Challenging adoption narratives : Adult adoptees write remembrance – Four Australian case studies

This chapter is a collaboration between three Australians who were separated and removed from their mothers at birth and adopted under Australia’s closed-records adoption system. Now formally recognized as a forced adoption system, for the purposes of this chapter, closed-records adoption refers to the twentieth century practice of taking babies away from their mothers immediately after birth, because their parents were not married, delivering them into the homes of adoptive parents as soon as possible, obtaining an adoption order and issuing a replacement birth certificate to the adoptive parents, and upholding the then life-long legal prohibition against adopted people accessing their origin information. The authors come from professional backgrounds in literature and law, psychology, and theatre, providing a multidisciplinary, insiders’ perspective on the responses provided to a qualitative survey developed to inform the clinical treatment of adopted adolescents and young adults. These responses were provided in writing by four Australians who were also adopted under the closed-records system. It was not surprising to the authors that they were older Australians: they know from their own experience that the very nature of being adopted entails an acute restraint on personal expression which may or may not diminish with age. For this reason, the respondees were asked to “write their remembrance”: to tailor their written responses to the survey as a remembering of the impact of adoption on their adolescent and young adults selves, on the understanding that interdisciplinary collaboration between writing and clinical research communities will create an important fusion of two discourse communities.