Conflict in History: The Australian Historical Association 33rd Annual Conference. Stream: ... My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during.
Conflict in History: The Australian Historical Association 33rd Annual Conference Stream: Australian Women’s History Network Symposium ‘Paper Work’
! Conflict begetting conflict: secrets, trauma, and the writing of memoir
! [A note: an apology, for the language of adoption is fraught. Many mothers involved find the terms ‘adoptive’, ‘birth’, ‘natural’, ‘biological’, etc, offensive as they regard themselves as mothers without any qualifier. However, in my writing about my experience, I need to both distinguish about whom I am speaking, and acknowledge the fact that I have two mothers (and two fathers). So, for the moment, I use the terms ‘adoptive’ and ‘birth’ to perform these functions. ]
! My doctoral research is in creative writing; I am writing a memoir about living with my adoptive parents and an exegesis on adoptee memoir as testimony literature. I am writing the memoir to bear witness to the experiences of not only myself as a late discovery adoptee, but also my adoptive parents: war, infertility, mental and physical illness, poverty, dislocation and dis-ease. As my paper will show, they both had lives filled with sorrows and difficulties, much of which was unknown to me until after the death of my mother. In a more constrained way, it is also a testimony to the experience of my birth mother, who would not have given me up for adoption if circumstances (personal, familial, and societal) had been different. I am telling a personal history that touches on the larger history of warfare and its aftermath, and which has been discovered through long forgotten ‘paper work’.
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As an adoptee, particular paper work has featured strongly in my story. I have two birth certificates, the one that records my adoptive parents as my parents with no reference to my adoption, and the original one that has my birth mother’s name, age, and place of birth as well as the name she gave me. But papers in various forms came to have enormous significance as I searched for more details about my parents’ lives.
! My adoptive parents were both born in England during World War One. They married in September 1939. My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during World War Two, and suffered physical and psychological injuries. He was eventually invalided out of the air force, and the effects of his experience remained with him for the rest of his life. He did speak of his war service from time to time, in both positive and negative light. But the memories of friends killed in bombing missions were uppermost: persistent and scarifying.
! I was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1965, and my birth mother, unsupported by either my birth father or her own family, was forced to put me up for adoption. Why were my adoptive parents suddenly living in New Zealand? One of the pieces of paper work that I discovered was an official document describing my father as a ‘Registered Disabled Person’ in 1958 in England. There are letters from him to my mother in the 1950s that seem to be from a hospital in which he was receiving longterm treatment. Knowing that my parents were in New Zealand by the early to mid-1960s leads me to wonder if he wanted to get away from this label and try for a different life in a new country. In an interesting twist, my adoptive father and birth !2
mother worked in the same organisation, and he approached her when he learned of her situation. Arrangements for my placement had already been made, but my adoptive father won over my birth mother.
! My memories of where exactly we lived in any one year and what my father was doing at any one time are sparse and vague. My QANTAS flight record book shows we criss-crossed between New Zealand, England, and Australia in those first few years, until finally settling for good in Queensland from 1974, and becoming Australian citizens in 1977. But by that time, I had attended eight different primary schools over those three countries, my father had gone bankrupt, my mother had endured major surgery, and we had been living in a caravan on the Gold Coast for three years.
! As I grew up, started interacting with the outside world, and developing my own opinions, my adoptive seemed to grow more hostile and distrustful than before. He seemed to have always suffered regular bouts of depression and changing mood, was generally anxious, paranoid, sleepless, prone to raging headaches and abdominal pains, and had difficulty keeping his balance. Combining this with his difficult, controlling personality led to deeply disturbing behaviour and a fraught family life. I felt as if I were on notice, that if I did not do the right thing—whatever that was— then terrible chaos would ensue. Most days I would wake wondering what sort of mood my father would be in, and whether it would be my mother or myself who would be blamed for that mood. My father often let it be known that my dissenting !3
behaviour made him ill, and even said to me once that my disagreements with him were worse than the bombs that had dropped around him during the war.
! When I was thirteen, my father told me I would be a doctor. This was not a hope, but an instruction. My mother was not keen on the idea, and would have preferred me to work in a bank. I loved languages and literature. My father’s will, however, was not to be challenged. The years of study, at high school then university, were grinding. I did not emerge from the medical degree unscathed. Although I did what my father instructed me to do, it seemed not to be enough. I had to straddle the demands of the world with the demands of my family; I had to become an adult and a doctor while maintaining a childlike relationship with my parents. I believed for a long time that I was a failure, that this inability to do what was required of me by medicine, adulthood, and parents was my fault.
! In December 1988, towards the end of the then six year medical degree, and in the middle of a supplementary term in obstetrics and gynaecology, I told my parents that I could no longer live with them in such conflict. My father and I had been fighting with each other for years. My mental health had declined—sometimes to the point of being suicidal—but I spoke to no one about this. I had arranged to live in the medical students’ quarters at the hospital to finish my course before I started internship. My father’s response was to tell me, ‘I suppose you know you were adopted’.
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I had not known I was adopted, but immediately, in that life-shifting moment, I knew it was true. Dozens of odd events and conversations fell into place in one gigantic click. Suddenly, not only did I have the parents who sat in front of me, but I had another set, somewhere else. And this information had been kept a secret from me for twenty-three years.
! I left home, left medicine after four months, worked, studied, and suffered mental ill health for many years. In 2001, my adoptive mother died, and my partner and I drove down to the Gold Coast to be with my adoptive father. Although I had kept in touch with my mother by letter, I had not seen my parents for several years, and the wounds that caused that estrangement were quickly reopened. But over the weeks and months that followed, I decided to call a truce with my father because there was no one else to look after him. He had alienated or ignored for years nearly everyone in the family, who all lived interstate or overseas; he had no friends, and saw few people except his gardener, the Blue Nurses, and his GP.
! My father’s health deteriorated over the next few months, and, after a bone-fracturing fall, he moved into a nursing home. I embarked upon a discovery of the lives of my parents through hidden and scattered and incomplete paper work: letters in particular, but also photographs, scraps of note paper, diaries, old calendars, postcards, recipes, ration cards, receipts.
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The aftermath of my adoptive mother’s death was the discovery of many secrets within my parents’ lives, things not spoken, silences maintained. I discovered that it was not my fault that my adoptive father behaved the way he did, that he had behaved that way for many years before I was born. I discovered that my adoptive mother had left behind another world when she followed my father to Australia, and that she hid great sorrow and pain. I found nothing about my adoption anywhere in their house, no documents, no letters, no diaries from 1965, nothing. But there were no photographs of us as a family on display, either, and no photographs of any family members at all. It was as if we were all wiped from memory.
! One day, during our cleaning out of my parents’ home, I noticed an embroidered bag on a single bed in the large spare room at the back of the house. The bag was made from pale pink cotton with blue, green, and black embroidery in a geometric design on the front flap, simple and stark. This was perhaps something she made when she was a child, because there are initials embroidered onto the inner pocket: L. J. R., with the J reversed. These were my maternal grandmother’s initials, Lilian Jane Roberts.
! Two letters were inside, one from someone I did not know to my mother, the other from my paternal grandmother to my father. This second letter had, on its envelope, the date 2 July 1956. The paper was pale blue, the writing in a round, cursive hand, upright, difficult to decipher in places. It began,
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‘I saw the petty officer Sat[urday] and what he told me [made me] very distressed, said you were an extremely charming man when he first met you, but found you were [the] most selfish and dissembling [?] man he had ever met. I asked how Lilian was, he heard she had been very ill and was not surprised as she was a slave in all weathers even bitter cold.’
! The letter continues in this vein, a mother’s embarrassment and distress at the behaviour of her son. The petty officer was describing a trip on the much-loved motorboat of my parents, which they had named Cressida. Ironically, one of the most joyous photographs I have of my parents is of them on the deck of this boat, laughing together, long before I was born.
! Like the petty officer, people who had first met my adoptive father, or knew him only on a superficial level, often commented how charming he was, how funny, what a nice man, right into his old age. When I read the words of my paternal grandmother, I knew I had found a piece of my parents’ past that validated my own experience. It was a startling moment, this finding of a counter-story. It told me that the behaviour I had seen was real, and that it was not all my fault. Some hurt runs long and deep.
! That letter had survived five decades through multiple changes of houses and countries. But more to the point, it had survived my father, who liked to throw things out. He wanted to throw aspects of his past away; he threw out or shredded countless documents after my mother’s death. But I also remember him years before throwing out a chocolate box that my mother had kept to store her buttons, a precious item, if !7
only cardboard, because her mother had given it to her. Curiously, he not only threw things out but altered facts. On a handwritten draft of a resume from decades ago I noticed that he put his date of birth forward by seven years. He told people that it was unknown which way around his first and second names should be, and even that my mother’s birth date was uncertain. None of these were debatable according to the official documents. I wonder if he preferred to be slippery, to not be able to be pinned down, to remain on the borders, able to disappear at any time, to reinvent himself.
! Perhaps he never read the letter from his mother in 1956, or even knew of its existence; maybe my mother kept it from him. But there it was, hidden in plain sight, almost as if it were put there for me to find.
! There was another item of paper work that was equally revealing, if more sorrowful. This was a letter I found amongst my adoptive mother’s carefully preserved belongings, along with her diaries from the 1940s, letters from a previous boyfriend, old and fading photographs of pets and stuffed toys sitting together, and dozens of letters from her mother. It began ‘Dear Dinkie’, which was my mother’s family nickname, and was dated 4 August 1964. It was from her father, who had emigrated to Western Australia after separating from my maternal grandmother sometime in the 1920s. Apparently my maternal uncle followed his father to Australia at some point, and subsequently never saw his mother again because she refused all further contact.
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The letter, on plain, ruled notepaper, notes my maternal grandfather’s ‘happy surprise’ at receiving a letter from my mother, and laments her recent bout of ill health. He asks her for a photo of herself and her husband, as ‘it is over forty years since I last saw you’. Forty years? This piece of information, sitting in the middle of the short but affectionate missive, shocked me. Was this why the only thing she said to me on that life-changing day of adoption revelation was, ‘Are you really going to leave before Christmas?’ My mother hardly ever spoke of her father, and only rarely mentioned the divorce. What heartbreak lay here, in this letter?
! Or was I, am I, overlaying my own interpretation and forgetting that there may have been no heartbreak at all? That my mother and grandmother may have felt the same way about their father and husband respectively? I had little evidence for my mother’s feelings, only her father’s words on a piece of ordinary paper.
! Writing my memoir has involved a heavy reliance on my fallible memory and the scraps of information gleaned from the house of my parents, the letters and other items that were interleaved with manchester in a large carved cedarwood chest, or left on the pillows of unslept-in beds, or in shoeboxes. Snippets of lore from adoptive family members have filled in some details about those long dead, such as the formidable, manipulative personality of my paternal grandmother.
! Maybe an event from my very early life in New Zealand was a prediction of the years to come. My first memory is of standing up in a cot and looking out to the sliding !9
glass doors to see my father swaying back and forth with the ground. My mother told me many years later that there had been a mirror hanging over that cot, and she raced to remove it as the earthquake began. Twenty years on, another quake of a different nature threw me off balance. My memoir is an attempt to understand the forces underlying that second upheaval, the natures of my parents, and the secrets they held for so long.
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