Sally Morgan

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.