The committee also reported on the experience of forced adoption and how it could push mothers towards suicide or suicidal feelings. These risks were further exacerbated by the inability of so many women to talk about the adoption and the child they had relinquished, often in awful circumstances. In the words of the report, ‘The culture of secrecy that surrounded adoption throughout the period in which the clean break theory was prominent meant women carried their experience as a secret from even their closest friends and families.’ This was my own mother’s story and her life for over 40 years.
I will let one of the witnesses to the Senate committee speak her words on these pages, as they seem to me to capture the rage of my mother, which was mostly unspoken, but which I knew was only just below her skin and ready to erupt in private and away from the prying eyes of the rest of the world — including me. While my mother had a different direct experience to the person quoted, I think that she would share the deep anger at the ‘obscene prejudice’ displayed towards unmarried mothers of the time.
The Senate witness June Smith is quoted in the committee report as championing the importance of public recognition of past events. She said,
We need to be respected in this country’s history as mothers who had their babies taken forcibly from them for no other reason than to satisfy the ideals of others. We need to be respected in this country’s history as mothers who were unjustly abused, betrayed and punished by all governments, hospital staff, welfare workers, religious hierarchies and society because of their inhumane, obscene prejudice towards us.
Arguably the most detailed and informative research undertaken into the impact of adoption was the National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. This study was commissioned by the Community and Disability Services Ministers’ Conference (a national meeting of federal and state and territory ministers) and the federal Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs as it then was. It was publicly released in August of 2012, shortly after Maida’s death, and was partly based on direct surveys of parents whose babies were adopted (overwhelmingly the mothers, who numbered 505) as well as 823 adopted individuals. It complements the Senate committee report, and preceded the national apology, which was given the next year.
Firstly, the study concluded that ‘there were very few birth mothers in the study who felt that the adoption was their choice’, and that ‘the most commonly identified contributing factors to their child’s ultimate adoption were family pressure and/or lack of family support, and mothers often talked about emotions such as grief, loss, shame and secrecy surrounding their experiences’. The study further concluded, ‘Mental health and wellbeing measures used in the survey indicate a higher than average likelihood of these mothers suffering from a mental health disorder compared to the general population, with close to one-third of the mothers showing a likelihood of having a severe mental disorder at the time of survey completion. Mothers rated lower quality of life satisfaction than the Australian norm, and over half had symptoms that indicate the likelihood of having post-traumatic stress disorder.’
These are incredible findings, but I doubt they would have shocked my mother. I saw time and again how her deep stress and distress manifested, often triggered by adoption-related reminders, such as old photographs or conversations. Those who knew Maida could see her pain, but the way she handled it made me realise that she had become a master of cover-up and self-protection. She did this by internalising her anger and anxiety on almost all occasions, but I could still see the underlying grief and distress that permeated her life.
The national research study also reported comprehensively on the situation of persons who were adopted — my category. I was eager to look at these results as soon as I gained access to the report. I know that I am in the minority of adoptees, for reasons I think have been made clear in my writing, but I have been deeply interested in the situation and circumstances of other adopted people as I have passed through my life. I have often reached out to adopted people that I have come across, especially where I have been able to assist them with thoughts about potential family reunion or relations with their birth family. I have assisted a number of people in this situation, including a former colleague, who I managed to encourage to link up with her very well-known birth father and mother.
This said, I cannot emphasise strongly enough that I also know many individual adopted people whose lives were irretrievably damaged by their adoption and their ill-fated attempts to make contact with their birth mother. I know people who have made initial contact with their birth mother or father only to find that they are unable to sustain the relationship for some reason. And I know those who have attempted to contact their birth mother, only to be met with a wall of rejection, and even outright hostility.
From the birth-mother perspective, I have been told on good authority by a departmental source that there have been many examples of mothers who experienced extreme traumatic feelings of grief and anxiety when they were advised that their child wanted to make contact with them. Their secret might have been kept from husbands and other children for decades, and the rest of the family might have had no idea that their wife and mother ever had another child who had been relinquished for adoption. The complexity and challenges of adoption reunions is further tragically demonstrated by the fact that some of these women experience suicidal thoughts and some of them have sadly taken their own lives.
On the other side of the equation, I have dealt with adopted people who have refused to have any contact with their birth family, despite attempts by their mothers to establish contact with them. Others have permitted initial contact, but then broken off the relationship, which must seem like a nightmare revisited for those birth mothers who suffer the double whammy of loss of the child at birth and then the rejection in later life.
Human relationships are complex, and I do not make any judgements here: reunions are hard and challenging for both mother and child, and can be tough on the wider adopted family as well. Sensitive and respectful processes were put in place with the creation of the reunion laws, which, if followed, give the best prospects for successful reunions to occur. It must be clearly understood that the great gift I was given in the success my own adoption reunion story is relatively rare. There is good reason for this, which is that many adopted people, as well as birth mothers, were damaged by the adoption.
When I read the statistics of the national research study, I was not surprised to read of the findings related to adoptees and the conclusion that ‘One of the most significant findings within this respondent group appears to be that, regardless of whether they had a positive or more challenging experience growing up within their adoptive family (roughly equal proportions of each participated in this study), most participants identified issues relating to problems with attachment, identity, abandonment and the parenting of their own children.’ Even though the statistics are arguably more ambivalent and far less alarming than the figures demonstrating the impact of forced adoption on relinquishing mothers, they are nonetheless serious cause for concern.
The study further concluded that ‘Compared to Australian population estimates, adoptees responding to our survey had lower levels of wellbeing and higher levels of psychological distress, and that almost 70% of adoptee survey respondents agreed that being adopted had resulted in some level of negative effect on their health, behaviours or wellbeing while growing up.’ These feelings included hurt concerning the ‘secrecy and lies’ surrounding their adoption and a ‘subsequent sense of betrayal’, as well as feelings of abandonment, low levels of self-worth, and difficulties in forming attachments to others.
I did not participate in this survey, but, had I done so, I would have been in the remaining 30 per cent, who did not experience these feelings. That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel great empathy and compassion for those who suffered as a result of their adoption, and I acknowledge and
deeply respect the suffering of those who did not share my experience. How could it be otherwise?
I am in the minority in the group of adoptees for another reason as well. The national research study reported that 60 per cent of the people surveyed had had some form of contact with their mothers, but only 45 per cent of that number (i.e., less than 30 per cent of the total participants) described a relationship that was ongoing. Further, the study found that around 25 per cent of the total number surveyed had had some contact with their fathers, but only one half of those (i.e., around 13 per cent of the total number) had ongoing contact. Given that I had huge ongoing contact with my mother from the time of meeting her until her passing, and also full-on expansive contact with my father and my brothers and sisters since the time of the first meeting, clearly I am in a very distinct and even tiny minority. I consider myself to be immensely and deeply privileged that I have known the love of three families, and each of them has been and remains hugely important, influential, and special to me in my life. I honour them and rejoice in their love and companionship and the contribution each and every one of them has made to my life.
The national research study did not have a large sample of adopting parents participate in the survey: the number was only 94, compared with the significantly larger sample size of the other surveyed groups I have mentioned. Drawing conclusions from this data would therefore appear to be more problematic, but there does appear to be a well-founded conclusion that most adopted parents were satisfied with the initial adoption process and, in the longer term, that, by mental-health and wellbeing measures, the adopting parents fared better than other affected groups surveyed.
I have recounted these findings of the national research study in order to convey some impression of the overall societal impact of the adoption processes, which by any measure had an immense and adverse impact on close to half a million Australians who have lived in my lifetime, even on a conservative estimate.
For all those mothers, and the others who shared their pain, the national apology moved in the Parliament of Australia on 21 March 2013 by Prime Minister Julia Gillard was of some comfort. I welcomed that apology, too, and know that, had my mother Maida lived to hear it, she also would have deeply appreciated it.
The words of the motion of the apology adopted by the Australian parliament on 21 March 2013 read as follows:
National Apology for Forced Adoptions
1. Today, this Parliament, on behalf of the Australian people, takes responsibility and apologises for the policies and practices that forced the separation of mothers from their babies, which created a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering.
2. We acknowledge the profound effects of these policies and practices on fathers.
3. And we recognise the hurt these actions caused to brothers and sisters, grandparents, partners and extended family members.
4. We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children. You were not legally or socially acknowledged as their mothers. And you were yourselves deprived of care and support.
5. To you, the mothers who were betrayed by a system that gave you no choice and subjected you to manipulation, mistreatment and malpractice, we apologise.
6. We say sorry to you, the mothers who were denied knowledge of your rights, which meant you could not provide informed consent. You were given false assurances. You were forced to endure the coercion and brutality of practices that were unethical, dishonest and in many cases illegal.
7. We know you have suffered enduring effects from these practices forced upon you by others. For the loss, the grief, the disempowerment, the stigmatisation and the guilt, we say sorry.
8. To each of you who were adopted or removed, who were led to believe your mother had rejected you and who were denied the opportunity to grow up with your family and community of origin and to connect with your culture, we say sorry.
9. We apologise to the sons and daughters who grew up not knowing how much you were wanted and loved.
10. We acknowledge that many of you still experience a constant struggle with identity, uncertainty and loss, and feel a persistent tension between loyalty to one family and yearning for another.
11. To you, the fathers, who were excluded from the lives of your children and deprived of the dignity of recognition on your children’s birth records, we say sorry. We acknowledge your loss and grief.
12. We recognise that the consequences of forced adoption practices continue to resonate through many, many lives. To you, the siblings, grandparents, partners and other family members who have shared in the pain and suffering of your loved ones or who were unable to share their lives, we say sorry.
13. Many are still grieving. Some families will be lost to one another forever. To those of you who face the difficulties of reconnecting with family and establishing ongoing relationships, we say sorry.
14. We offer this apology in the hope that it will assist your healing and in order to shine a light on a dark period of our nation’s history.
15. To those who have fought for the truth to be heard, we hear you now. We acknowledge that many of you have suffered in silence for far too long.
16. We are saddened that many others are no longer here to share this moment. In particular, we remember those affected by these practices who took their own lives. Our profound sympathies go to their families.
17. To redress the shameful mistakes of the past, we are committed to ensuring that all those affected get the help they need, including access to specialist counselling services and support, the ability to find the truth in freely available records and assistance in reconnecting with lost family.
18. We resolve, as a nation, to do all in our power to make sure these practices are never repeated. In facing future challenges, we will remember the lessons of family separation. Our focus will be on protecting the fundamental rights of children and on the importance of the child’s right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.
19. With profound sadness and remorse, we offer you all our unreserved apology.
I think my mother Gwen would have found some of the language of the apology challenging, as did some other adopting parents, judging by media reports of their responses. Maybe I’m just too close to it, but I can’t find it in my heart to apportion any level of blame to my mother Gwen or my father Bert for the loss suffered by my mother Maida. And I know from many conversations with Maida that she had nothing but respect and appreciation for the role my mother Gwen and father Bert played in my life, and, without any attempt to gain favour with me, soon after we met, she quietly placed a photograph of Bert and Gwen in the living room at 38 Lansdowne Street.
I don’t want to suggest for one moment that there weren’t adopting parents who treated their adopted children cruelly, or others who hid the fact of the adoption from their child or children and thereby potentially further contributed to the trauma of the adoption, or indeed inadvertently created such trauma by their actions. Despite this, my sense, from all that I’ve read and observed on this issue to date, is that most adopting parents were well-intentioned and genuinely wanted to give a home to a child.
This doesn’t mean that closed adoption as it was carried out over those decades was good public policy. I welcomed and supported the national apology, and all the state and territory apologies, each as an important act of respect, atonement, and social justice for those affected Australian women and their children. It is critical to understand this complex, deeply distressing dimension of the social history of our country from the perspective of the mothers who had to give up their children and who might not have seen them again for decades, or indeed ever.
There is a postscript to all of this for me. During my time as CEO of Red Cross, I became heavily involved in the support of a program called the Young Parents Program, which was designed specifi
cally to support the needs of young women and men up to the age of 25 years, and which is still running today. Through the program, young parents are able to access the safety, security, and support they need to help them with parenting. The program overwhelmingly benefits young single female teenage parents, focusing on their empowerment and on increasing their capacity for education and employment. The program has been evaluated on numerous occasions, and during 2013–14, for example, 95 per cent of all participants, all of whom had entered the program because they risked having their child removed from their care, were able to ensure that they kept their children, through the parenting and essential life skills and attributes they learnt in the program.
Of course, I had both an emotional and an intellectual commitment to this work. At a major fundraiser for the program held at the Bondi Pavilion in 2013, soon after my mother’s death, I spoke out as an adopted person, urging public financial support for the program. My experience has been that in a large general audience of 200 or so people, there are likely to be at least a few people touched by adoption. Sure enough, at this function, after I had finished speaking publicly about my own adoption experience for the first time, a number of women unrelated to one another came forward to shed some tears and to thank me for the openness and honesty of my story. They all pleaded for support for the young mothers benefiting from the program. I have always been inspired by the young women participating in this and similar programs — by their determination to do the right thing by their kids and to seize new life opportunities, sometimes after having endured the school of hard knocks in their family and personal lives. In previous decades, those same inspiring young women would have had their children taken from them.
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The Stolen Generations
I have thought long and hard about whether I should include anything in this book about the Stolen Generations, who have a fundamentally different story. Their story is about the racist assimilationist practices that underpinned the separation of Aboriginal children from their families over many generations. On balance, I have decided to do so, because there is the huge common thread in the pain of mothers, and no story about adoption in Australia would be complete without due reference and respect being paid to the tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were taken from their mothers, and to the loss and pain of the mothers themselves, their families, and the wider Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. It was also a period of appalling government policy, the aftermath of which I had much to do with in my time as minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.
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