Ten Doors Down

by Tickner, Robert;

  I should also apologise for my abysmal writing and spelling. My teachers used to say that I developed bad writing to cover up my bad spelling.

  I explained how Jody and I had another child, too, Baby Jack, and as Jody was technically my first cousin, this meant that Jack was not only ‘directly related to you as his Grandma, Nanna, etc. — you choose’, he was also biologically related to mother Gwen, ‘and this does make Jack a very special person before his life has even started’.

  I had become increasingly conscious of Maida’s vulnerability and fragility thanks to the discussions I had had with Sandra, which meant that now I wanted to try to build her trust and confidence in me — to reassure her that I had no issues of any kind with my adoption, and to make sure she knew how much I was looking forward to meeting her.

  … let me make some things very clear because I think it is important to do so. In the period of my whole lifetime I have NEVER had any feeling of hostility or resentment whatsoever towards you. I emphasise this because I have read in some textbooks offering expert opinion that this may happen. Well, not for me! Never ever! I have nothing but positive feelings and expectations about meeting you and getting on well.

  Why is this so? Two reasons, I think. (1) I have had such a good life. And (2) the approach my adopted Mum and Dad (whose names are Gwen and Bert) took to my adoption was very wise. I always knew I was adopted, and was told of the name Beasley and about being born in Crown Street Women’s Hospital. Incidentally, I subsequently lived at 423 Crown Street, Surry Hills and represented that area as an Alderman on the Sydney City Council.

  The second major thing I should make clear and emphasise is that you need have no fears whatsoever about meeting and all that we hope will flow from that. I cannot think of a single downside, except the fact that my public commitment to people and to politics will mean that sometimes I will have to be working when I would prefer to be talking to family or friends. I mention this only to let you know that I have a driving commitment to my beliefs and my political work. It is not about self-promotion or personal gain but is an innate motivation for my political values. I don’t know where this comes from as Mum and Dad Tickner were not ALP supporters, although they were very caring about other people.

  I reassured her that I would ‘flow with your wishes absolutely on the question of when and where we should meet’, and I added that no matter where we met, ‘the event will be one of — if not the most — significant in our lives, as I am sure you will agree. Again, don’t worry and don’t be afraid. I will probably be unbelievably emotional no matter what we do beforehand. Just be yourself, and if we cry hopelessly then so what.’

  I wrote about seeing her face for the first time in the photograph she sent me: ‘… with no exaggeration, opening the envelope was one of the most wonderful moments of my life. You look so good. So gentle.’ I added, ‘We look alike, especially when you were a school girl and I was just a lad.’

  I told her how much I was looking forward to our meeting and joked about how nervous I was going to be about her safety until we met: ‘… be very careful crossing roads, getting out of bed, sneezing, or moving in any way. If anything should happen to your precious self I will never forgive you!’

  I finished with what I hoped were encouraging words:

  I already admire you so much and look forward to developing our friendship and understanding. I think we are both very lucky that this has happened to us. I have this overwhelming feeling that we should not waste a minute! I personally believe there was a one in one hundred thousand chance or less of us not liking each other. But Sandra’s report of her meeting with you makes that less than one in a million. From what she has told me about you I am very proud that you are my mother … Take what time YOU need and do what is right for YOU. But above all else, feel proud, confident, happy and as wonderful as I feel.

  I had gone all out to convince her that I was totally free of any possible anger or resentment towards her, and that it was safe to meet me and to seek to build our relationship. I would never let her down and wanted her to know this with all my heart. Against these efforts, in my letter, I made a ham-fisted blunder when I suggested a couple of possible places for our first meeting: the Sydney Botanic Gardens or, unthinkingly, out the front of the Crown Street Hospital where I’d been born. I don’t know what could have possessed me to say something so utterly insensitive and stupid.

  Without my knowing it, my letter contained another dangerous bombshell. I had enclosed two photographs, which, when my mother saw them, would inadvertently endanger the whole process of reunion and even make her doubt her sanity. To her, these photographs were a cruel and deeply painful reinforcement of the suffering she had experienced ever since losing her child.

  The first photograph showed me, aged five or six, with my grandmother Minnie Osborn on the front porch of 18 Lansdowne Street in Merrylands. This was the house where my mum Gwen had grown up, and where Mum and Dad had taken me as a baby immediately after my adoption in 1951. I had noted the address on the back of the tiny photograph.

  In a coincidence that beggars belief, when my mother, in a state of great emotional vulnerability, received the photograph, she was sitting in her home just ten doors down, at number 38 Lansdowne Street. She had lived there since 1957, but had been visiting the site since 1955, when the land was first purchased. Greg Kirwan, her husband, was a carpenter and had built the house with his own hands — it remains there to this day. The coincidence was truly shocking. More likely than not, my mother would have been only ten houses away when the photograph was taken.

  The second photograph was also extraordinary in its coincidence and must have deeply compounded the pain my mother felt. It was what I thought was a cute photograph of me, aged about four, sitting on Santa Claus’s lap. My mother Gwen had told me it was taken at a department store in Parramatta, and the year, 1955, was clearly displayed on a big sign in the background. When Maida saw this photograph, she realised that she already had one very similar of her twin sister Cynthia’s son, Daryl. When she rushed to look at it, she found it had been taken the same year as mine with exactly the same Santa. Even more disturbing for my mother was the fact that the department store was directly opposite the council building where she worked. She had been just a heartbeat away from me all those years ago.

  When my mother learnt of these extraordinary coincidences in January 1993, they pushed her almost to the edge of a breakdown. Long after we met, she told me that when she saw the first photograph, she had run distraught from her house into Lansdowne Street — this woman who was so intensely private and had kept her terrible burdensome secret for so many years. She told me that she thought her mind was playing terrible tricks on her, or even that it might be some cruel current-affairs program hoax that would destroy her life.

  Let’s walk in my mother’s shoes for a moment. She had given up her child back in December 1951, and had thought about what had become of him every single day of her life since. She couldn’t bear to have any other children because of the pain of the forced adoption. She had only talked about this adoption with her husband, Greg, once in their 35 years of marriage.

  Fast forward to January 1993, when my mother receives this letter and realises that the child she has grieved for so deeply, for so many years, was right under her nose: a little black-haired boy playing in her very street. It was just one more kick in the guts, pushing her pain to its limits. That pain must also have made her doubtful about how she might cope with the meeting I was proposing, and eroded her confidence that things could ever work out between us.

  At the time I sent the letter, I knew nothing of these coincidences, of course, or this terrible new hurt that I had unintentionally inflicted. It fell to Sandra to tell me what had happened and to talk my mother through the avalanche of pain that had come with the rekindled sadness and loss of the last 40 years.

  10

  Adoption practices in
New South Wales in the 1950s

  Most people born after 1970 would find it almost inconceivable that less than 20 years earlier, a 22-year-old woman, as my mother was, living with her family in country New South Wales could have been turned out by her father because she had conceived a child outside of marriage. At that time, it was seen as so shameful that keeping the child was usually impossible. Not only was there no supporting parents’ benefit, but the social marginalisation of single mothers, including by their own families, was all pervasive.

  This wasn’t a social stigma confined to Australia. The Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who relinquished her child for adoption in the late 1960s and was reunited with her in the 1990s, described the scandal of conceiving a child outside marriage as being so intense, even in the late 1960s, that it was ‘like you murdered someone’.

  I learnt not to ask my mother about the details of what happened to her in Crown Street Hospital in December 1951, or what it was like for her in the months leading up to my birth and subsequent adoption. It was made clear to me, by her and Sandra, that the events of that time were simply too painful for my mother to talk about to anyone. But it is beyond doubt that, after she became pregnant, my mother was unable to continue to live in the family home or the town where she had grown up and to which the Beasley family had contributed over many decades. I never knew my grandfather Clifton Ernest Havelock Beasley personally, but I later learnt from my mother’s husband, Greg, that he was a hard, gruff, and at times even cruel man, although not violent. There is no doubt in my mind that he was one of the primary reasons my mother was forced to leave Orange after I was conceived. Having been born in 1891 and served in WWI, he was of course a man from another era, and no doubt his views would have reflected that time.

  I also know that my mother showed strong feelings of hostility whenever Crown Street Hospital was mentioned. We now know from many formal reports and the evidence from mothers and hospital staff given in government inquiries that the practices of the hospital were often cruel and damaging to the single women who went there to give birth. While the practices were not uniform around Australia and varied within states, it was very common for unmarried mothers in hospitals to be stigmatised, disparaged, and treated very differently from married women. The files of unmarried mothers were marked ‘baby for adoption’ or ‘BFA’, and there is considerable evidence that nursing staff often displayed disdain towards those women. In some hospitals, there is evidence that unmarried mothers were given sedatives and drugs to inhibit milk production. Although in the early 1950s the prevailing practice in many hospitals was not to have children with their mothers in the ward, in the case of mothers of children marked for adoption, there was a strong practice of denying contact altogether or limiting contact in the belief that this would somehow reduce the grief of the mother following the loss of her baby to adoption. Some hospital nurses from this time have expressed remorse about their role in the implementation of this practice because of the permanent damage it causes to the mothers.

  My own mother simply refused to talk about these things. She was a closed book whenever I sought to know more about her experience in the hospital or at the accommodation she lived in during those pregnant months in Sydney, far from her family and friends in Orange. What I know from her demeanour and manifest sadness was that it was a grim and deeply unhappy period of her life, which left brutal scars on the core of her being.

  Long after we eventually met, I became aware that Maida was following closely the work of the Parliament of New South Wales Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social Issues, which in 1998 was given the reference to conduct a wide-ranging inquiry into adoption practices in New South Wales from 1950 until 1998. The committee had the authority to inquire into and report on the administrative practices in those adoptions and whether they involved unethical and unlawful practices. The committee was also asked to advise the government on what policies should be adopted to deal with the distress caused to people by these former policies.

  I would like to acknowledge the incredible courage of the women whose political actions, lobbying, and legal actions contributed to persuading the government of the day to refer this matter to the Parliamentary Committee. The courage of these woman has left a lasting legacy.

  The committee was chaired by Labor MLC Jan Burnswoods (an old friend of mine), and it reported on 8 December 2000. The next day, 9 December (Maida’s birthday), the Sydney media reported the outcome of the committee’s deliberations. It delivered wide-ranging recommendations, including recommendation 16, which stated, ‘The NSW Government should issue a statement of public acknowledgment that past adoption practices were misguided, and that, on occasions, unethical or unlawful practices may have occurred causing lasting suffering for many mothers, fathers, adoptees and their families.’ The next recommendation called on ‘departments, private agencies, churches, hospitals, professional organisations, and individuals involved in past adoption practices [to be] encouraged to issue a formal apology to the mothers, fathers, adoptees and their families who have suffered as a result of past adoption practices’.

  Following the inquiry, it took until 2012 for the New South Wales parliament to pass a formal apology for forced adoption practices, which it did on 20 September, two months after my mother Maida had passed away. This New South Wales apology was preceded by an apology from the parliament of Western Australia in 2010, and accompanied in 2012 by apologies from all other states and territories, except the Northern Territory, which followed in 2013.

  A very large number of people were affected by these events; the number of adoptions just between 1951 and 1975 totalled an estimated 150,000 babies. It has been further estimated that the total number of adoptions Australia-wide from the 1940s to the new millennium may have been as high as 250,000.

  At the national level, in November 2010, following on from the Western Australian apology, the Senate referred an inquiry into former forced-adoption policies and practices to the Community Affairs References Committee. The committee reported in February 2012, and the report included extensive recommendations, including a call for a formal apology by the national government. The Senate committee concluded that it was ‘incontrovertible that forced adoption was common’ and occurred when children were given up for adoption because their parents, particularly their mothers, were forced to relinquish them or faced circumstances in which they were left with no other choice. I have no doubt that my own mother felt that she had no choice but to have me adopted.

  The peak of adoptions in Australia actually occurred in the period 1971–72 — almost 10,000 babies were adopted in that year — and then began to fall quite quickly. The Senate committee observed that this coincided with the decline in births amongst women generally and noted that there were a range of possible causes for the decline, including the legalisation of abortion and the widespread introduction of family planning and contraception advice. It is also the case that the proportion of adoptions to births has decreased since the 1970s, due to the increased social acceptance of single-parent families and de facto relationships. Contrary to popular mythology, which I had not appreciated, the introduction of the supporting mother’s benefit by the Whitlam government did not occur until two years after the rate of adoption started to plummet.

  Reading the Senate committee report is also very helpful to understanding the changing social attitudes towards adoption in post–World War II Australia. Prior to World War II, there had been a move away from the institutionalisation of children towards the option of adoption, and, following the end of the war, there developed the ‘clean break’ theory, as described in the report:

  Developmental psychologists premised their beliefs on the long-held notion that a child is a ‘blank slate’ as a newborn. They argued that the personality and intelligence of an individual is determined by environment, not genetics. The prevailing theories advocated that the psychological and financial qualif
ications of a married couple were superior to those of single mothers and impoverished families. Therefore, placing the child in an adoptive home within the earliest possible timeframe was the primary way of safe-guarding the welfare of the child.

  I guess my life was hugely impacted by this view of the world, but sure as hell my adoption reunion has proven to me beyond doubt, and contrary to my expectations, that I was in no way a ‘blank slate’ when I was born.

  The Senate committee’s research and observations showed a deep prejudice against single mothers at that time, including from doctors, and that prejudice continued unabated for at least two further decades after I was born. One doctor from the children’s department of the Prince of Wales Hospital, Doctor Grunseit, wrote in 1973 in The Medical Journal of Australia, ‘In New South Wales most unmarried mothers … are more likely to be poor, undernourished and of low intelligence, if not actually retarded.’ Such attitudes are repugnant, but they do help to explain why so many women were so unjustly treated over so many decades.

  The Senate committee also reported that another doctor at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, Doctor Lawson, gave a public address in 1959, which was quoted in The Medical Journal of Australia, and stated, ‘The prospect of the unmarried girl or of her family adequately caring for a child and giving it a normal environment and upbringing is so small that I believe for practical purposes it can be ignored. I believe that in all such cases the obstetrician should urge that the child be adopted … The last thing that the obstetrician might concern himself with is the law in regard to adoption.’ As I see it, the rights and concerns of vulnerable young women meant nothing to people like this, and they displayed a disdain and arrogance that knew no bounds.

  On the other side of the equation, there was a huge demand from childless couples for children they could adopt. By the 1950s, according to the Senate committee report, there were more couples wishing to adopt a child than mothers wishing to relinquish their child.