My Place was not the first published narrative dealing with
Aboriginal issues, it was ―the first to be actively celebrated, heavily marketed, and critically promoted‖ (Schaffer and Smith 92). In Ruby Langford Ginibi‘s words, My
Place was ―‗the first to open this country up‘, an act of ‗intercultural brokerage‘ which for many Australians was their first meaningful picture of contemporary urban
Aborigines‖ (Ginibi qtd. in Whitlock 156). Sally Morgan was thus one of the first people to give a voice to the Stolen Generation. She raised awareness and portrayed
Aborigines as a maltreated and physically abused society and culture. Morgan‘s own narrative is written in the spirit of reconciliation, recovery and healing. Through the memories of her childhood and adolescence, hints and echoes begin to emerge and a hidden knowledge is uncovered. Whereas My Place presents autobiography as part of a process of liberation and of a quest for identity, we may observe quite different presentations of Aboriginality in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence whose protagonists
61 have never been in any doubt as to their Aboriginal roots. There is no explicit process of making Aboriginal identity through the autobiographical writing such as we find in My
Place: ―What had begun as a tentative search for knowledge had grown into a spiritual and emotional pilgrimage. We had an Aboriginal consciousness now, and were proud of it‖ (Morgan, My Place 233). Although Doris Pilkington turns aside from any expressions of Aboriginality, the book does not reject spiritual affirmations of
Aboriginality. Both Pilkington and Morgan‘s books help us see the consequences of the children‘s removal and understand the construction of Aboriginal identity in terms of protagonists‘ hope and determination to return to their roots and relatives.
62 6. Perception of the Works
As My Place was published earlier than Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, I will rather deal with the impact of Sally Morgan‘s work on other Aboriginal writers and on the recognition of Aboriginal past. Sally Morgan was one of those writers and activists who realized that the Australian government had been long hiding the files about the true history of Aboriginal people as she points out in her book: ―our own government had terrible policies for Aboriginal people. Thousands of families in Australia were destroyed by the government policy of taking children away. None of that happened to white people‖ (Morgan, My Place 164). After My Place was published around the time of the Bicentennial celebrations held in 1988, ―the question of how Australia had treated the country‘s original inhabitants had become a collective bad conscience plaguing white Australia‖ (Ommundsen). Bicentennial celebration was stated to mark two hundred years of continuous European settlement and it was the time when ―Australians were encouraged to focus on their personal, communal and national histories‖
(Whitlock 157). Nobody could ignore Aboriginal issues any longer because ―the highly visible, visual, and spirited counter-celebration displaced the official story of white settlement, raised significant human rights issues, and opened multiple possibilities for the future‖ (Schaffer and Smith 86). Before My Place was released, non-Indigenous
Australians did not know enough about the treatment of Aborigines in Australian society. An accepted and dominant version of Australian official history was constructed by colonizers of Australia and by government officials. Kathryn Trees in her essay calls it ―a fiction that both creates and substantiates a political reality that is itself fictitious‖ (Trees, ―My Place as Counter-Memory‖). She further claims that
―official history has served to marginalise ‗Aboriginal‘ knowledge, customs and
63 beliefs‖ (Trees, ―My Place as Counter-Memory‖). On the other hand, she asserts that the history produced in the form of literary works ―serves as . . . a ‗counter-memory‘ of the violence and deculturation to which Aboriginal people have been subjected, but which has been omitted from official white Australian histories‖ (Trees, ―My Place as
Counter-Memory‖). The story is counter-historical in the sense that it represents a narrative that goes against the accepted white official history. Sidonie Smith in an article published in Modern Fiction Studies declares:
Through [Morgan‘s] narrative construction of a counter family history . . .,
Morgan posits her Aboriginality as an identity originating in her matrilineal
heritage and socially confirmed in her identification with and
acknowledgement by the community of Aboriginal people in Corunna Downs
(Smith 534).
My Place can be regarded as such a counter-memory of the exploitation of Aborigines through taking of their land and using them as servants or for unpaid labour. Rosanne
Kennedy also asserts that My Place ―elaborates a counter-history of Australia . . . [and] serves as the vehicle for restoring lost voices, and thereby making a silenced history speak‖ (Kennedy 237). The life-stories of Morgan‘s family members widely contributed to the so-called counter-history that disputes the reality of the white Australian history.
For example, when removing the half-caste children from Aboriginal communities, the government often said to the family that their children would be back home in the few weeks and that they are going to be given education. Arthur Corunna, Sally Morgan‘s great-uncle, retells his experience when he was twelve:
They told my mother and the others we‘d be back soon. We wouldn‘t be gone
for long, they said. People were callin‘, ‗Bring us back a shirt, bring us this,
64 bring us that.‘ They didn‘t realise they wouldn‘t be seein‘ us no more. I thought
they wanted us educated so we could help run the station some day, I was
wrong (Morgan, My Place 182).
Morgan‘s grandmother, Daisy Corunna, also describes her experience as one of being
―stolen‖ from her Aboriginal family. When they took her at the age of fourteen, she and her mother believed that she was going to be sent to school, but instead she was made a servant: ―I kept thinkin‘ of my poor old mother and how she thought I was gettin‘ educated. I wanted to tell her what had happened. I wanted to tell her all I was doin‘ was workin‘. I wasn‘ gettin‘ no education‖ (Morgan, My Place 333). Such examples are definitely part of the ―counter-memory‖ that goes against the most trusted sources of
Australian history. However, there appears a question whether a literary text like My
Place may be interpreted as pure history. What we can clearly see is the fact that such stories provide at least some understanding of the Aboriginal history in the
Reconciliation process. They record displacement from their own society and their adaptation to the white rules. Thus, we can proclaim that the readers are encouraged to read Aboriginal literature as history of Australia.
There is no doubt that the exposition of secret and earlier unspoken stories always evokes contradictions and debates. We have to affirm that personal stories of this kind are even able to slightly rewrite history and reconstruct cultural identities, such as in the case of these two works. Some readers and critics may argue that there is no guarantee that My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence could be read as stories of
Australian history. However, it seems to me, the events described in the books can be considered factual not only because the family‘s experience corresponds to many other
Aboriginal stories but also because the auto/biographical genre assures us of the
65 reliability of the events. Christine Watson argues that the genre of autobiography has a
―status as a ‗truth-telling genre‘ [and] seems to provide the best opportunity to ‗make people believe‘ the histories they witness‖ (Watson). Morgan‘s grandmother, Daisy
Corunna, points out that ―I got to be careful what I say. You can‘t put no lies in a book‖
(Morgan, My Place 325), so we are simply positioned to trust the tale, as Kennedy proposes: ―some critics read this statement as establishing a truth-contract with the reader, and a sign of the text‘s naivety― for Daisy, ‗the book‘ is associated with the authority of white man‘s education and the law‖ (Kennedy 241). Such a widespread viewpoint is also expressed by Joan Newman in her article ―Race, Gender and Identity:
My Place as Autobiography‖ (Newman 69). Sally Morgan herself repeatedly stresses in the book that she does not want to say anything that is not true and encourages the witnesses they must tell the truth in their testimonies.
6.1 Common Readership
This subchapter considers the perception of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-
Proof Fence by the wide Australian readership including both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal Australian citizens. I will briefly state different positions, mixed reactions and responses of Indigenous and settler Australians to the Stolen Generation narratives.
Kathryn Trees proposes a very challenging idea that ―many ‗Australians‘ are unable to empathise with ‗Aborigines‘ as an oppressed, displaced people because even today the ‗native‘ is still understood as sub-human . . . [and] variants of ‗primitive man‘ are never the creators of history‖ (Trees, ―My Place as Counter-Memory‖). The books offered the readers truths that many have not heard about before. According to me, there
66 were quite a lot of people who were, after reading of My Place and Follow the Rabbit-
Proof Fence, shocked and surprised about the harsh experience of Indigenous people and realized that the racial barriers should be diminished. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie
Smith argue that ―stories of separation and abuse shocked readers, but the telling provided a legitimating context that recognized the irreparable harm caused by government-sanctioned policies and practices (Schaffer and Smith 105). Australian citizens with Indigenous roots became more prepared to acknowledge their
Aboriginality and stopped to feel ashamed of their origins. Aboriginal people could affirm their identities without the essence of white stereotypes. Before My Place was published, it was unthinkable for young Australian readers to imagine that being
Aboriginal could be seen as something shameful. Until that time, Aboriginality was being hidden from public knowledge and it seemed nobody cared for the difficult situation among the two communities. Sally Morgan and Doris Pilkington have created not only the characters that readers of Aboriginal origins can relate to, but the fact that the protagonists are/were real people makes the reading even more exciting and poignant.
It is quite surprising that these books became successful not only among
Aboriginal readers but also among non-Aboriginal population. When referring to My
Place, Marcia Langton stresses that ―the enormous response by white Australia to the book lies somewhere in the attraction to something forbidden—‗Aboriginality‘ or incest—and the apparent investigation and revelation of that forbidden thing through style and family history‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖ 117). She continues with the persuasion that, ―the book is a catharsis. It gives release and relief, not so much to Aboriginal people oppressed by psychotic
67 racism, as to whites who wittingly and unwittingly participated in it‖ (Langton,
―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation‖ 117). We can assume that many Australians felt shame about the role their forefathers played in the dispossession of Aboriginal people, and autobiographical narratives written by Aboriginal women thus became an instrument for relief.
The impact of Aboriginal storytelling and story writing on white audience is large indeed. Storytelling may be understood as a tool of resistance of Aborigines against indifference or hostility of white bureaucrats and citizens. After the truth about
Australian history has emerged, many people ―accept that the practice of child removal was wrong. Many, however, also think it is wrong to condemn earlier generations for their role in this policy. They think of this policy as misguided but well-intentioned‖
(Manne). In ―Indigenous Human Rights in Australia: Who Speaks for the Stolen
Generations?‖, Schaffer and Smith stress the curiosity of non-Indigenous readers about the distinction between lives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Non-Aboriginal audience wished to require some knowledge of Aboriginal experience with the government and with struggles against pervasive prejudice in many areas such as education and employment. Moreover, since Bringing Them Home was published, people have not been totally ignorant of the reality Aborigines must have faced, and the discussions of Indigenous rights and past injustices in Australia have become more frequent. It seems to me that the success of the text was gained, among others, by the testimonies of the victims of the Stolen Generation because true-life stories are always highly effective. Public awareness of racism in Australia has been strengthened internationally and the main aim was thus accomplished. In her essay ―Presenting
Aboriginal Women‘s Life Narratives,‖ Amanda Nettlebeck emphasizes the importance
68 of life histories because they are ―not only testimonies of individual experience but also accounts of mission life, government surveillance, stolen childhoods, and other forms of twentieth-century race politics‖ (Nettlebeck 43). My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof
Fence present a special contribution to the ever-present debate, and it is quite evident that both books help bring the previously suppressed history to a wider audience.
Of course there were more factors that changed Australian attitudes to the perception of Aborigines than just these two books I am dealing with in my thesis. My
Place, as the principal initiator of Indigenous writing, though, certainly contributed to a re-evaluation of Australian studies. It became understood that there was a need to begin to respect Aborigines and acknowledge their rights both to the land and to human conditions. Moreover, both books were deployed both as evidence for what actually happened in the past and as evidence for the consequences of removals for the present life.
6.2 Critics, Historians and Theorists
In this subchapter, I will present some critical views of My Place and Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence provided by experts on Aboriginal literature and culture. Schaffer and Smith suggest that ―until the 1990s there were no critical texts by Indigenous theorists and activists or anthologies that articulated Indigenous cultural and political perspectives‖ (Schaffer and Smith 98). I will try to include the attitudes of both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal critics and researchers.
Robin Dizard has presented My Place as a work that ―addresses the crucial issue in global, national and personal relations, namely, the historical and psychological experience of repressed cultures‖ (Dizard, ―My Place and the Healing Art of
69 Autobiography‖ 135). In her essay, she expresses a very interesting opinion on the analogy between a personal history of Aboriginal people and African American slaves:
Morgan‘s major narrative emphasis on authenticity in My Place resembles the
rhetorical tradition created by fugitive slaves in America in the autobiographies
the anti-slavery societies published. Because American slave-owners and
Anglo-Australians maintained similar fictions about racial separation and
mixed-race inheritance, the autobiographical projects of American fugitives
from slavery and Australian Aboriginals are similar (Dizard, ―My Place and the
Healing Art of Autobiography‖ 136).
The American audience itself frequently compares with the colonial past of their own country and similar experience of the dispossession of culture and heritage, and removals of the first nation people on reserves. Philip Morrissey in his contribution
―Restoring a Future to a Past‖ also claims that ―a parallel is often drawn between the
Aboriginal and American experiences‖ (Morrissey 11). In another of her essays, Robin
Dizard continues: ―Australians had no slave code as such, nor were treaties ever affected between settler administrations and Aboriginal peoples, but Aboriginals incurred fines and arrest if they did not work, while no one had to pay them wages‖
(Dizard, ―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 155).
Sally Morgan herself explains such a view in her book:
The pastoral industry was built on the back of slave labour. Aboriginal people
were forced to work . . . I always thought Australia was different to America,
Mum, but we had slavery here, too. The people might not have been sold on the
blocks like the American Negroes were, but they were owned just the same
(Morgan, My Place 151).
70 The relations between Aboriginal people and their employers have often been described as slavery because the Aborigines were in fact owned by the house keepers. We can assume that Morgan‘s grandmother was a real slave because she was an often bed- partner of a patriarch of Drake-Brockman family: ―I was owned by the Drake-
Brockmans and the government and anyone who wanted to pay five shillings a year to Mr Neville to have me. Not much, is it?‖ (Morgan, My Place 350). I am inclined to believe that although the phenomenon of the Stolen Generation is a specific one, it really resembles to a certain extent African American slaves.
Among those who praised My Place was the cultural critic and anthropologist
Stephen Muecke. It was principally because of ―the inclusion of the directly told stories
[that] made the book into an occasion of collective narration‖ (Docker 5). By the term
―collective narration,‖ I understand telling life-stories by Aborigines who underwent similar experience, did not hesitate to break the silence, and decided to retell their histories to other people. Rosanne Kennedy observes that ―in constructing a collective narrative, Morgan follows Aboriginal custom, which dictates that narrators are only ever the partial holders of traditions and are required to defer to the others who hold the rest of the sequence if they are available‖ (Kennedy 235-236). I have already discussed the positive contribution of My Place connected to collective memory and collective narration. Stephen Muecke allocates My Place to one of ―‗discursive formations‘ that have encouraged Aboriginal representations. These include social history; feminism, psychoanalysis and autobiography; family history and genealogy; and identity politics‖
(Muecke qtd. in Attwood 197). All these concepts are, according to me, more or less part of Morgan‘s book. However, we can argue that such features are common in almost every piece of literature dealing with Aboriginal issues. Moreover, the identity politics
71 has endured ―a phase of critical change and realignment‖ in the 1980s and autobiographical narratives such as My Place were part of this process (Whitlock 154).
Whitlock commends Morgan‘s style of auto/biographical narrative and her skill to present Aboriginality, specifically ―Aboriginal identity which is available to urban
Aboriginal Australians of mixed descent, and grounded in cultural and spiritual identification‖ (Whitlock 157). However, there are various critics, Rosanne Kennedy among them, who disagree with the genre of autobiography which is usually perceived as ―a genre which stresses individualism‖ (Kennedy 235). Joan Newman in her article
―Race, Gender and Identity: My Place as Autobiography‖ quotes the Aboriginal novelist Mudrooroo Narogin who also ―distrusts autobiography which foregrounds the individual at the expense of community, implying individual causes and solutions to problems rather than communal ones‖ (Narogin qtd. in Newman 70). However, since
My Place is produced in a fragmented way and includes more testimonies, I believe it is a collective text.
Stephen Muecke observes that ―Morgan‘s primary aim is to express a hidden truth of the self as a means of ‗liberating‘ herself‖, an idea with which Rosanne
Kennedy disagrees (Muecke qtd. in Kennedy 255). Kennedy rather stresses that
Morgan‘s ―act of bearing witness to a hidden past shares some of the motivations that psychotherapists have found in the children of Holocaust survivors‖ (Kennedy 255).
Kay Schaffer has made an interesting research on the genocide in terms of Aboriginal people. Genocide as a word was not part of the Australian vocabulary: ―Before the release of the [Bringing Them Home] report these terms resonated with popular understanding of the horrors of the German Holocaust. They had no relevance for
Australia‖ (Schaffer, ―Getting Over the Genocide Question: Australia and the Stolen
72 Generations Debates‖). The report‘s finding of genocide is specifically grounded in the immediate post-war international response to the Nazi Holocaust. Pilkington herself depicts Molly‘s first impressions of the dormitories at the Moore River Native
Settlement in ways which point to the Nazi Holocaust: ―It looked more like a concentration camp‖ (Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 72). Schaffer has compared Australia‘s record with the German experience and found some similarities in the historical events and situations that happened in these two countries. She has stressed similar crimes against humanity committed in the 20th century, and especially
―the shared belief in the ‗civilizing‘ power of the West, and similar policies of legalized racism‖ (Schaffer, ―Getting Over the Genocide Question: Australia and the Stolen
Generations Debates‖). However, Schaffer has also emphasized differences connected with ―the aims and intentions of the Nazis and the Australian government‖ (Schaffer,
―Getting Over the Genocide Question: Australia and the Stolen Generations Debates‖).
Political scientist and historian, Robert Manne, has made a commentary on the resemblance of Mr Neville‘s policy of assimilation and the views of the Nazis in the
1930s in Germany. Manne points out that although the term genocide had not yet entered the English language, the intention of Australian government to ―breed out the colour‖ is very similar to German processes in the Second World War (Manne).
Australian historian, Bain Attwood, adds that the ―removal of children constituted genocide as it was defined by the 1948 International Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide‖ and agrees that spokespersons of legal organisations ―compared the separation of children to the holocaust and called for compensation on the grounds that Germany had provided financial restitution to its
Jewish victims‖ (Attwood 204). We already know that the main purpose of removals of
73 half-caste children was to prevent the reproduction of Aboriginality, and amounted thus to genocide. There are various interpretations of the resemblance between the extermination of Jews in Germany and of Indigenous Australians provided by the cultural theorists. The most important are, however, the effects of the assimilationist practices on Indigenous people, who got used to describe such policies of Australian government as genocidal.
Nevertheless, we can also find some opponents to My Place, above all among educated critics, who have seen negative points in one or more elements. Eric Michaels thinks that My Place ―has been . . . found to be lacking in authenticity; her spirituality is similarly found to be impure and inauthentic because it is ‗filtered‘ through
Christianity‖ (Michaels qtd. in Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖
14). Bain Attwood has responded to My Place especially by discussing the style of writing: ―Morgan‘s book ‗mirrors‘ pretty well traditional anthropology, radical and oral history and behavioural psychology‖ (Attwood qtd. in Docker 6). However, he is disappointed that Morgan has addressed only her Aboriginal heritage and not discussed the influence of her white Australian childhood. Morgan‘s mother and grandmother always attempted to conform to the white colonialist society. They wished to succeed among other Australians and for the children to go well at school and become part of the professional middle class. Aboriginal writer, historian and right activist, Jackie
Huggins, expresses an agreement with Attwood ―in doubting Sally Morgan‘s claim to
Aboriginal heritage, values, and identity‖ (Huggins qtd. in Docker 6). In her essay
―Always Was Always Will Be,‖ Huggins blames white editors of control and intervention in the text that ends in ―little which indicates the writing and story of an
Aboriginal‖ (Huggins 63). Huggins also criticises the book for being like a ―story of a
74 middle class Anglo woman [whose] only strength lies in the family testimonies‖
(Huggins qtd. in Docker 6). She complains about the bad-selected position of oral histories of Morgan‘s family members. Instead of the back, she would prefer to put them in the front of the book because ―as a Black writer [she] could not understand nor find a path through this maze of Anglified hyperbole‖ (Huggins 63). Morgan‘s narrative strategies are obvious; she places the stories of her great-uncle, mother and grandmother towards the end of the book where they are more powerful in contrast to the familiar narrative of suburban Australian life at the beginning. Robin Dizard argues that
―Morgan uses some conventional European images and incorporates human figures and faces into her works, but she also esteems Aboriginal aesthetics‖ (Dizard, ―Native
Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‖ 152). Kennedy cites in her article a part of the critique written by Eric Michaels who has criticized Morgan ―for doing ‗violence‘ to her Aboriginality of her kin by using the European genre of autobiography to represent their stories‖ (Michaels qtd. in Kennedy 235). Michaels believes that although Morgan lacks the acknowledgement of the cultural influences of her white ancestry, we can clearly see that the European influences, such as the narrative form or the use of English, are present in her work. Joan Newman has also contributed to this discussion by suggesting that although ―her story is a successful amalgam of two different cultures, black and white, there are some paradoxes and conflicts between traditional Aboriginal concepts of identity and those implied by the choice of autobiography, a product of Western, European culture‖ (Newman 38).
However, we have to acknowledge that Sally Morgan has been raised in white
Australian ways in the suburban Perth so it stands to reason that her writings will bear signs of Western fiction. It is obvious that ―the phenomenon of an urbanized mixed-race
75 Aboriginal population which swelled as a result of assimilation‖ (Whitlock 158), places
Morgan in relation both to Anglo-Australian culture and Aboriginal culture. Although her work My Place comprises elements of the white literature, ―each statement [by her grandmother] resists some Anglo-Australian practice, from her aboriginal name which whites changed to Daisy, to having no birthdate, to entering the world under a tree, to letting children see the birth‖ (Dizard, ―Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl‖ 153). Moreover, the publication of autobiographical writings in
Australia ―has frequently required the services of the white amanuensis, editor, patron or collaborator‖ (Whitlock 146). In my view, Sally Morgan was very successful in saving her family from the confusion and self-hate their Anglo-Australian relatives and ancestors had required of them. Anne Brewster regards Aboriginal life stories not only autobiographical but also biographical: ―These texts examine the author‘s own life within the context of other family members, and the life histories or biographies of other family often have an important place in these narratives‖ (Brewster, ―Aboriginality and
Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 9). Because My Place comprises various witnesses of the forcible removal and traumatic events (both personal and collective) of white assimilation, it should not be read as a European-style autobiography.
Jackie Huggins sees the greatest defect in Morgan‘s naive thinking that her book should be understood by non-Indigenous people without any difficulties: ―Precisely what irks me about My Place is its proposition that Aboriginality can be understood by all non-Aboriginals‖ (Huggins 61). Huggins disagrees with Attwood‘s statement that the book requires only little translation to non-Aboriginal audience, and prefers more explanation of Aboriginal issues to non-Aboriginal people. In her essay ―Always Was
Always Will Be,‖ Huggins denies the idea that non-Aboriginal people should be able to
76 specify and give a definition of Aboriginality, ―as it insults [her] intelligence, spirit and soul and negates [her] heritage (Huggins 60). Huggins believes that Aborigines should write only for their own people and claims that ―Aboriginal writers have a stronger sense of history than their white counterparts‖ (Huggins qtd. in Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 16). The leading Aboriginal scholar, Marcia Langton, supports this idea in her essay ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation,‖ where she has expressed her doubts about white people commenting on Aboriginal works: ―[Non-Aboriginal] critics find it difficult to discuss Aboriginal works because of an almost complete absence of critical theory, knowledge and sensibility toward Aboriginal art‖ (Langton, ―Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of
Representation‖ 113). I have already discussed the popularity of My Place and the eagerness of non-Aboriginal Australians to read Aboriginal texts in general. However, there are critics, Jackie Huggins among them, who are against regarding Aboriginal writings such as My Place as representative. Huggins quoted in the essay by Anne
Brewster ―criticizes the widespread use of My Place as the representative text of
Aboriginality and as the only Black text on the reading list‖ (Huggins qtd. in Brewster,
―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 15). Susan Lever also thinks that My
Place ―does not present itself as representative of Aboriginal experience. On the contrary . . . [it is] a kind of metaphor for white urban Australia‘s repression of its part in the mistreatment of Aborigines, forcing a recognition that Aboriginal problems are
. . . part of the present‖ (Lever 115). Anne Brewster concludes that ―its popularity has meant that it has indeed often been seen as representative Aboriginal literary text‖
(Brewster, ―Aboriginality and Sally Morgan‘s My Place‖ 15). In my opinion, we may read both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence as representative stories of
77 children who have been removed, of parents who have had their children taken or of people who have been denied knowledge of Aboriginal culture. Both Sally Morgan and
Doris Pilkington contribute with their auto/biographies to the awareness of the non-
Aboriginal society of Aboriginal issues and injustices done to the Indigenous population.
78 7. Conclusion
In my Master‘s Diploma Thesis, I have dealt with one of the darkest chapters of
Aboriginal Australian history, the Stolen Generation. It is a phenomenon which characterized relations between the government and Aborigines in Australia for much of the twentieth century. The concept of the Stolen Generation is a matter of many debates all around the world, because it has disturbed settled views on how things were in the past. Since it is a very controversial and emotional issue, I have tried to take a sensitive approach to the topic. The stories that treat the harsh experience of part-Aboriginal children removed from their parents and placed into government institutions have previously been invisible to public knowledge. The history was not taught in schools, the claims to land rights were ignored and Indigenous communities had only little knowledge of each other‘s stories. The life histories that earlier circulated only among local Aboriginal communities have emerged in print in the 1980s, predominantly in the form of Aboriginal life writings and autobiographical works. Morgan‘s My Place and
Pilkington‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence are good examples of how the Stolen
Generation may be elaborated in Aboriginal literature.
It is difficult to answer to whom the Aboriginal life stories are directed; the opinions of cultural theorists differ in this concern. Indigenous and non-Indigenous readerships perceive Aboriginal narratives in diverse ways thanks to the different social background and different life experience. Nevertheless, autobiographical and biographical narratives, such as My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, have become part of compulsory reading at secondary schools worldwide. Aboriginal life writings have not only served Aboriginal readership to regain the sense of belonging and rediscover the Aboriginal identity, they have also fulfilled the healing process of
79 their damaged souls. The success of such narratives was acquired thanks to the humoristic and compassionate style of writing, thanks to the reconnection with
Aboriginal communities; and, last but not least, thanks to the influence they had on other Aboriginal writers. My Place not only became a bestseller but opened the way for the publication of other autobiographies and accounts of Aboriginal life. Morgan has won the trust of the non-Aboriginal readers and has led them to confront disturbing facts about the history of their relations with Aborigines.
Since my thesis is not only literary but also cultural-historically oriented, I have provided quite extensive information on historical and political background to
Australian Aboriginal history, explaining terms like Aboriginality and the Stolen
Generation. Since the arrival of European settlers on Australian continent, people of an
Indigenous origin have always been regarded as inferior to non-Indigenous Australians.
According to the policy of assimilation, half-caste children have usually been placed in orphanages where they should have been educated in European ways. Since the conditions in the settlements were poor, children soon began to suffer from physical and psychical problems. The largest effect is, however, attributed to the loss of Aboriginal identity and disconnection from Aboriginal communities. An important event in
Australian history was the release of Bringing Them Home report that not only started the process of reconciliation but also raised interest in Aboriginal literature dealing with the concept of the Stolen Generation, such as Morgan‘s My Place and Pilkington‘s
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. As it has been suggested, both books deal with the phenomenon of the Stolen Generation. Nevertheless, the authors treat this issue from a different perspective. In My Place, Sally Morgan discusses her new-found Aboriginal identity and acknowledges her family‘s past experience with the rape and abuse. She
80 refers to the sense of exclusion from the non-Aboriginal society and a fear of authority figures Morgan‘s family members were feeling during their lives. Morgan also mentions obstacles in her investigation of the lost history and admits the difficulties to identify with being Aboriginal. My Place thus features intimate portrayals of the impact of forced removals on individuals, their families and Aboriginal communities.
Pilkington‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, on the other hand, does not discuss the sense of belonging to the Aboriginal community or a feeling of Aboriginal identity to such an extent. The book rather describes the escape from the settlement‘s repressive conditions and brutal treatment, pointing to the possible victory over government policies. Such a view gives the victims of the Stolen Generation hope for their future lives and represents a healing process in their recovering from the past injustices.
In my thesis, I have also included comments and debates discussed in various theoretical essays and journal articles by leading critics and historians. We have seen that some theorists, such as Robin Dizard, Rosanne Kennedy or Kay Schaffer, align the stories with the suffering and abuse of minority people in other parts of the world. They compare Aboriginal experience to the Jews in Nazi Germany or to the African
American slaves. In her contribution, Kathryn Trees has called My Place a ―counter- memory‖. I have mentioned the doubts of reliability of testimonies and of regarding the book as an example of pure history. Beside positive evaluations of the text, we can find some critics, for example Mudrooroo Narogin and Jackie Huggins, who have attacked
My Place on the grounds of authenticity and Morgan‘s lack of authority to speak for
Aborigines. However, it seems to me that the genre of autobiography does not need the author‘s authority; the most important is to have experience that is expressed in the text.
There have also been criticisms of My Place for not being the story of Aborigines living
81 within an Aboriginal community, for being individualistic, for appealing to the values of white middle class readers and for not acknowledging the white influences on Sally
Morgan. Jackie Huggins has attacked the book even for its popularity among non-
Aboriginal readers.
It is certainly true that Aboriginal families have been influenced by the history of the Stolen Generation. The damage assimilationist policies have caused to Aboriginal people is severe indeed. Nevertheless, neither Sally Morgan nor Doris Pilkington wanted to present Aboriginal people as helpless victims. In my view, My Place may often provoke feelings of guilt and shame or support the readers to express anger or denial. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, on the other hand, arouses feelings of pride and collective healing. Moreover, the three trekking girls in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence have achieved something that all Aboriginal people desired—a sense of freedom. Of course, grief and sadness are contained in both stories, but I rather suggest that
Morgan‘s and Pilkington‘s works serve the recognition of Aboriginal life and experience throughout the twentieth century. According to me, both books put a human face on the issue of the Stolen Generation. Recently, a lot of autobiographies, family histories and academic studies have been written, and many poems and songs have been composed. Nevertheless, although many pieces of literature have already been published and many reports and documentaries have been filmed, the issue of the Stolen
Generation is still being a great emotional business.
82 Abstract
My Master‘s Diploma Thesis deals with the concept of the Stolen Generation and its depiction in Aboriginal literature, namely in Sally Morgan‘s My Place and Doris
Pilkington‘s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. Aboriginal memories have been long preserved and transmitted orally inside Indigenous communities. Although the white official history was silent, Aboriginal social memory persisted in people‘s minds.
After the portrayal of Aboriginal life writings in general, I have treated My
Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence regarding both Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal readers, authors‘ motives of narration in an auto/biographical style and the worldwide success of the books. I have also based my research on cultural and historical knowledge of Australia and set the analyses of the books to this context, because I believe it is important to get a balanced view of Aboriginal and Western Australian history. Before I have analyzed My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence in terms of the issues of Aboriginal identity and the Stolen Generation, I have explained the most discussed terms in my thesis, namely Aboriginality and the phenomenon of the Stolen
Generation.
The objective of my thesis was to show that both books are written in a slightly different way, even though they share the same message. In the comparative study, I have suggested the most common similarities and differences between the works. Both authors point out the importance of a struggle for Aboriginal people‘s rights, and by telling their family members‘ life experience they start the process of healing of
Aboriginal souls. At the end of my thesis, I have demonstrated some positive and negative views of various critics and cultural theorists on elements in both My Place and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.
83 Resumé
Ve své magisterské diplomové práci se zabývám tématem „ukradené generace― dětí domorodého původu, které byly v průběhu dvacátého století násilně odebírány z rodin, nejčastěji těch, ve kterých byl jeden z rodičů Evropan. Cílem bylo vychovávat děti evropským způsobem v rezervacích, kde panovaly obecně špatné podmínky.
Důsledkem této politiky asimilace byla postupná ztráta specifické kultury a vymizení tradičního způsobu života domorodých obyvatel. Ve své práci se snažím ukázat zobrazení „ukradené generace― ve dvou dílech domorodých autorek, publikovaných v 80. a 90. letech 20. století. Jedná se o autobiografii Sally Morganové „Sem patřím―
(My Place) a biografickou knihu Doris Pilkingtonové „Sleduj králičí plot― (Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence).
Součástí této práce je také vylíčení politického a historického kontextu, do kterého jsou obě díla zasazena. Protože se jedná o knihy s autobiografickými prvky, můžeme je považovat za hodnověrné představitele australské historie. Do své studie jsem zahrnula i otázky týkající se důvodů pro zaznamenání životních zkušeností domorodých obyvatel s vládními institucemi. Věnuji se i problematice přijetí děl jak
čtenáři domorodými, „bílými― Australany, tak i čtenářskou veřejností za hranicemi
Austrálie.
Cílem práce je ukázat nejen jakými způsoby se „ukradená generace― reflektuje v obou dílech, ale i poukázat na odlišnosti a podobnosti mezi oběma díly z hlediska stylu, který autorky při psaní používaly, cílů, kterých chtěly dosáhnout, a témat, které do svých děl zahrnuly.
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