Pip's Progress My 21-year Quest To Find My Boy

One mum’s experience of adoption in the 1970s

- Julie Jacobson

The year was 1970. It was the time of the Crewe murders, John Rowles’ single Cheryl Moana Marie was the number-one song, and police and anti-Vietnam War protestors clashed outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Auckland, where visiting US Vice President Spiro Agnew was staying.

Actress Danielle Cormack and former Green co-leader Metiria Turei were born. Fewer than 1000 people were on the unemployment benefit and only two percent of working-aged people relied solely on social welfare support of any kind. It would be another three years before the domestic purposes benefit (DPB) came into being.

It was also the year a then 20-year-old Pip Murdoch put her newborn son up for adoption, signing away any rights to the baby she named Nicholas, but who she would later come to know as David.

Pip is now 69. A trained nurse and grief counsellor, she and husband Simon, a former diplomat, live in the upmarket Wellington suburb of Kelburn.

She reveals the search for her son, 21 years after his birth, in Relative Strangers, a memoir set during a time of massive social change and intergenerational upheaval.

It’s taken her almost a decade to write, after she ditched the first draft – “my life generally” – to instead concentrate on a period that spans growing up in the 1960s, her pregnancy and “confinement”, and the subsequent heartbreaking, quest to find her firstborn.