Forcible Child Removal in Australian Aboriginal Literature. A Study of Sally Morgan's "My Place," Glenyse Ward's "Wandering Girl," and Alice Nannup's "When the Pelican Laughed"

Sally Morgan's "My Place," Glenyse Ward's "Wandering Girl," and Alice Nannup's "When the Pelican Laughed" provide different accounts of forcible child removal in twentieth-century Australia. Each of these novels reports the authors’ experiences of what it means to be Aboriginal in white Australia. Each of them also delves into the topic of the Stolen Generations from different points of view, namely, Morgan tells her experience as the descendant of removed Aboriginal people; Ward recounts her experience as an Aboriginal servant in an Anglo-Australian, middle-class household; Nannup narrates her life story, from her removal to the reconnection to her Aboriginal roots as an elderly woman. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate how Aboriginal writers cope with the trauma of the Stolen Generations in their novels. For this reason, the first part of the dissertation focuses on the colonial policies adopted in Australia during the twentieth century. In particular, it examines the policy of forcible child removal and the effects that this policy has had on Aboriginal peoples. The second part of the dissertation is centred around the representation of the Stolen Generations in Aboriginal literature and how Aboriginal writers deal with this issue, focusing on the novels written by Morgan, Ward, and Nannup.