Don’t worry about feeling nervous about the meeting. It is perfectly understandable and I feel a little bit that way myself. But we must both have faith, and in my heart I know all will be well.
Take care until we meet.
With great love and affection,
Robert
I remember the exact spot where we embraced that first time, in that momentous and life-changing moment, on Wednesday 20 January 1993: near the corner of the far bottom step, at the left of the Opera House as you are approaching from Circular Quay. Whenever I am at the Opera House now, I never fail to go there. It became my and my mother’s spot forever.
One of the reasons I remember this first meeting so clearly is because I grabbed a piece of cardboard off the back seat of my car when I arrived at the Botanic Gardens, and I made some notes as I walked along the foreshore towards the Opera House. I have kept this humble piece of cardboard for 27 years.
That first embrace with my mother Maida was a kind of coming home. I know she felt the same. She had truly waited a lifetime for this moment.
She greeted me with a simple, ‘Hello, Robert,’ and then we fell into each other’s arms. When the embrace ended, we each took in the reality of the person in front of us. I was face to face with my beautiful mother for the very first time since I was adopted over 41 years previously.
No photograph could have adequately prepared me for meeting Maida in person. She had a high-energy personality and impressed me straight away with her spontaneity and vivaciousness. I noticed her beautiful smile and her infectious laugh, which sometimes sounded like a schoolgirl’s giggle because she was so incredibly nervous. She kept saying, ‘Oh, Robert! Oh, Robert!’ in disbelief, while laughing and crying all at the same time.
For my part, the feelings were overwhelming, and I was so nervous that at first I could hardly speak. I kept thinking, This can’t be happening. No other moment in my life has been so turbulent and momentous in comparison.
Neither of us said much in those first minutes; we just stood there sizing each other up. I saw that my mother was a tall, slim, and very attractive woman. Her hair was beautifully cut and permed — I suspected it was done especially for the occasion. She wore a sleeveless blue and white summer dress with a belt, and I wondered if she had agonised as long as I had about what to wear. Whether she had or not, she looked great and had made just the right choice.
After that first greeting and embrace, we had to work out what to do. There was no game plan or script for this situation, despite Sandra’s work in preparing us. I suggested we could walk into the adjacent botanic gardens, and, when my mother agreed, I tentatively placed my hand on her back to guide her. I have been a shy person for most of my life, but that day I was especially nervous, and every small touch was breaking new ground.
We walked past the Opera House, mingling with the throngs of tourists and visitors, and entered the gardens from the walkway along the foreshore. Our historic meeting had a truly magnificent Sydney backdrop. On the way, we chatted about the harbour, the gardens, and the city, occasionally stopping and facing each other to prove to ourselves that this was real.
My mother thought the gardens were glorious. As we walked towards the restaurant and coffee shop, we passed a small pond with waterlilies. Here, it was quieter, and we could be alone. I saw a garden bench not far away and suggested we take a seat there. I could see that if we sat on that bench, we could face inwards towards each other, or turn front on, or even turn away from each other as necessary. It was a safe conversation space, and we needed that, because there was much to be said.
There was no guide for us, no agenda or connivance of any kind to start the process of mutual personal discovery and begin to understand what had become of our lives. It was a raw and unrehearsed meeting from beginning to end. I was too deeply involved in listening to my mother’s words and responding to them to think about taking any notes. My mother, however, did have a small notepad with her to record key details to think over later, and I suspected Sandra’s guiding hand.
My mother was on fire and did much of the early talking. She had waited a long time for this. I was hit with an almost incomprehensible avalanche of family history, names and places, which left me scrambling to understand how this family jigsaw fitted together. For a time, I was confused by my mother’s repeated references to someone called Precious, who I assumed, at first, must be her husband, Greg. Then my mother explained to me that Precious was the latest in a long line of beloved cats, who had each occupied a prominent place in her life. But I was riveted to every word. With each sentence, I was learning more about my mother and her family. Often, she needed to stop and wipe away tears.
Occasionally she asked me to turn front on to her, so she could look into my eyes, and of course they were her eyes looking back at her. ‘You have my eyes, darling Robert, and you can’t escape that,’ she said, laughing.
My mother mentioned names, like Adrian, Lorraine, and Brian, but it took me some time to understand that they were her siblings — and therefore, of course, my uncles and aunts. The sibling she talked most often about was her twin sister, Cynthia (Cyn), whom she was extremely close to. Cyn had suffered from polio as a child, and had worked at The King’s School (where I nearly went as a student) as a cleaner and later in hospitals doing the same work. Aunty Cyn’s husband, Jack, was no longer alive, but there were two children, Jenny and Daryl (Daryl had been photographed with the same Santa as me in 1955). The whole family still had strong connections with the central-western New South Wales city of Orange. Maida’s other sister, Lorraine, her husband, also called Jack, and their family still lived there, and it was clear that my mother strongly identified with Orange as her hometown, even after all these years. It was where her mother and father and grandparents (my grandparents and great-grandparents) were buried. Later, I was to learn more about the longstanding family association with Orange, and that gift of a rich family history was another valuable outcome of my adoption reunion.
That day, however, these family connections were a whole new dimension, which I hadn’t considered, and I told my mother how much I looked forward to meeting my aunts and uncles and numerous cousins. At this, she again wiped away tears, and I detected some diffidence about my enthusiasm to meet the wider family. I realised this was because she had been so private and secretive for so long about her post-adoption pain. She told me that only a handful of people in the world knew that she had given birth to a child, and Cyn was the only one who understood the pain she had suffered for decades.
By far the most important person in my mother’s life was her husband, Greg. Maida explained that soon after my birth she had embarked on a trip to Europe by boat — a wonderful and courageous thing to do to reclaim her life, I thought. She came from a relatively poor family, so must have undertaken some very determined saving to raise the funds. The photographs from that trip she later showed me reveal a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties experiencing life at its best. Maida travelled with a girlfriend and stayed away for more than six months, during which time she kept substantial diaries. When I later read some of these, they revealed the depth of Greg Kirwan’s feelings for her and of her friendship with him. He was to become her husband in 1957.
Maida told me Greg was a carpenter by trade and had built their house in Lansdowne Street himself in preparation for their marriage. She was proud of the fact that they’d never taken out a mortgage, but had saved to buy the modest suburban block. When Maida spoke about Greg, there was so much admiration in her voice. I immediately got the impression that she saw him as a kind of saint-like figure of wisdom and compassion, in contrast to what she perceived as her own fallibility. She explained that he had stuck by her all those years, and his steadfastness and steady hand had helped her survive. Over the rest of her life with me, she constantly described Greg as her ‘rock’, and gradually I came to understand what that meant. Greg was always there for he
r when she went to the edge, as must have happened so many times. Over time, I came to know Greg intimately, and I know that, in his later years, he saw me as the son he never had. The love and the trust between us became absolute, and continued until the day he died in 2017.
By now, we’d been talking for about two hours, and my mother was gaining the confidence to speak about some of the difficult and sensitive subjects she had never shared with any of her family or friends. It was as though she’d been saving herself for this conversation with me. I felt enormously privileged, but at the same time found it very hard, and we both sobbed at times as she tried to get her thoughts out.
My mother explained that there wasn’t a single day she hadn’t thought of me, but she had spoken about my birth and adoption only once to Greg, very early on in their relationship. Just one conversation in over 40 years with her soulmate. Of course, her words included outpourings of grief, and, as they came, I could hardly contain my own distress. I held her in my arms and comforted her as best I could, and both of us were grateful for the solitude and privacy we had that day in the gardens.
She then gently made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about my birth and the later adoption process, which was obviously too painful for her. With a discreet aside, she made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about my birth father, either. I got the very clear impression that these subjects were off limits, and I respected that.
Maida recalled the moment when the first letter from the Department of Community Services had arrived. She’d known immediately what it was about, and it was a bolt of lightning striking at the heart of her identity and existence. The letter had terrified her, and she told me how deeply distressed she had been, and that she couldn’t stop crying. It had taken some time before she could tell Greg about it, even though the letter and the later call with Sandra heralded the promise of a reunion. The very thought of meeting me had compounded the sadness and the longing she had felt for so long.
The coincidental convergence around Lansdowne Street had deeply distressed her, too, but she needed to hear more to better understand what had happened, and how it could have come to be. She asked me to tell her more about 18 Lansdowne Street, Merrylands, that house of my childhood only ten doors down from her own home.
I explained that I’d often stayed at the house during the first 12 years of my life, until my grandmother had died in 1963. Most school holidays, my family would travel from Forster to visit Grandma for a time, and I’d played up and down the street, and I vividly remembered quite a few people who’d lived there. There was a Miss Ezzy, a long-term Italian resident who Maida remembered well, too, and Bernard who I remembered as ‘the Dutch boy’ and his family, who lived opposite my grandmother. I remembered frequenting the shop on the corner of Woodville Road, up and across from where my Aunty Daphne lived at number 6.
My mother tried to imagine me in the street as a ‘cute black-haired little boy’, as she described me. She told me she remembered Mr Rowley at number 6 (my Uncle Dick) and especially remembered my grandmother Mrs Osborn, who used to sit on her verandah, and who my mother passed every day on her way to and from work. We shook our heads in disbelief about these shared recollections. It was a relief to me, though, that my mother didn’t remember seeing me in the street, as I’d often played out the front of my grandmother’s house or sat with her on the front porch or walked on my own to visit Aunty Daphne, who used to give me little ornaments that I’d taken a liking to. It would have been just too painful for her to deal with the knowledge that the little boy she’d seen all those years ago was her own lost child.
Sandra had constantly reinforced that I should take things slowly with my mother, and although I did my best to keep this in mind, we did a lot of talking that day. Maida asked me about my own family circumstances, and, to reassure her that she hadn’t caused me pain by the adoption, I spoke at great length about the happiness of my childhood. A whirlpool of conflicting emotions poured from her: gushing tears and deep distress, interspersed with her terrific spontaneous laughter. I worried about whether my protestations of the wonderful life I’d led made her relieved that I’d been well looked after or whether they caused her further pain, but eventually I understood that she felt only relief that I hadn’t suffered.
She took great delight in my excitement about the birth of Jack, her grandson, which had happened only four months earlier, and had been, as I reminded her, the turning point in my decision to lift the contact veto and reach out to her. My hope was that Jack could be, in some little way, the child she’d never been able to enjoy and love; I could see, as tears poured down my mother’s cheeks, that she had so much love to give. She was delighted to see more pictures of him, and I vowed to make sure that Jack would play a huge part in her life from now on. And, indeed, it was a delight as the years unfolded to see the love Jack gave Maida reciprocated in doting grandmotherly bucketfuls.
I knew it was important to give Maida confidence about the ongoing security of our relationship. At one point, I faced her, held her by the shoulders, looked into her eyes, and said, ‘You need to know that now I’ve found you, I want you to be a special part of my family — a grandmother to Jack and Jade. And I promise you that I’m not going to go away. You’re stuck with me forever, okay.’ I wrapped my arms around her, and we cried again together, but I know they were tears of fulfilment and happiness.
We kept talking, and I explained the importance of growing up in Forster to my life. I told her that I’d never stopped thinking of myself as kid from the country, and she reminded me that she was one, too. I was eager to show her Forster and other key places in my life, but we were both very conscious that my mother Gwen was still living in Tuncurry in the aged-persons complex. At all times, Maida was incredibly respectful, if not deferential, towards my mother Gwen, and kept saying over and over, ‘She must be such a beautiful person, Robert.’
Maida also asked me how I’d become involved in politics, and this was where our first real point of difference came out. My mother confessed that she was a lifelong Liberal Party voter. I thought this was hilarious, and we joked about our differences. Then and there, in the gardens, we made a deal that we wouldn’t talk about politics again, and that remained our vow for the two decades we spent in each other’s lives before Maida’s death in 2012. Whenever politics came up in some way in conversation, my mother would give a little shriek and say, ‘Oh, Robert!’ and move on to another topic. The truth was, our different political allegiances never bothered me in the slightest. I loved Maida unconditionally, as my mother.
There was another side to Maida, too. Despite the trauma of her past, she was a strong and resilient woman, who had got on with her life and had a wonderful marriage to Greg. She told me stories that day about their travels together around different parts of Australia and overseas. The good times they’d shared over their many years together clearly filled her with joy. She had been a loyal and highly respected Parramatta City Council employee for almost 30 years, and she and Greg were debt-free, financially secure, and happy and fulfilled. I could tell, too, that they were humble people, who didn’t like pretentiousness, and who had lived a very modest life during the years of their marriage. I was left with the clear impression of my mother as a strong, proud, and competent woman, who had gallantly fought the sadness of the adoption, though it had inevitably left a scar on her soul.
At the end of many hours together, I again remembered Sandra’s advice that it was wise not to rush the relationship. While she hadn’t said so explicitly, the implication was that Maida and I would part company in the gardens. But after what we’d just been through, it felt like it would be too artificial for words to turn my back on my mother, and for us each to make our way home alone. So, in the late afternoon, I said, ‘Well, dearest mother, would you like a lift home? I already know where you live, after all,’ referring, of course, to my familiarity with Lansdowne Street. She laughed and willingly accepte
d the lift.
As we walked through the gardens towards Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, where I’d parked my car, I remembered the disposable camera in my back pocket, and asked a passing stranger to take a photograph of us.
And there we were, immortalised, with our arms around each other and with the harbour and the Opera House behind us in the distance. Mother and son, reunited.
When we arrived in Lansdowne Street, Maida invited me inside to meet Greg for the first time. As we walked from the car, I was nervous. I had no idea how Greg might feel about me. Would there be any underlying resentment about the disruption I’d caused to their lives by pursuing the adoption reunion?
I needn’t have worried. Greg’s manner was warm and friendly, and we shook hands enthusiastically.
‘Thank you so much for being a part of this,’ I said. ‘I know it’s a bit overwhelming, but I know things will settle down and everything will turn out fine.’
He replied in a strong, calming voice, ‘I’m sure it will.’
I was conscious that it had been a long day for my mother, so I gave her one last hug, gave Greg a big wave, said goodbye, and left. As I jumped into the car, I saw that Maida and Greg had come outside to farewell me, which had the instant effect of making me feel part of the family.
I headed up Lansdowne Street and stopped in front of number 18. I imagined myself as that little black-haired boy sitting on the verandah with my grandmother, and felt a wave of gratitude and privilege sweep over me.
Driving back to Stanwell Park, I felt uplifted and empowered, but, at the same time, I desperately wanted to know more about how my mother was feeling. I still wasn’t even close to fully understanding that.
13
Learning my birth father’s name
As the new year progressed, I felt daunted as I contemplated how I was going to deal with the ongoing emotion of this adoption reunion while also maintaining some privacy, continuing my work as a local member serving my electorate in a marginal seat, and managing my public life as the federal minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs at a time of huge public debate around the Australian government’s response to the Mabo decision. (Readers who want to know more about the turbulent politics of the time can read my book Taking a Stand, which deals with these and related issues in great detail.)
Ten Doors Down Page 12