A legacy of love and loss

A baby gets a loving home, a couple completes their family. Surely adoption is a happy event? But for many - those giving up a child, the child and the families who welcome them - it can be a lifelong journey of searching and healing. With as many as one in 15 Aussies impacted by adoption, we meet a service offering hope.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

Di Riddell was born in Di 1947, in the small town of Nambour between the Sunshine Coast and the Blackall Ranges in the era of postwar hardship. Her father was an alcoholic who told her she was worthless, but she had a sunny outlook which enabled her to look forward with hope to the usual things teenagers enjoy, like the local dance she went to when she was 16 years old.

"There was a guy there who I thought was the bee's knees," Di tells The Weekly. "He offered to drive me home. He said it would be a night to remember and in my romantic mind it was a drive home in the moonlight, a peck on the cheek and a drop-off. I got in the car, and I heard a noise. I turned around and there were two other guys in the back, on the floor. We didn't go home. I guess you could say I went looking for love and rape found me."

Shortly after, Di discovered she was pregnant. "I was devastated. I thought my father would wring my neck, so I went to my eldest brother, who was the pillar of our family, and told him."

Her brother found an ad in a newspaper seeking domestic help in a doctor's home in Kenmore, which was more than 100km south on the Brisbane River, and Di was "sent away in disgrace". She never told anyone what had happened to her.

"My fear of retribution kept me quiet," she says, adding that she found herself working as a servant in the doctor's home, with no way of escaping. When she went into labour she was denied painkillers for most of the 36 hours. The nurses said this was her punishment for being wicked. Two women stood over her bed and told her to sign adoption papers.

"The welfare workers told me I should do nursing and get out of society's way because no decent man would ever want me," she says. She wasn't allowed to see her baby.

And it wasn't just unwed mothers who were treated that way.