Finding me

Growing up, Dianne O’Brien thought life was good until her mum died and the mirage imploded. Her story from stolen generation to finally meeting her people is tragic, shocking, miraculous and ultimately uplifting.

- SUE WILLIAM

It was love at first sight the moment 15-year-old Dianne Westman set eyes on her baby daughter. She felt she was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen, with long black hair right down to the nape of her neck. “Hello, sweetheart!” she cooed when the baby was placed back in her arms after being bathed by the nurses. “I’m your mum. I’ll always be your mum, you hear me? We’ll never let anyone separate us.”

Back then, in 1962, Dianne was right to be so protective. Already the nurses at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital had tried to persuade the single mum to sign adoption papers to give her child away to a “more respectable” married couple. But knowing how many other young unmarried women had already been tricked, pressured and sometimes even drugged into giving away their children (the forced adoption scandal was later uncovered officially by an Australian Government Senate Inquiry in 2011), Dianne had resolutely refused to sign anything – even if it meant she’d be denied pain relief during the birth.

“I was just very, very determined to keep my baby,” Dianne says today, on the eve of the release of her memoir, Daughter of the River Country. “She was my only family and I wanted to make sure I was always there for her. I wanted to make sure she’d never suffer in the way I’d suffered.”

For although Dianne was still two weeks shy of her 16th birthday, she’d already endured more hardship than most people four times her age. Her beloved mum had died when she was 14 and, suddenly, her father no longer wanted to know the couple’s only child. He went off with a series of women, leaving Dianne fending for herself, alone, in their house in Sydney’s western suburbs.