Phil Evans came into his mother’s life on November 14, 1950. The circumstances of his birth in Sydney’s Crown St Women’s Hospital were nothing remarkable. From what he’s been told the place was “a baby factory” at the time. But rather than going home in his 16-year-old mother’s arms when she left, he stayed alone in the hospital for ten days.
The next time they would meet would be 57 years later: mum suffering the early stages of dementia and the baby boy she never knew already a grandfather and teacher. Phil had been successful in life, but not without having overcome a history of alcoholism, violence towards his peers and parents and petty crime brought on by a constant feeling of abandonment.
Phil doesn’t blame his mother for abandoning him: “It wasn’t her choice,” he says. But what happened does make him angry. She was one of an estimated 150,000 Australian women who had their children forcibly removed from them between the 1950s and 1970s and adopted under a practiced sanctioned by governments, churches, hospitals, charities and bureaucrats.
Today Prime Minister Julia Gillard will offer an apology to these women and their children in the Great Hall of Parliament House, while both the House of Representatives and the Senate will move motions of apology. It’s a significant event for the victims of forced adoption.
Phil never knew he was adopted. He is what they call in adoption circles a “late-discoverer”. He grew up in a loving family and cannot praise his adoptive parents enough for the upbringing they gave him. But he always had the feeling that something “wasn’t quite right”.
When, as he was nearing his sixties and had begun to piece it all together, he called his mother (the woman who raised him) to ask outright if he was adopted, her exact words were: “Darling, if I was there looking you in the eye, I would have to say ‘yes, you are’”.
The constant crying as a young boy, the playing up in school which eventually saw him expelled, the early spiral into alcoholism, petty crime, and violence and the toll it took on his health and relationships all began to fall into place.
“I kept sabotaging any good thing that ever happened to me,” he says.
“I used to live and play very hard and there was so much emotion going on constantly that I didn’t understand.”
With the knowledge of what he feels he should have always known on some level, Phil could start to heal, and start to forgive himself and his birth mother.
“She was a young girl and she had no choice but to give me up,” he says.
“She was told by family, she was told by the church [to give me up] and I was taken away from her. I had to stay in the hospital until my adoptive parents came to pick me up.”
Phil did suffer but he’s never felt like a “victim” of forced adoption. His mother, he says, like thousands of other women in that same era, definitely was.
“She had to give up her child and she was devastated.”
In the six months after finding out, Phil reunited with his birth mother and her family (she had gone on to marry and have children) but she was elderly and ill and they didn’t have much time to reconnect before she passed. He was grateful to spend some time with her, but he realised how much she had suffered.
“Even when she started to lose herself to dementia, her face would light up every time I walked into the room. She knew exactly who I was, I was her son,” he says.
“I’ve worked through the anger, the disappointment, I’ve worked through a lot of things and I can now accept that everything is the way it is, but she had lived with it since she gave me up. All those years of not knowing.”
“The apology [to victims of forced adoption today] would be extremely significant to her.”
Up to a thousand people are expected to gather in Canberra today to hear the Prime Minister deliver a national apology to Australian victims of forced adoptions, something groups like Origins Australia have been rallying for for decades.
Julia Gillard says the apology is a sign of the country’s willingness to right an old wrong and face a hard truth. She will announce a five million dollar injection to improve access to special support, records tracing and mental health care for those affected by forced adoption. And Phil Evans says this couldn’t be needed more.
Now a counsellor and life coach, Phil is determined to help others heal who have similarly suffered because of forced adoptions.
“This is going to take ongoing support,” he says.
“It’s taken a long time for me to heal, but I’ve healed more than most. People, particularly mothers [of forced adoption] are going through major emotional stuff. I want them to know that there is incredible support available, because I know what it’s like to feel completely alone.”
