Sister Heart Study Guide

Sally Morgan was the eldest of her parents’ five children. As a child, she was acutely aware of being different due to her mixed-race heritage. Her father was White, and her mother told Morgan and her siblings that they were also of Indian-Bangladeshi heritage. In fact, Morgan’s mother Gladys was Aboriginal and had been taken away from her own family and placed into a residential school when she was a girl. Morgan’s father Bill suffered from PTSD and was institutionalized for much of Morgan’s early life. He died when Morgan was still young, and she and her siblings were raised by their mother and grandmother. Morgan was a sickly child who suffered frequent illnesses and struggled to perform well in school. She barely qualified for high school and attended only because of her mother’s intervention. After graduating, she worked a series of disappointing jobs before deciding to attend college in pursuit of a more fulfilling career. Although she studied psychology at the University of Western Australia, she ultimately found her fulfilling career in the arts. Her first book, My Place, concerns her discovery (at age 15) of her own Aboriginal Palyku heritage and tells the stories of her mother, grandmother, and great-uncle. She has written and illustrated more than half a dozen children’s stories in addition to several biographies of her family members and a play which she coauthored with her son David. She has received multiple awards for her work, including the Australia Book Prize, awards from the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and the Human Rights Literature Award.

The British first established a colony on the continent of Australia in 1788 both as a convenient place to send convicts from overcrowded British prisons and with an eye toward establishing lucrative agricultural plantations and expanding their naval presence in and around Southeast Asia. Sheep husbandry began as soon as the British arrived in 1788, and the first cows were imported in the 1880s. Soon, some wealthy colonists controlled large land holdings called “stations” on which they raised cattle and sheep. Many of these stations employed—and exploited—Aboriginal workers. Beginning in the 1860s, European colonists began to call loudly for taking Aboriginal and mixed-race children from their families and to educate them—first on religiously-affiliated mission schools and later in government-run institutions—for the purposes of cultural assimilation. Many of the children taken from their families, who have come to be known as the “Stolen Generations,” were later forced to work for White settlers. The height of these attempts occurred between 1905 and 1967, during which time thousands of children were separated from their families (estimates vary from 20,000-300,000 and are complicated by poor record keeping)—many permanently. 

Sally Morgan’s first book, 1987’s My Place is a work of nonfiction that tells the story of Morgan’s teenage discovery of her Aboriginal roots and delves into her mother’s, grandmother’s and great-uncle’s histories. Some of its elements mirror aspects of Annie’s story in Sister Heart: like Annie, Morgan’s grandmother Daisy and great-uncle Arthur grew up on a large sheep station (livestock ranch) in northwestern Australia;. Also like Annie, Morgan’s mother was taken from her own mother and placed in a residential school. Another young adult novel covering the experience of stolen Aboriginal children is Anita Heiss’s 2001 Who Am I?, a novel in the form of a diary written by an Aboriginal girl named Mary Talance in the 1930s. For readers interested in a historical first-person account, there is Nancy de Vries’s One Life, Two Stories: Nancy De Vries’s Journey Home, which was co-authored by Jane Mears and published in 2012. It tells the story of Nancy de Vries, who was taken from her family when she was barely more than a year old, and who spent decades searching for her mother as an adult. De Vries became one of University of Western Sydney’s first Aboriginal graduates when she completed a nursing degree in 1988, at the age of 56.