My Place is considered as a story about a journey. What kind of journey is represented in the story? consider that the journey here does not always mean physiscal journey. Through the story, Sally Morgan tends to tell the reader about her journey, her journey on finding her family’s identity. A kind of journey which is represented in the story is an emotional journey.
The definition of emotional journey itself is the series of emotions which happen any moment in your life that is caused by an event that leads on to further emotions, either good or bad. Your whole life is an emotional journey. Let us make a plotted story to make it being emotional. Imagine that when we are in a relationship with someone we have been trust in and loving for years, then that person cheats on us. Feeling disappointed, betrayed, and needing someone to talk to, to share with, and someone who can lean their shoulders and let us to cry as loud as we want.
Unfortunately, right before we are going to give her a ring, we are called by her mother and being told that she died. Going to the funeral heavy-heartedly, in a deep condolence, you meet her for the last time and farewell. Unexpectedly, you find your lost brother, you hug him in joy and tender cry. But then, he got shot by anonymous right after you are hugging each other.
On that day, you lost your trust towards your partner, lost both your best friend and your lost brother. That would be very emotional. In the story, what emotional journey is Sally’s struggle to find her family origin since her grandmothers’; Nan, her mother; Gladys, until she finds out it all. She also finds out about how Aborigins are treated unequally and sometimes getting discriminated and stereotyped. A journey doesn’t always mean you involved your physic get tired or moving into one place to another places.
As stated by Peter Skrzynecki, an Australian poet, that “All physical journeys have questions. Journeys are always made by individuals or groups. Why were these journeys made, what or who was left behind? Some physical journeys end in hardship or death, however all physical journeys result in knowledge being gained”. A physical journey is a corporeal experience where an individual moves from one place to another.
During this journey, it is the obstacles encountered that challenge the individual which allow the individual to extend themselves physically, intellectually and emotionally. We can do a journey without making our physic feel tired, and yet still we get extended in physically, intellectually and emotionally. We find out the buried truth, feeling sad, happy, angry, and get all of the emotion within, that means we have done our emotional journey. Journeys give rise to emotional and intellectual ones. Therefore you can have the actual journey occur literally with the implications of having the persona evolve as a person and go on their own independent spiritual journey.
Therefore, what will we get after going through a journey that it is a part of life, about how to overcome the obstacles, as the extension of personal boundaries, the beginning of a clear understanding of life, and this may led to a new life. The conclusions about journeys might include some of the following points:
- Journeys are beneficial if undertaken with people who can be helpful to your journey
- Journeys are integral to self-growth
- Journeys are profound
- Journeys can be seen as catalysts for change
- Journeys are treacherous, so you need to prepare for them
- Journeys can be unpredictable and, at times, dangerous
- Journeys bestow joy upon the traveler
- Journeys change your values, ideas and aspirations
- Journeys confront and challenge the traveler
- Journeys demonstrate that the grass is always greener on the other side
- Journeys enthuse you to undertake new challenges that will make you happy
- Journeys facilitate reflection about the way you feel about yourself, others and the world
- Journeys facilitate self-realization
- Journeys illustrate that there are many ways to attain a goal
- Journeys inherently assist in reaffirming your beliefs and ideals
- Journeys inspire you to achieve your personal best
- Journeys lead to discoveries beyond the physical
- Journeys reward the traveler
- Journeys take on a life on their own and cannot be predicted
- Journeys transform the way you look at the world
Let us start what journey Sally Morgan has been gotten through her emotional journey. The journey of Sally written in the story is telling the reader about what she remembered since she was 5, when she was Sally Corunna, until how she was becoming Sally Morgan. She often accompanied her mother to visit her father, who got treatment after war, in the hospital.
Nan, her maternal grandmother who also lived with her the same house, always found unique animal and discovery in the garden in early morning like bullfrog, bobtail goanna, snake tracks, cricket with unusual feelers, and so forth. In page 13 chapter one, sally stated that spring was an emotional experience for her, as well as for Nan. “It was a clear, blue spring day. I could smell the damp grass and feel the coolness of the breeze. It was such an optimistically beautiful day I felt like crying. Spring was always an emotional experience for me. It was for Nan, too.”
She tells about her lack of enthusiasm during her first year of school, her interested in drawing which leads her to get embarrassed when her teacher found her drawing her parents naked. She was made embarrassed again and labeled as a dirty girl because of her unavoidable wet during the class.
She got closer to her father, but she also saw her mother were got pushed by her father. In the other hand, her father was a good drinker and often took Sally and her siblings to the nearest club, but made them to wait inside the car. His moodiness made him angry often without any reason. This made Sally, Nan, her mother, and her siblings hiding into Aunty Grace’s house. Then, Sally realized that her father also needed her to accompany him during this time. She felt sorry to not put his father to her first priority instead of her mother. In September, her father died.
Page 43 chapter six:
“That night I found myself feeling sorry for Dad. He was so lost. I blame myself for being too young.”
One day, she was asked about her nationalities by her classmates. She said that she was an Australian, but they didn’t reckon. After going home, she told her mother, and she was advised by her mother to say that they were Indian. Meanwhile, she is an Aborigin, she was forced for being to pretend for what she didn’t belong to.
In page 39 chapter five:
“It was good to finally have an answer and it satisfied our playmates. They could quite believe we were Indian, they just didn’t want us pretending we were Aussies when we were not.” Her curiosity began when she met Arthur, Nan’s brother, and he came with his grandchildren whose skins were dark. She was surprised because Arthur spoke in English, then started wondering and wanted to be taught Indian by them.
In page 47 chapter seven:
“…Mum grinned at me and said, ‘Well say hello, these are your cousins’. As usual, my mouth had difficulty working. The small group of dark children stared at me….”
After the school graduation, her mother didn’t allow her to be an artist. Sally saw Nan crying and talking about black skinned people. Jill, her sister, said that they were Aborigin, and being Aboriginal wouldn’t bring any goodness at all.
Page 97 chapter fifteen:
“You bloody kids don’t want me, you want a bloody white grandmother, I’m black. Do you hear, black, black, black!”
“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. What did that make us, what did that make me? I had never thought of myself as being black before.”
“Boongs, we’re Boongs!”
“A Boong. Youknow, Aboroginal….”
“Can you tell me one good thing about being an Abo?”
“Her mother said she doesn’t want her mixing with you because you’re a bad influence. She reckons all Abos are a bad influence.”
“It’s a terrible things to be Aboriginal. Nobody wants to know you, not just Susa. You can be Indian, Dutch, Italian, anything, but not Aboriginal.”
Page 105 chapter sixteen:
“I had accepted by now that Nan was dark, and that our heritage was not that shared by most Australians, but I hadn’t accepted that we are aboriginal. I was too ignorant to make such a decision, and too confused. I found myself coming back to the same old question: if Nan was Aboriginal, why didn’t she just say so?….. In my mind, there was no possible comparison between us and them.”
Page 107 chapter seventeen:
“Why did she want to be white? Dis she really equate being white with the power of God, or was it just the slip of tounge?” “…If you are white, you can do anything.”
By then, Sally Corunna got married to Paul Morgan, and became Sally Morgan.
Page 128 Chapter 20
“I was going out with Paul, a schoolteacher, by then, and he persuaded me to stick it out. I met Paul through his brother, with whom I had been friends for many years. In fact, Bruce had lived with our family for a while. He was like a brother to me and also a favourite of Nan’s.”
“By the end of the second term of my third year at university, we’d fallen in love and decided to get married. This came as a real shock to Mum, because I had always told her Paul was just another good Friend.”
Sally still tried to get the answer of being Aboriginal by her mother’s own mouth. One day, she just got it when having conversation with her mother.
Page 135 chapter 21:
“Then, after a while, there was a lull in the conversation, so I said very casually, We’re Aboriginal, aren’t we, Mum?’
‘Yes, dear”, she replied, without thinking.
‘Do you realize what you just said?!’ I grinned triumphantly. Mum put her cake back onto her plate and looked as though she was going to be sick.
‘Don’t you back down! I said quickly. There’s been too many skeletons in our family closet. It’s time things came out in the open.’ After a few minutes’
strained silence, Mum said, ‘Why shouldn’t you kids know now? You’re old enough, it’s not as though you’re little any more. Besides, it’s different now’.
‘All those years, Mum’, I said, ‘how could you have lied to us all those years?’.
‘It was only a little white lie’, she replied sadly.
I couldn’t help laughing at her unintentional humour. In no time at all, we were both giggling uncontrollably. It was as if a wall that had been between us suddenly crumbled away. I felt closer to Mum then than I had for years.”
After she was sure with their identity, nationality, she did have to worry when saying that they are aboriginal.
Page 138 chapter 22:
“ By now, both Jill and I had many friends at university. All our lives, people had asked us what nationality we were, most had assumed we were Greek or Italian, but we’d always replied, ‘Indian’. Now, when we were asked, we said, ‘Aboriginal’.”
These evidences are how government and Englishman treated Aboriginal people.
“A lot of our history has been lost, people have been too frightened to say anything. There’s a lot of our history we can’t even get at, Arthur. There are all sorts of files about Aboriginals that go way back, and the government won’t release them. I mean, our own government had terrible policies for Aboriginal people. Thousands of families in Australia were destroyed by the government policy of taking children away.”
“Most of the land the Aborigine wants, no white man would touch. The government is like a big dog with a bone with no meat on it. They don’t want to live on that land themselves, but they don’t want the black man to get it, either. Yet, you find something valuable on the land the Aborigine has got and whites are all there with their hands out.”
The truth had been uncovered. Her grandfather, Gladys’ father was a white Englishman, and Nan’s father was also a white Englishman. Nor of the white Englishman fathers acknowledged the children who birth from the black women. Arthur told the history and the experiences he had been gone through. After the story-telling ended, Arthur died. Sally and her mother went to Corunna, from where Daisy and Nan came from. Some people there knew about Daisy, Nan, and they were relatives. After that, Gladys and Daisy, Nan’s white fellow name, took contribution to Sally’s novel. They shared what they remembered and how they felt.
