Ten Doors Down

by Tickner, Robert;

  Sandra followed up by writing to my father on 4 July 1994, and she also enclosed a letter from me. I later retrieved her letter from my father and cringed to read the following assurance from Sandra given the context, unknown to Sandra, of my early inadvertent stalking incident:

  I would again like to take this opportunity of reinforcing that you have nothing to fear regarding contact with Robert. He is a person with respect for privacy and is aware of the issues his contact with you may hold for you and/or family. Be assured therefore that you need not fear unannounced visits and the like.

  My father’s handwriting, when I eventually saw it, was very elegant. My own dreadful script in the letter forwarded with Sandra’s must have made him severely doubt that we could be related. Once again, I forwent a salutation:

  This is probably one of the most unusual letters you will ever receive but I hope one of the most important ones. Please excuse my poor writing. I could have typed this letter, but even though my handwriting is terrible it is more personal to write than to type.

  I hope with all my heart that you will welcome my letter and understand how much I want to meet you. You need to know that this person who is your son poses no threat to you and your way of life. I am fully aware how sensitive and difficult my existence may be for you and possibly to other members of your family. You need to know from me right from the beginning that I try to be a caring and sensitive person, and in the period ahead will try to give effect to those principles.

  You also need to know right from the beginning that my wish to meet and establish a possible relationship with you is totally separate from any person you knew in your past life. I have no interest whatsoever in talking about the past. But I am a human being and you are my father and I want to meet you so very much.

  I believe that you may have had other children and I hope in time I may be able to meet them too. I have no other brothers or sisters.

  The good news is that I am modestly very confident that you will like me. Just for the record I am tall, reasonably well built, have dark hair and a very friendly personality. [In hindsight I cringe at the things I wrote.]

  I have had a most wonderful life. I grew up in a town on the North Coast of NSW (Forster) and was always very comfortable with the fact that I was adopted. My adopted mother and father gave me a great life and every opportunity that a person could wish for. My adopted father was in a range of successful small businesses and gave a lot to people in the community through his voluntary efforts teaching children to swim. My mother died only two months ago. She was wonderful.

  I am married and have two children, Jade and Jack. My wife Jody and I have been married for nearly 8 years and I became the instant father of Jade, who was then six years old. Baby Jack is now 18 months old and was the first person in the world who actually looked like me, however he has blond hair and mine is dark. He is of course your grandson and he is wonderful!

  I have worked very hard in my life and have been fortunate enough to be successful in what I have done. I was able to go to university and have a couple of law degrees and an economics degree. But I am not working as a lawyer. I have to warn you that my job has made me somewhat of a public figure in the community. I hope that when you do find out my name, you will form your own judgments about me, not from what you read or see but from meeting me and knowing me. I am modestly proud of what I have done in my life and what I stand for, however the public me is not the real me!

  I have deliberately not contacted you directly because I recognise the sensitive nature of the issues and the need to proceed cautiously. For this reason I have approached Sandra of the Family Reunion section of the Adoptions Branch of the State Department of Community Services. I know Sandra to be a very caring person and I am confident that she will be very sensitive in making contact with you.

  I should tell you about an incredible coincidence. I know very little about your past life but was told the general area where you grew up — Gymea. I immediately thought of a trusted personal friend in the area who would be about your age and asked her if she knew your name, without telling her why I wanted to know. My friend told me she knew you when she was growing up. I asked her if she had a photograph of you, and she found one of a big group of people taken at Stanwell Park, which is the town where I now live. The coincidence is even more remarkable because in this big group of people you have your hand on my friend’s shoulder and that of another young girl. [In fact, the other person whose shoulder my father was touching was a young man.] However the photograph doesn’t help me much because it is so tiny that your face isn’t clear even with the use of a magnifying glass. But what an unbelievable coincidence!

  To write to you takes a bit of courage on my part. It may well take a bit of courage on your part to take a step into the unknown to meet me. But don’t worry, all will be well. After all, I am your son.

  I would like to conclude my letter by stressing that I am a very down to earth person. I am very ‘together’ in my life and have no hang-ups of any kind about the circumstances of my birth and my adoption.

  I know this must be a big development in your life. It is certainly a big development in my life, and probably like you I am of course a bit nervous about it all. However I feel confident that it will work out for the best, and I hope you feel the same.

  Respectfully yours and warmest of personal regards,

  Robert

  I didn’t know when I wrote this letter about a fundamental problem facing a possible reunion with my father. I subsequently learnt from Sandra that my father had never mentioned to his devoted wife, Lola, nor to my brothers and sisters, who then ranged in age from 24 to 33, that he had fathered a child in his mid-twenties. In many families, this may be less of an issue, but in the case of my father, there was a risk it would affect his family’s perceptions of his character and personality. My father and Lola had been married for over 30 years, and they were both of a strong Christian faith and very caring and loving people. My father was seen by the family as someone of outstanding integrity: a devoted husband and father, who had lived a very thoughtful and ethical life. But, despite this, he had kept an enormous and morally complicated secret from the people he loved the most in the world. Understandably, he was concerned about how they would react to the shock of that revelation.

  Sandra told me that my father was determined to sort out these things before we met. I just had to wait for him to share the shocking news with his family and, after all that had happened, to determine when he was ready to meet me — if indeed he was still prepared to do so. The wait was excruciating, and I started to worry more and more about any hurt to others my arrival on the scene might be causing.

  To this day, I have no knowledge of what happened behind the scenes when my father told Lola and my brothers and sisters about my existence, nor of what their first reactions were. I guess I don’t want to know. But it would have been very natural if there were tears and deep shock. I suspect there must have been some hurt and even anger directed towards me, too; they would be less than human if this was not the case. Despite our closeness now, that has, of course, always been their private business with my father, and I have always respected that.

  In the interim, my father replied to my scribbly note with a beautiful handwritten letter. It was warm and friendly, and contained a photograph taken at Port Arthur in Tasmania some years previously. He looked very different from the blur in the old picture of him with Hazel, although his features were still not completely clear in this new photograph.

  My father let me know how pleased he was that I’d grown up in happy circumstances and had had a satisfying life. He went on to say,

  … the strangest coincidence is that I have always thought of you — at least in earlier years — as ‘Wee Robbie’ without really knowing your name. I still have a vision of you, having nursed you as a babe at the hospital where you were born, looking more advanced than you
were at the time. My sister Dulcie, then a nurse, was with me at the time. So you can understand then in no small measure that not only are you a human being as you say, but a very special one, and my son.

  I felt very connected to him reading these heartfelt words and the emotion within them. But I was shocked to read that my father had held me as a baby in the hospital. I had never been told this by my mother.

  I was intrigued and surprised by what I read next:

  … the assurances made to me after you were born about your prospects for the future were well founded. Forgive me for talking about the past in this way, but I do not think I should dwell on it as you have rightly said.

  My father’s letter made clear that he looked forward to meeting me soon, and went on to talk about Lola’s reaction:

  … although Lola knew nothing about us until a week ago she has been magnificent in her attitude and I value her understanding and support as it is an important phase in our lives. She is also most involved and is looking forward to meeting with you all. I am a lucky man.

  He continued:

  I should tell you a little of myself. Born at Marrickville, where we lived with my grandmother for five years, and then to Chatswood where I went to school for five years, thence to Gymea where we had a poultry farm. My mother worked hard at undertaking what my father could not do until he retired at 65 from the railway. I milked a cow, fed chooks before leaving for school, and used a single furrowed plough for growing green feed and vegetables. I used to transport 30 dozen eggs on the handlebars of my bike to the shop at Gymea Bay owned by Les Johnson. [This was the same Les Johnson who was my predecessor as local member in the federal seat of Hughes.]

  I served an electrical apprenticeship with the Sutherland Shire Council [a stone’s throw from my electorate office in Sutherland] and these skills enabled me to become the youngest electrical installation inspector in NSW when I got to Orange.

  So, there was a connection with electricity, I thought, remembering what my mother Gwen had told me all those years ago as a small boy.

  My father said that in Orange he had lived in the single man’s flat at the fire station, and that he had been very involved in many community-based organisations in the town. Given my own background before politics, I was intrigued to read that he had begun legal studies as a young man, but was forced to suspend them when he moved overseas to take a job running the Honiara power supply in the Solomon Islands. He had taken up these studies again in his retirement. Without having any idea yet what I did for a living, my father also recounted that his New Zealand cousins had told him that ‘our ancestors for about 600 years have been farmers, doctors and lawyers as well as politicians’. I was delighted to see that I was mentioned twice in these categorisations.

  He mentioned that despite being a non-smoker, asthma and chronic airways disease had caused him to retire from his later work in the insurance business. My own lungs had never been strong, and I wondered what my future might hold in this regard. I decided to try to get back to regular swimming when I could.

  I was especially excited when I saw that my father had revealed the first substantive information about my siblings, Jeanette, Kathryn, Neil, and Craig, and something about their family circumstances.

  Finally, I was pleased to read his reassurance that he wouldn’t be deterred by any public image I might have:

  You should rest assured, Robert, that I would not make judgements of you, public image or otherwise. I am confident (a gut feeling if you like) that you will be a representation of your grandfather Archie (Archibald) who was admired and respected by all who knew him, diligent and sincere.

  I am pleased with all the thoughts that you expressed in your letter and I relate to them all and pray that all will move steadily and directly to that focal point of unity and happiness continuing.

  Any adopted person getting a letter like this from their birth father would have to feel they’d won the lottery, and indeed I did.

  My next letter to my father contained more personal information about myself, my family, and my job, to be passed on by Sandra when she believed the time was right. I also enclosed some photographs that showed various snippets of my life, mostly of a family nature:

  Your letter was just wonderful. I don’t think I could have wished for more. The fact that you held me as a baby is just extraordinary and so special.

  I thought it very important to reach out to Lola, too, and to express my deep appreciation for her support for the reunion process. She could have responded so very differently, but clearly had thought things through deeply and had come to a point of acceptance and resolution. I am sure this was helped by the fact that her sister had adopted children, which meant the issues were not unknown to her.

  I would like to say to Lola how much I appreciate her warmth and understanding and that I will never let her down in my friendship. I am confident that she too will enjoy what lies ahead. But for now, good on her for being so supportive!

  Much later, Lola told me, tongue in cheek, and with a laugh, that if the events of my birth had occurred during the 30 years or so she and my father were together, things might have been very different. I found her wisdom and graciousness to be another uplifting aspect of the adoption reunion process.

  I expressed my delight at finding out I had brothers and sisters, and let my father know what a big deal this was for me:

  I never thought that would happen to me. They seem a fine bunch, but I guess it will take a while to work it all through. But for them too, I am no threat.

  I hoped that one day my siblings might get to read this letter and my positive message of reassurance.

  My father replied to my letter two weeks later, again through Sandra. This correspondence was very much a trust-building process, expertly managed by Sandra, to move step by step towards a reunion, and hopefully to build strong foundations for a future relationship.

  My father had been very moved by my letter and confided that it was ‘all overwhelming’ for him. He also acknowledged my heartfelt feelings directed to Lola and confirmed that her support meant a great deal to him. ‘I do not know how I would fare otherwise,’ he confessed.

  Now knowing my identity and my ministerial role, he made an astonishing admission:

  … in one of my earlier letters, Lola had suggested that we omit to mention Craig’s chosen career in the police service, because if you were on the ‘other side of the tracks’ it could cause problems.

  I thought this was a fantastic revelation, and showed that they had wanted to progress the reunion even if I were a well-known criminal! I also learnt that my father and Lola had been engaged in their own version of stalking to try to find out who with a public profile lived in Stanwell Park, which was the only detail they had about me at that time. They hadn’t managed to work it out, and of course there was no internet for them to access in those years.

  I had already discovered that my father grew up knowing Les Johnson, my predecessor in the seat of Hughes, but my father now mentioned that just prior to our contact, he’d been in the Sutherland Shire and spent some time with Les. My father had been visiting the Shire to attend the funeral of a well-known local identity (whom I also knew well). The funeral had been held only a few blocks from my electorate office.

  In this letter, my father also mentioned that he hadn’t yet told my siblings of my existence. I sensed some trepidation in him about the challenges this might involve. He and Lola wanted to speak to each of my brothers and sisters face to face, but they wanted to tell my sister Kath first, as she was living away from the rest of the family in Brisbane. They were scheduled to visit her in November, which was some four months away. I was a little worried that such a long delay in telling them might compound the shock, but of course I didn’t consider offering a view on such matters. I could only hope that everything would be handled with great compassion and sensitivity — and I expected it
would be from all that I had read from my father so far.

  I received one further letter from my father in July. Sandra faxed it to my office in Canberra while I was overseas at a meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which was in the course of preparing a draft declaration on Indigenous rights. In the letter, my father said that Lola had seen the photographs I’d sent with my letter and had been ‘amazed at your likeness to Neil at his graduation in photographs she had just received from him’. In a later letter, after I arrived back from overseas, he mentioned an approaching family ‘special occasion’ to celebrate Neil’s engagement to his future wife, Nereda. Craig, Jeanette, and Kath were also excited about the event, and my father wrote, ‘It always has been a close, caring family and hopefully it will continue of “pentagonal” proportions in the foreseeable future.’

  I was deeply touched that he considered me to be the final side of the pentagon, but it was a daunting prospect, too. Depending on the response of my siblings, I might not be welcomed into the family as we hoped.

  17

  Meeting my birth father, brothers, and sisters

  A week after this letter, in August 1994, I received the momentous news from Sandra that my father was ready to meet with me.

  When I’d met my mother for the first time, we’d chosen a Sydney landmark as our meeting place, so I thought it fitting to choose another landmark place to meet my father. I proposed the Pyrmont Bridge, as I had a long history with it. I was one of the campaigners against its proposed demolition when I was a city councillor back in the early 1980s. Opened in 1902, the bridge is a Sydney icon of sorts, linking the business district with the adjacent suburb of Pyrmont. It passes over Cockle Bay, a small horseshoe-shaped bay that is now part of the Darling Harbour entertainment area. A pedestrian and cycle bridge these days, it was once used by motor traffic and had a swing span that would rotate to allow boat traffic to pass.