Mei-Fen Kuo - The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption

THE MARKET IN BABIES

THE MARKET IN BABIES

STORIES OF AUSTRALIAN ADOPTION

Marian Quartly, Shurlee Swain, Denise Cuthbert

With Kay Dreyfus and Margaret Taft

Copyright 2013 Marian Quartly, Shurlee Swain, Denise Cuthbert All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australias Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher.

Monash University Publishing

Building 4, Monash University

Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia

www.publishing.monash.edu

Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought.

Monash University Publishing titles pass through a rigorous process of independent peer review.

www.publishing.monash.edu/books/mb-9781921867866.html

Series: Australian History

Design: Les Thomas

Cover photograph Marcin Smolarek / 123RF.

Frontispiece Jan Kashin, The Warrior Princess (2004). Reproduced with permission of the artist.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A NOTE ON THE AUTHORS

Marian Quartly holds the position of Professor Emerita at Monash Universitys School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. She has published for many years in the area of Australian history, with special reference to the history of the family and gender relations. Her current research concerns are the history of womens activism and the history of family in late twentieth century Australia.

Shurlee Swain is a Professor at the Australian Catholic University. She has published widely in the history of women and children, with a particular interest in the impact of welfare on individual lives. Her publications in this area include Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (1996), Confronting Cruelty (2002), Child, Nation, Race and Empire (2010), and Born in Hope: A History of the Early Years of the Family Court of Australia (2012). Currently Professor Swain is the historian chief investigator on the National Find & Connect Web Resource project.

Denise Cuthbert is currently Dean of the School of Graduate Research at RMIT. She has a long-standing interest in adoption and family formation and has published on the experiences of non-Aboriginal women who adopted and fostered Aboriginal children. In her recent work on the history of adoption in Australia, Denise has published widely on the politics and philosophy of adoption policy. In 2009 she co-edited with Ceridwen Spark Other Peoples Children: Adoption in Australia (Melbourne: Scholarly Publishing).

A NOTE ON THE USE OF TERMS

The language of adoption is a fiercely contested area. Mothers separated from their children by adoption reject all the terms that have been used to describe them: biological mother, relinquishing mother, natural mother, birth mother. They want to be known only as mothers; anything else denies the reality of their relationship to the children they bore.

Women who adopted children complain in their turn about being called adoptive mothers. They feel that they have been mothers to those children in the fullest possible sense, and that the term adoptive mother diminishes them.

Adoptees are indignant when they are referred to as children. They are mostly adults, well on in years, and determined to be in charge of their own lives.

In writing this book we have not used these offensive terms, except in cases where we are directly quoting the words of our historical actors. We apologise if this causes any distress to our readers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the summation of five years of research, and we have had a lot of help along the way. The Australian Research Council provided the Discovery Grant that has been the projects life-blood. The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia gave support for a workshop on the policy implications of our research.

Kate Murphy, Kathy Lothian, Nell Musgrove, Margaret Taft and Kay Dreyfus have all given invaluable assistance as research fellows. Amy Pollards PhD research has enlightened us about the movement for adoption reform. A number of people have helped us with particular projects, both as researchers and as organisers; these have included Jill Cox, Ana Kailis, Sally Newman, Sarah Pinto, Ceridwen Spark, and Sam Cavarra and his team from the Victorian Department of Human Services. Our work has also been enriched by collaborations and assistance from other adoption researchers, including Karen Balcom, Joshua Forkert, Patricia Fronek, Jessica Walton and Indigo Willing. Oral historians who have collected adoption stories for us include Jeannine Baker, Patricia Curthoys, Karen Downing, Rosemary Francis, Jennifer Hamilton-McKenzie, Naomi Parry, Pauline Payne, and Dominic Golding who did all the interviews of intercountry adoptees.

Building and maintaining the History of Adoption website has involved the efforts of a wide range of IT experts from Monash University. We thank especially Anthony Beitz and Nicholas McPhee from the Monash e-Research Centre, and Joanne Sullivan from the Arts Online Presence Team, without whom the project could not have been carried through. Keeping the project ticking over financially was made possible through the efforts of Tommy Fung and Alice Davies at Monash. At ACU our thanks go to colleagues in the School of Arts and Sciences (Victoria), and in particular to Sylvia Herlihy, whose quiet efficiency ensured that this collaborative project went smoothly.