AustLit

'This article addresses Sally Morgan's My Place(1987) and Maree Delofski's The Trouble with Merle (2002). A key similarity between these texts is a confusion surrounding the racial identities of their female protagonists. In Morgan's book, the narrator discovers that she is Aboriginal, and not (as she had been led to believe) Indian. The subject of Delofski's documentary is the vintage Hollywood film star Merle Oberon. Oberon claimed to be born in Tasmania, presumably of Anglo-Saxon parentage. Following her death in 1979, however, it was revealed that Oberon was actually born and raised in India and had Anglo-Indian parentage. Yet, some Tasmanians still claim that she was born in Tasmania and was, in fact, Anglo-Chinese. I suggest that a useful and compelling way of reading these texts is through Judith Butler's multivalenced concept of “trouble”. The protagonists of My Place and The Trouble with Merleare “trouble” to the extent that they are both situated outside an idealised white Australian femininity. On another level, both texts “trouble”—as in, they pose a challenge to—understandings of race and gender. (Publication abstract)