Abstract
Genetic Bewilderment was one of the many terms I came across after I had put my name down for my information in Victoria in 1984 and began reading about adoption and what it means to those of us who actually lived this experience. My experience of being adopted in 1953, similar to the many other adoptees of that time, meant we lived in a cloak of secrecy. This was perpetrated by the State. They closed our records, and the folks that adopted us, were encouraged not to tell anything but us being, "their children. "

 

GENEALOGICAL BEWILDERMENT

 

For 31 years, I went along with this, because I had no choice. Then, when I chose to reconnect with my origins, I did so, with little knowledge of what it would all mean for us. When I connected with my family of origin, my elder sister immediately sent me some photographs. After observing these images, I had the experience of "clunk" and for the first time I have a picture in my head, of what "I" look like. So the journey of discovery and the knowledge about nature vs nurture, commenced.

 

Thank goodness we are all together here, talking about the grief and effects of severing the bonds between mother and child. Thank you Di, whom I know to be a brave soul, Lily and everybody else who helped to get us all here for these two days.

 

Oz women have a proud tradition of leading the world in giving we women the rights and opportunities to follow our own dreams. The Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia, is an example of how a small group got together in Melbourne back in the mid-nineteen sixties and subsequently, NMAA grew to a huge grass-roots organisation dedicated to taking back the women's business of breast-feeding from the male-dominated medical establishment, that was convincing us, en mass to feed our new-born infants with their artificial products. These women started something that became a world-wide groundswell of women taking back what is rightfully theirs. So here is to these two days being the beginning of another swell of peoples’ rights being respected.

 

Australia, as we know it, was founded on falsity and the dispossession of people. Firstly the whole concept of "Terra Nullius," or nobody here, gave the colonisers the insolence to subjugate Indigenous peoples lives. Their existence was at the colonisers’ whim. This is akin to closed/secretive adoption in my opinion. You exist only as 'the states records' indicate and to question that was difficult, if not impossible, and if you did, you probably got labelled with some form of insanity.

 

My friend Joyce, a wise elder women I know told me the story of how South Australia women were the second in the world to achieve the right to vote. My maternal forebears, our sisters from Aetearroa, were the first. Apparently, the story goes, the business of colonising South Australia was battling. The Kaurna people having heard the stories of the 'grinkaries' or white folks, from other places departed to the safety of the hills. So when this anticipated source of labour wasn't available the answer was to empty orphanages back home and send them to the province as domestic and farm labour. There was no money, Adelaide was a busy sea-port and soon there were many young women and their children  with no means of support. The women of the colony got together and organised  orphanages.  As they were banded together they then succesfully went for the right to vote.

 

Australia was quick to take up the concept of "legal Adoption" back in the twenties. I was born in South Melbourne in 1953, during the 'closed/secretive' era. In the Bringing Them Home enquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children published in 1997 it states this secrecy was "partly in deference to the desire of the adoptive parent's to present the child as their own and partly because of the stigma of illegitimacy which attached to adopted children." The second part of that statement makes absolute no sense to me because living in a small community meant that unless the adoptive/folks moved, most others in the community knew of your status, even if you didn't. In my experience, the most common way to find out one's adoptive status was to be told in the school yard or by other members of your adoptive family.

 

When I am talking about adoption and what this institution has imposed upon me and therefore upon my children and grandchild, I find it impossible to depersonalise my conversation. This means I can only understand what the effects of adoption have been for me, having lived within the walls of adopteedom since my teen-age mother Coral signed the consent for adoption when I was two weeks of age.

 

Despite that I realised my adoptive status at a very early age, it was a non-topic of conversation the entire time I was growing up and even throughout my adulthood. This almost total avoidance of the subject, being adopted, was perpetrated on me by the threat "You'll be the death of your mother" which was directed at me if I "upset"  my adoptive mother,  by ever asking anything about my origins. This ploy worked because having experienced the loss of my mother, the thought of losing another one terrified me into compliance. So, being adopted was something that I just accepted and adapted to. This conspiracy of silence also extended way beyond my adoptive family. For example, when I was sixteen, I attempted suicide. The trigger for this attempt was a rejection by a friend due to my adoptive status. I saw a psychiatrist for a year at this time. A couple of years ago I was curious to have a look at my mental health history and was surprised to find out that 'adoption' was not mentioned in that psychiatrist's report back to our family GP.

 

During my last pregnancy in 1984, the enormity of having no idea of any information about my genealogy finally overwhelmed me. Victoria was the first state in Australia to open their sealed adoption records I immediately applied for my information. Fortunately Victoria didn't put any impediments in the way of adult adoptees and their birth/family records. This contrasts with most other states, which have veto provisions in their legislation that still means some adult adoptees don't necessarily have an unalienable right to their original birth certificates and information re their family of origin.

 

I first came across the term Genealogical Bewilderment in my readings whilst searching for my family of origin. Betty Jean Lifton, an adoptee from the US of A in her wonderfully powerful  book "lost & Found, "attributes the term to E. Wellisch, a British psychiatrist, in an article entitled "Children without Genealogy--A problem of adoption" published in Mental Health in 1952.

 

In questioning whether it matters if a child has such knowledge, it should be remembered that most people accept their own genealogy as a matter of fact, and are no more aware of it than one is of one's own shadow or mirror image.

 

Expanding this analogy, Wellisch pointed out that the shadow and mirror image of a person have considerable psychological significance in that they are extensions of the body image.

 

Finally in 1990 I tracked down my family of origin to discover my mother was long deceased, but I had a father (my parents were married when I was relinquished) and 2 sisters and a brother with the same parents in common and 2 sisters and a brother with the same father in common. They all lived on the other side of the country to me.  Despite the fact that they had no prior knowledge of my existence my siblings where almost as excited as I was about the prospect of meeting and getting to know each other.  My elder sister, immediately on talking to me on the phone the first time sent me some photographs of family members. One of them was a picture taken of our mother and father standing together. My mother we estimate was around 16 in the photo. I was over the moon to finally gaze upon pictorial evidence of my genetic forebears. Soon after receiving these photographs, I was pondering on what all of this meant to me. I can remember driving over the bridge, across the mighty Murray river where we were living at that time, when I, quite literally felt a "clunk" in my brain and then suddenly I was aware that I now had a picture in my head of what I looked like.

 

This self image was something that I had lacked before this fateful day, when I was aged 37. When I have spoken of this experience, a lot of people have looked perplexed and asked me what I meant. The best way to describe it is to say that if I were looking at photographs of myself, I would feel as though I was looking at somebody else. Another example is if I was walking down the street pushing a stroller and caught a reflection in a window I would only recognise that it was me by recognising what clothing I had on or by the stroller I was pushing.

 

I was fortunate in meeting a number of close relatives on reunion, so I had plenty of opportunity to discover the genetic connections. When I reconnected with my kin I expected to find similarities in physical features, etc. but what caught me by surprise was seeing some of my behaviours reflected back at me. For example, one of the characteristics that seem strong amongst those genetically connected to me is the putting things in order trait that we all share. This seems to be related to our anxiety levels. Another surprise for me was the hair-pulling trait that my younger sister and I share. This twirling of my hair mannerism used to drive my adoptive mum mad and she was constantly on my case about it. It made me laugh to observe exactly the same trait in my sister. There was also a strange finger sucking pattern that 3 out of 4 of we, full siblings, shared as infants. So I learnt that many of my mannerisms that I believed were peculiar to myself where in fact part of my genetic make-up.

 

More and more as I mature, I recognise what the state of adopteedom means to me. I now understand what a profound thing it is to sever a child away from those genetically connected to them. After I reunited with my family of origin in 1990, I would proudly tell my stories to anyone who gave me an ear. As I began to identify with my Maori as well as my Irish roots I found myself with many more friends with mixed Indigenous origins. I then experienced severe victimization from authority for the first time in my life. Suddenly, I felt as though there were parrallel universes that coexisted and which one you are in depends on your genealogy and culture.

 

 I would like to finish today with this dedication to her family from Sally Morgan in her amazing book "My Place" A story that every Australian should read.

 

"How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as a whole people. We never would have known our place."

 

REFERENCES:

 

Lifton Betty Jean,Lost and Found, Harper & Rowe, NY 1988

 

Morgan Sally, My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, WA, 1987

 

Bringing Them Home, HREOC Canberra 1997