Reconciling with oneself: Gordon Matthews' An Australian Son

Gordon Matthews' memoir, An Australian Son, is the story of a darkskinned youth adopted at birth into a white middle-class Melbourne family. Born in 1952, as the White Australia Policy was beginning to be dismantled, Matthews endured years of confusion about his origins and identity. At university, a sympathetic white lecturer encouraged the young Gordon to apply for a Commonwealth Aboriginal study grant, and consequently Matthews began to identify as Aboriginal. In the 1970s, Matthews took up opportunities available to him as an Indigenous Australian, and began an impressive career as the "first Aboriginal" diplomat. When, in his mid-thirties, he began searching for his biological parents in order to verify his Aboriginality, he dis - covered that his father was, in fact, a Sri Lankan man who had been studying in Sydney during the 1950s. His father had subsequently married his white biological mother and Matthews discovered he had three siblings. The remaining part of his memoir is a poignant and at times harrowing portrayal of the anguished process of meeting his new birth family and his simultaneous disidentification with Aboriginality.