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| Me in Belgrade 1985 |
According to the zeitgeist, you have a baby because you love
them. You’re gay, or trans, or cis, or whatever you are, but love is what
matters.
Okay. The zeitgeist is BS. I am 63 and I have struggled
with identity my whole life. You need to know where you come from and you need
photos. No child should be conceived without access to photos of their
relatives. I didn’t see photos of my relatives until I was 50, but they
absolutely opened my world. Here was my hair, my height, my eyes, my whole
belonging.
So you might say, my child is happy without photos. But
life is long. You don’t give birth to a baby, you give birth to a person and
it is that person who will ultimately decide the rights or wrongs of the matter,
not you. Unfortunately, when I was born in 1960, the government made the choice
that you were a new person without access to your old family. No photos. It was
a social experiment and it failed.
I am an example of why.
I was adopted into a colonial Australian family of English
origins, although I’m not English. (About three sixteenths and even two
sixteenths of that, my aunt told me, considered themselves Irish. So, we’re
down to one sixteenth.)
I cannot be what anyone wants
me to be. I have to be myself.
When you’re a child, you do as you’re told. I grew up on
English literature, English history, English war stories, English politics, English movies. When
I was in kindergarten, we celebrated Empire Day. I read the English novels and
poems my mother gave me.
When I was 29, my adoptive father died. My adoptive Mum died when I was 42. The day after her funeral, I met my biological sisters, having met my brother earlier that year.
From that day, everything changed.
As the years went on, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed
the English authors Mum had enjoyed. I discovered the truth about English history
and English war stories, not the sanitised versions. After marriage to my half Italian
husband when I was 31, my tastes began to alter radically.
Now, I really loved my Mum. I loved her family history in the
Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Once she died and my new family began
talking about their European roots (which were my roots because we had the same
parents) the tug-of-war between the old and the new nearly tore me apart. With
a husband and two small children to look after, daily I had this nasty little
voice in my head telling me that Mum’s family, which I had loved, was no longer
mine because now I had a Real Family. I was one of the Lucky Adoptees who had
actually Found Out Where They’d Come From.
This insidious chatterer tortured me. Without mercy it went on and
on, week after week until one night three months after Mum died I was in the
kitchen washing up while my husband and daughters were watching TV. Suddenly in
the dark, Mum was behind me. Suddenly I started to cry. I said, ‘Hi, Mum.’ And then
she was gone.
In an instant I was healed. From that brief encounter I knew that Mum’s family and my new family both belonged to me. The Lord had allowed Mum to come and reassure me of that.
People may think I’m crazy being so interested in
Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, but I look like them. When I
got off the train in Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met
people as big as I was, I thought, ‘What is this wonderful place?’ I thought
Belgrade was the best city in the whole world. I loved the story of the Yugoslav
Partisans in World War 2. When I was only twelve Mum had told me about the
women who fought alongside the men.
These Partisans were fighting for the country where I felt I
belonged, where half of me had come from. Who I looked like. They impressed the Germans, they impressed
the British, they were the only country to stand up to Stalin. I am old enough
to remember watching Soviet tanks roll into Prague in 1968 on the TV, merely
because Czechoslovakia longed to be free of Moscow. Russia never attempted that
stunt in Yugoslavia. Why? One name: Tito. Not a perfect man, but a very interesting
one. I loved Yugoslavia because it was wild and mysterious and brave. What did
Tito say about it? ‘Yugoslavs are a proud people.’
War is a terrible thing, but I have often wondered, with envy I am ashamed to say, what it would be like to fight passionately for the country where your roots had been for a thousand years or maybe more. How I envy the Australian Aborigines because they belong to the land.
So this is my little piece of history. I like to write about
Yugoslavia because I think it’s a great story.
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