School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemAboriginal women's autobiographical writing( 1989)This thesis is concerned with three autobiographies by Aboriginal women: Ruby Langford's Don't Take Your Love to Town, Elsie Roughsey's An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New and Sally Morgan's My Place. Although these texts can be classified as autobiographical writing, they possess quite different textualities: structure, terrain, and mode of expression varies from text to text. Don't Take Your Love to Town is basically an account of the various hardships experienced by Ruby Langford and her children. In her "Acknowledgements", Langford introduces the text as “a true life story of an Aboriginal woman's struggle to raise a family of nine children in a society divided between black and white culture in Australia”. The telling of her story, from early childhood through to motherhood, is presented as a window to the white reader on Australian black-white race relations. Elsie Roughsey's An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New is primarily a lament for her people's traditional way of life. Roughsey's own personal history is used as a framework to relate the passing of the tribal life and their experience of westernisation. Her text includes details about her people's culture, history, laws and legends, as well as an account of mission life. This text is also quite unusual in its presentation of a traditionally oral style of story telling in a written form. In My Place, Sally Morgan narrates the story of her growing awareness of her family's Aboriginal origins, and her consequent quest for an Aboriginal identity. The text is structured as a quest, involving the recovery of her family's suppressed Aboriginal history in order to establish a basis for this identity. (From introduction)