All she has is a photograph – just one, faded and worn. And a name – sadly, just one. But Abelly de Oliveira dos Santos has buckets of spirit and determination, and with these two small clues the 27-year-old Brazilian who lives in the heart of the Amazonian jungle is determined to find her Australian father.
Let’s start with the name: it’s Kennedy. “I don’t even know if it is his first name or surname,” Abelly tells The Weekly in Manaus, a city located where the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes converge to form the mighty Amazon River. “I don’t even know if he is still alive.” But, as with anyone trying to track down a missing relative, she has to hope for the best.
There are seven people in the photograph. Kennedy, a tall blue-eyed Australian, is second on the left, and his right arm is draped affectionately over the shoulder of Abelly’s mum, Maria do Carmo Santos. It was taken on June 25, 1988, in Iranduba, a municipality south of Manaus on the opposite bank of the Rio Negro. Kennedy and Maria (then aged 22 and 21 respectively) had only just met and it was the start of a whirlwind holiday romance. The other two men in the photo are an Englishman and, on the right, a Frenchman. With them are their girlfriends. A festival was taking place in Iranduba and everyone was in jovial spirits. Happy days.
Abelly’s story is also Kennedy and Maria’s story, and at first it sounds terribly familiar: boy meets girl in an exotic location, they fall in love, and then just when he has to leave she discovers she is pregnant. He promises he will return to take care of her and their child – and that is the last they see or hear of him.
But this story has an unusual twist. True to his word, Kennedy did come back a year later, looking for her, but by a cruel quirk of fate their paths did not cross again. It’s a story of so near and yet so far, of what might have been and so could easily have been.
It’s a story that has been haunting Abelly all her life. Although she grew up in a loving environment, she says she “always had the sense that something was missing”, a feeling that was driven home to her in her tender childhood years every Father’s Day, when she became painfully aware that her junior school mates had fathers and she lacked one.
Abelly armed with the one image she has of her Australian father.
Credit: The Australian Women’s Weekly
She hopes there are more chapters to come and that there will be “a very exciting end to this story. The kind that makes everyone smile and cry at the same time,” she says on the Facebook page Finding Kennedy (Procurando Kennedy in Portuguese) that she has set up in the hope of finding her father.
In some ways, the #FindingKennedy campaign is her last hope. She has explored all the bureaucratic angles, including the Rio Branco Hotel where Kennedy stayed (it no longer has the guest lists from the 1980s), the Australian Ambassador in Brasilia, who is restricted by Australian privacy laws, the Brazilian departments of immigration and foreign affairs and the Brazilian federal police who, she says, “were rude and I cried on the phone when I talked to them”.
“Social media is the only way I can do it,” she says. “There must be someone out there in Australia who recognises him, who could pass on some tips or clues. I would love to hear from them.”
You might think it odd that a woman of 21 like Maria could become pregnant to her lover and yet not even know his full name and lose total communication with him. But you have to consider the circumstances and the times. This was Manaus, one of the most isolated cities in Brazil, about 1400 kilometres inland, in the late 1980s. Telephones were a luxury, and Maria came from a poor family. Moreover, she could not read or write. She spoke no English, Kennedy spoke no Portuguese (although he knew some Spanish), and they had to rely on the Portuguese-English dictionary he had with him to communicate.
Abelly with her mother, Maria.
Credit: The Australian Women’s Weekly
As Maria, now 51, petite, dignified and still strikingly beautiful, tells her story, you can’t help but sense her inner strength and admire her for what she has been through – it can’t have been easy being a single mum in those circumstances.
She was working as a maid at the time she met Kennedy. He was then at college in an Australian city, but his parents lived in the country. He had to leave Brazil because his tourist visa
was about to expire, but his brother was due to marry a Brazilian in Sao Paulo the following year and he would return to Manaus after the wedding. He wanted Maria to go to Australia to live with him, but she had her reservations – travel was extremely difficult in those days and getting passport and other documentation would be complicated. Kennedy returned to Australia via Caracas in Venezuela and Miami. All she could do was wait and hope he would return. She never saw him again.
Abelly and Maria desperately hope to be reunited with Kennedy.
Credit: The Australian Women’s Weekly
But Maria and Abelly are sure he did return around August 1989 after his brother’s wedding, seeking out her and his daughter (Abelly was born in April 1989) at her house in the suburb of Sao Raimundo, which he had visited a couple of times. Someone in the neighbourhood told Maria that a tall blond Australian man had been inquiring after her, but because they did not know Maria at the time, they could not help him.
Maria can only guess what went wrong: when Kennedy had been in Manaus the year before, the river had been low. In 1989, though, after good rains, it was very high, and must have looked very different; indeed, some parts of Sao Raimundo needed makeshift bridges to be accessible. He must have been disoriented, or maybe it had been physically impossible for him to get to her house. And, you imagine, it must have been a frustrating ordeal for him, and that when he gave up the search he must have done so with a heavy heart.
She has never met her father, but Abelly feels that her creative side and love of cinema – she’s a video editor at the Centro Cultural dos Povos da Amazonia (Cultural Centre for the People of the Amazon region) – comes from him. Kennedy was by all accounts a somewhat eccentric adventurer: his goal, she says, was to build a cinema in the Amazon. “Like Fitzcarraldo,” adds Abelly’s partner of nine years, Adson Queiroz, a fellow video editor who is making a documentary about Abelly’s quest. (Fitzcarraldo was Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a would-be rubber baron who had many hare-brained schemes, including building an opera house in a remote part of jungle.)
So, what does it feel like to be half Australian? It’s a question that Abelly had to ponder deeply when Brazil hosted the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament, for which Australia qualified. “I was confused about which team to support if they had to play each other,” she says (fortunately for her, they were kept apart in the draw). “And when Australia were playing I really wanted them to win.” (Unfortunately, they didn’t).
She has recently started English lessons, too, in the hope that if one day she meets Kennedy she will be able to communicate better with him than he and Maria were all those years ago.
Abelly and Maria with The Weekly’s Bernard.
Credit: The Australian Women’s Weekly
We’ve all had young love, we’ve all had holiday romances, some of which we remember fondly and others which we can now put down to the folly of our youth. The Weekly is curious to know how Maria (who has never married) would feel if Kennedy were suddenly to reappear in their lives. Was he the great love of her life?
Her response is guarded. “I missed him, of course, and I did find love again two or three years later, but what saved me was having a baby, having Abelly to love and care for.”
She understands Abelly’s quest to find her father, but adds with a note of steely resolve in her voice, “I was the mother and the father.”
It’s a statement that sums up the strength of single mothers all over the world.
If the photo of Kennedy looks familiar to you, please contact Bernard O’Shea on [email protected] or post a comment on the Finding Kennedy Facebook page.
