Like most of us must, I have had to reinvent myself as I’ve moved through life. I hope to continue to do so, while always maintaining some continuing core values.
19
Nature or nurture?
My reflections on my adoption family reunion wouldn’t be complete without some elaboration of the rich family history I inherited through my birth parents, some of which was relevant to my political life as well as my personal life.
My Murray family on my grandfather’s side had New Zealand and Scottish connections, but it was my grandmother, Margaret Murray (nee Douglass), who provided the links with colonial Australia. I was astounded to learn that my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather James Lewis (aka Duce) was speared to death by Aboriginal people on Pelican Island — now called Dowadee Island, adjacent to Soldiers Point within Port Stephens, New South Wales — towards the end of April 1824. Port Stephens is also the local extremity of the territory of the Worimi people, the traditional owners of the area around Forster where I grew up. This seemed to me to be a superb irony, given my ministerial portfolio and my public championing of the process of reconciliation with the first people of this land.
I also discovered that James Lewis came to Australia not on the First Fleet, but on the Hillsborough in 1799, after being convicted before a London jury of stealing 56 yards of printed cotton. He offended further when he arrived in the new colony as a convict, and was sentenced to 56 lashes. He then offended again by stealing a boat. James Lewis went on to become one of the 22 male convicts who accompanied Lieutenant Bowen in the first British settlement in Tasmania in 1804. He distinguished himself by being the only person who managed to stage a successful escape from this remote first landing, but was eventually caught and flogged and taken back to Sydney. If my friend, and occasional sparring partner in the ministerial days, Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell had known of my colonial heritage, he could well have charged my convict ancestor with having been part of the ‘invading forces’ who first helped take the land of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. I wouldn’t have been able to deny the charge. At least Michael never found out while I was in that job, as I suspect he would never have stopped gently taunting me about my family history.
Years later, James Lewis gained his liberty and had some free time in the colony before his death. He had only one child, Sarah, who is mentioned in the famous Tasmanian diaries of Reverend Robert Knopwood. Sarah Lewis was born in Sydney in 1802, although there is also some suggestion that she was born on a ship off the coast of Tasmania. She eventually married a convict, Thomas Watkins, and together they operated a hotel somewhere near the corner of what is now Sussex and Druitt Streets in Sydney in the 1820s. In 1838, they moved to the bush and established a farm on the banks of Mangrove Creek, a tributary of the Hawkesbury River. Members of the Watkins family continue to live in this region to this day, and my own grandmother was closely connected with the place as a child. Sarah and her husband are buried on the bank of Mangrove Creek, and recently, in 2016, I paddled my kayak down the creek and scrambled through the mangroves to visit their graves.
My ancestors on my grandmother’s side also include convict John Cross, who arrived on the ship Alexander in 1788, part of the First Fleet, and commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip. (Observant readers will note that this was, incredibly, the same ship that my mother Gwen’s ancestor Andrew Fishburn arrived on.) John Cross married Mary Davidson, who also arrived as a convict, but on the Second Fleet. In the early 1830s, one of John Cross’s sons, David Cross, built the Queen Victoria Inn on the banks of the MacDonald River, another tributary of the Hawkesbury, which branches off right at the little township of Wisemans Ferry. While the building is still standing, it is no longer a licensed premises and is now in private ownership. David Cross became the operator of the Wiseman’s Ferry after Solomon Wiseman, when it came into government ownership. I understand that Wiseman was the direct ancestor of author Kate Grenville, and the subject of her novel The Secret River.
Over recent years, I have often reflected deeply on the potential roles of my ancestors in the killing, dispossession, or further marginalisation of the Aboriginal people of the region during the early 1800s. Ultimately, I have only been able to guess at what those relationships may have been, but it has certainly made me doubly pleased that I have devoted much of my life’s work to fighting for the human rights of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of this country.
Despite my father’s very best efforts to educate me, I am still befuddled by the family history on my father’s father’s side. I know that it stems from the Scottish heritage of my grandfather William Archibald Murray, who was born in New Zealand and moved to Australia as a young man. His uncle, also named William Archibald Murray, was a member of the New Zealand parliament in the 1800s and apparently one of the leaders of conservative thought in New Zealand politics at the time. I am also related to Bill Hamilton, the New Zealand inventor of the jet boat. Another descendant of the New Zealand Murrays was my grandfather’s cousin Sir Angus Murray, who was knighted for his services to gynaecology, and was president of the British Medical Association in Australia (the precursor to the AMA).
Although I didn’t know it at the time, and nor did my father, the grandson of Sir Angus Murray is Rob Oakeshott, who became the independent member for Lyne on the north coast of New South Wales after I had left the parliament. My brother Neil heard Rob’s first speech in the House of Representatives on the radio and worked out that we’re all related. Rob and I have a lot in common, both having chaired the Joint Standing Committee of Public Accounts, as well as the Amnesty International Parliamentary Group. Both of us have a commitment to advancing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and a commitment to social justice more generally. It is also a strange irony that Rob represented the electorate of Lyne, which is where I grew up, and which was the seat my father Bert wanted me to represent.
As for the family history on my mother’s side, my mother Maida also had a very active interest in discovering that history, and she shared her research with me. There are filing cabinets of family-history research gathered by her, and I’m hoping to bring it all together when I can get the time. She managed to trace her father’s side back to colonial English convict roots, with connections to Tasmania as well as the goldfields of Victoria.
Maida was particularly devoted to her own mother, Annie Mary Beasley (nee Killeen), a soft and gentle woman, who had been lived a very hard life, starting off as an orphan. Being so close to someone who had clearly suffered as a result of not having their parents may well have partly informed Maida’s grief surrounding my forced adoption, but I can only speculate, as she never mentioned it herself. Maida and Cyn worked assiduously to find out my grandmother’s history and heritage. They were able to confirm that she was born in Victoria, the illegitimate daughter of an Irishman, Patrick Killeen. She was later made a ward of the state, and, sadly, Maida and Cyn were unable to further trace her origins.
My maternal grandfather’s Beasley side of the family was descended from a convict, James William Beasley (Beezley), who arrived in Tasmania in 1844 on the convict ship Equestrian. My grandfather’s family had a long association with Orange, and the Beasley name is on the Boer War and World War I memorials in the centre of the town. My grandfather’s brother died on the first day of the landing at Gallipoli. I later had the privilege of visiting Lone Pine at Gallipoli and seeing the name of Private W.R.C. Beasley on the memorial there. I was also able to pay him the tribute, with my cousins Gary and Julie, of laying a wreath in his memory at the Orange memorial on the Anzac centenary in 2015. At that time, I was still the CEO of Australian Red Cross, and the local newspaper recounted the fact that the news of my great-uncle’s death was sent to the family in Orange in 1916 by Red Cross.
During the roller-coaster of my adoption reunion, I constantly reflected on the wider nature and nurture argument. I’d thought I had it all figured out bef
ore I met my birth family. I was sure my personality and core behaviours were a direct product of the upbringing and parenting skills of my beloved adoptive mother and father, Gwen and Bert Tickner, shaped by their respective influences and the powerful influence of the community I grew up in. I still think this view has an undeniable element of truth to it. That is why I have always so passionately fought for social justice and investment in education and communities — to give all children the opportunity to advance their lives. Surely that is the human right of every child in the world.
But then, on meeting my birth parents and my brothers and sisters, the question of what had shaped me became far more complex for me. Things about my own life I thought I’d figured out with absolute clarity and certainty became greyer and more ambivalent.
What I learnt of my family history, particularly the knowledge of those strong political connections in my extended family have, of course, caused me to speculate further on what drove my passionate interests both in politics and in helping to build a better world. Of course, in one of his first letters to me, my father told me what his New Zealand cousins had told him: ‘our ancestors for about 600 years have been farmers, doctors and lawyers as well as politicians’. And this was before he had any idea that I was a member of the national parliament.
The truth is, though, I have never thought of myself as a politician; I have always been cause- and conviction-driven, rather than being career-driven. Most of my life I have spent working in the not-for-profit sector and in championing social reform through community-based NGOs and outside political party processes. I remember that even while I was still at school, I was writing letters to the local newspaper, The Cape Hawke Advocate, about the government neglect of local roads, which I believed had contributed to the deaths of some of my contemporaries in the town. At high school, I was also writing in opposition to nuclear weapons and as a champion of peace when I wrote in the local RSL Anzac essay competitions. So I can say that, even as a kid, I was a fighter for justice and the causes I believed in.
I was also, as long as I can remember, someone who deplored racial discrimination. I remember as a young schoolboy being very distressed when I visited the local cemetery and found that the graves of local Aboriginal people were relegated to the very back of the cemetery, and often without headstones. Many graves were not identified, and, of those that were, many were marked only with flimsy and transient wooden crosses. Even in death, I saw their poverty and the discrimination against them. My mother Gwen and father Bert are now buried in that cemetery, and I go there often. These days I see a transformation in the way the Aboriginal graves are respected and commemorated: the stories of so many local Aboriginal heroes are now told and recorded in that cemetery. It is a privilege to walk among them and pay respects.
At home, neither my mother Gwen nor my father Bert articulated political views to me of any kind, despite the fact that I later learnt that my father was a card-carrying member of the National Party. My father’s newspaper of choice was The Daily Telegraph, and it was not known for its championing of social issues. Nor was there anyone in my circle of friends or acquaintances who felt as strongly as I did about issues of social justice. So where did it come from?
Did it, perhaps, come from the sensitive and caring approach to people and life that I saw in my adopted mother, Gwen? Or was it the ‘feisty gene’ that I inherited from my birth mother, Maida, or an ‘empathy gene’ that I inherited from my birth father, Len?
That question of nature came up particularly powerfully when I learnt more about my father. In his first letters to me, he revealed his long-term interest in public speaking and his participation in the Rostrum organisation. He had also studied law as a young man, and he had resumed those studies and was enrolled in a law degree when I met him. But deeper than this, I sensed a core dimension of my father’s character to be similar to one I saw in myself — a dimension that I knew had been one of the drivers of much of my life’s work and my relationships with people. In one of my early letters to him, I mentioned a characteristic of mine ‘which some consider a fault, but I can’t change. It is that I am very soft. I just can’t stand to see people hurting. I have an innate sense of compassion and justice which has influenced my life.’ I was baring my soul to my father, and hoped that the intensity of my words wouldn’t scare him off. But I came to see that these innate feelings of compassion and love of people were very much part of my father’s persona, too, and underpinned all his relationships. It was in this sense that getting to know my father, first through his writing and then in person, was truly the missing dimension in my life.
From my mother Maida, I’m sure I inherited my high levels of energy and spontaneity, which are every bit as important to the heart of my identity. She was a highly intelligent woman, who could have done so many more things in her life had she had the opportunity. She had such core integrity, strength, and determination that if I had inherited half of it, I could have moved mountains.
The end result, though, is that I don’t know if I have an answer to the nature-nurture question, or at least not one that makes any sense — I just don’t think it’s possible to unravel these competing and complementary forces. Modern science and psychological theory accept the same view, I think: that it is not possible to separate or disentangle the forces of nature and nurture, which interact with one another in such complex ways. I am a combination of my genes and my whole life’s-worth of experiences, which is the same for everyone. It is one of the delightful and beautiful mysteries of life.
20
Conclusion
My mother Maida’s funeral in June 2012 was small, but especially moving for all those present who knew of our family reunion story. She had passed away in the nursing home, after suffering greatly from the ravages of dementia, and Greg had phoned me most distressed to tell me the news. He had been devoted to her in every way. Each day he had driven to the nursing home to hand-feed her and to stay with her throughout the course of the day. At her funeral, family and friends crowded into a little chapel at the crematorium at Pinegrove in western Sydney. I gave the eulogy. I was particularly moved that Sandra, who had played such a huge part in bringing us together, was there that day, too. Her ongoing dedication to my mother was so strong.
In the eulogy, I spoke about my mother’s life growing up in Orange — without, of course, mentioning anything of my birth — and I shared how deeply Maida and Greg had engaged with the children of the wider Kirwan and Beasley families. I also spoke about how warmly Maida and Greg welcomed me into their lives, and how they had become the instant and devoted grandparents of Jack. ‘I regard my mother as a wonderful life model and a real hero. I respect the deep courage and integrity she displayed in her life, and the abiding love she felt for me, which was deeply reciprocated.’
The headstone we prepared for mother Maida had Greg’s and my names on it, and the death certificate that was issued a month later had ‘Robert’ in the column for ‘children’.
After my mother passed away, I found snippets of notes that revealed her state of mind in the immediate aftermath of our adoption reunion. One, I think, was copied from a booklet the Post Adoption Resource Centre had given her: ‘… but when the grief remains unresolved it can be activated by reunion, setting off the mourning that should have taken place years earlier’.
I can only imagine the turmoil my mother must have gone through at this time, as her grief caught up with her. For 40 years, she had carried the pain and unspeakable guilt of having relinquished me for adoption. None of her friends or workmates knew anything about the birth of her child. She had held this secret so tightly over so many years.
In 2015, I was privileged to read an account of Greg’s life story, which he had typed up some 15 years previously. In it, he recorded the circumstances of his meeting up again with Maida when he moved from Orange to Sydney to live (in the years after I was born), and he related the ‘shambles and nea
r disaster’ of that meeting.
I contacted Maida Beasley and arranged to meet her at Marrickville Railway Station, the suburb where she was boarding at the time. I went down to the station to meet her when I became aware of the loud clanging of a bell emanating from a tram trying to get past this utility parked on the side of the road blocking its progress. Of course, it happened to be my utility, and so I had to shamefacedly repair from the scene much to the ire of the tram driver and its passengers.
In the meantime, Maida, probably suffering from nerves, had to repair to her lodgings nearby to relieve an urgent need. Eventually we did greet one another. This was not a terrific introduction to my first meeting with Maida in Sydney. She must not have been very impressed. Who could this country bumpkin be?
Still the acquaintance grew and there were other meetings, and for my part I became very attracted to this girl. I cannot say that the relationship was a smooth one for there was a lot of on and off occasions.
There was another aspect to overcome. In our talks I learnt that she had some personal trauma at some stage which affected her deeply and was probably the source of a reluctance to be involved in another relationship. I was to learn of her courage shown then and at later times.
That conversation with Greg about my birth and adoption was to sustain my mother for the next 40 years. They never talked about it again.
Ten Doors Down Page 18