------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- From: Self <Single-user mode> To: @LIST1F5C.PML Subject: The Age: Facing their past Reply-to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 11:05:08 +1000 THE AGE Wednesday 26 May 1999 Facing their past By MARTIN FLANAGAN FIVE people sit in a room, three black, two white. There could be more because the sense of family that brings them together branches off in numerous directions, white and black, but if they were all here the story would be impossible to tell in anything short of a novel. People say they should write a book. We sit in a circle and I ask Kaye Briggs to begin. She was 19 when she gave up her baby. At the time she had three wishes: that her child would be brought up knowing he was Aboriginal; that he would be happy; and that one day he would return to her without hate in his heart for what she had done. It has been a long, hard road, but her three wishes have been granted. Her son Daniel, 26, a trainee mental health worker in Shepparton, speaks his truth in a halting, determined way. Does he know many cases of black children being adopted into white families that have worked out? ``Not too many.'' Why did it in this case? ``Because there was understanding and respect on both sides.'' Later Daniel rings me back, concerned that I have taken too rosy an impression from the meeting. The Koori community is going to read this story, he says. It has to be truthful. There were a lot of bad times along the way. Daniel and his adoptive brother, 24-year-old Jeremy, had different birth parents, and Jeremy's Koori heritage has been harder to reconnect with than Daniel's. When Jeremy was 13, his white father took him to Wilcannia to meet his black grandmother. She lived the traditional Aboriginal way and spoke little English. The boy couldn't understand what she was saying. In the course of the same trip, he had his first experience of ``full-on'' racism from an adult white. When I ask him how he felt at that moment, he says, ``Speechless.'' Jeremy still finds words hard to come by, in public at least, and Daniel speaks on his behalf. ``It's been harder for Jeremy than it has been for me. There were still hard times when I'd go off and hit the grog, but I had a lot of support (from my Koori family).'' Daniel says a Koori kid approaching the Koori community after growing up white experiences a crazy combination of excitement and fear - excitement at the thought that he might belong and a terrible fear that he won't. After all, not everyone does. Berris Daws was a nurse at the Royal Children's Hospital who had grown up in Camberwell and wanted eight children when she married Terry Falla, a Baptist minister. The couple soon had two children of their own but out of concern for the planet and arguments about zero population growth, they chose to adopt. As most applicants wanted babies with blond hair and blue eyes, the Fallas agreed to be put in a category for special cases. They had no idea that the two babies they received (in 1973 and 1975) were small parcels of Australian history that would explode in their faces. The first shock, as Terry Falla calls it, was a television report they saw that said that in more than 90per cent of cases black children adopted into white families were returned to state institutions by the age of 10. A Victorian Koori, Molly Dyer, spoke about the ``stolen generation'' and the need to reconnect these children with their black families. Berris understood the idea instinctively. She had been particularly close to her grandmother. As their sons entered the turbulence of adolescence, Terry Falla saw the need become more pressing, but their requests for information were steadfastly turned back by the state bureaucracy. It might be a case, they were told, where the mother's family knew nothing of either the pregnancy or the birth. Meanwhile, the Fallas' education in what it means to be Aboriginal increased. At a ball in Northcote, Terry sat beside an old Aboriginal woman named Girlie. Girlie's eight children had all been taken from her. With a Koori acquaintance, he went to Aurukun, an Aboriginal community in Queensland, as part of a social justice group. At the town airstrip they were met by two policemen, who told them they weren't welcome. On the other side, Daniel's birth mother, Kaye, had begun looking for her son, although she didn't know his name. Her natural longing for her child had been intensified by the death of her mother. With her passing, she had taken much of the knowledge she possessed about the family identity and history with her. Kaye sees her mother as belonging to a generation of Aboriginal people who were shamed into accepting the logic of assimilation. It was apprehension about her mother's feelings that led her to adopt out her baby. The cost of such beliefs, she now saw, was a potentially tragic loss of self. In the offices of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, Kaye's husband, Paul Briggs, saw a photograph of 14-year-old Daniel, which had been left by the Fallas. Kaye knew at a glance it was her son, just as Berris knew at a glance that Kaye was Daniel's birth mother. The memory of seeing Kaye for the first time still makes Berris cry. But the story was far from over. In Kaye's words, there was so much ``untangling'' to be done. Daniel now had two mothers. When the Fallas visited the Briggs family in Shepparton, Berris instinctively acted the role of mother in Kaye's house. There was more hurt, more upset. Ten years later, there's a bond between Berris and Kaye that seems to go beyond emotion. It's like seeing the path cut by a river in flood, after the flood has passed. In a letter the Fallas have kept, Kaye refers to Daniel as ``our son''. ``It's like everything else,'' says Kaye. ``You have to go beyond the idea of ownership.'' Berris arrived at the same point via a poem of Khalil Gibran's: ``Your children are not your children They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself They come through you but not from you And though they are with you they belong not to you.'' THEY all say one of the major reasons they were able to get through the bad times was Kaye's husband, Paul Briggs. He runs an Aboriginal football club in Shepparton that welcomes white players and white members. He persuaded Kaye to begin the search for Daniel. When she encountered obstacles with the Fallas, he encouraged her to speak her heart's truth. Terry Falla now believes candor of that degree is the only course in such cases. ``You can't escape the conflict,'' he says. ``Eventually, you have to move towards the centre of it, and that means pain.'' Once, in a blind drunken rage, Jeremy began wrecking the Fallas' home, even tearing doors off hinges. In desperation, Terry Falla rang Paul Briggs on his mobile phone, thinking he was in Shepparton. As fate would have it, he was three streets away. Falla says that when Briggs - a Koori man Jeremy respected - arrived and confronted the boy, he was ``shocked and shamed''. ``We've been through so much,'' says Daniel of this incident and others. He refers to the abuse, the wild indiscriminate emotion. ``It wasn't directed at Mum and Dad, but they have copped a lot of it.'' The Falla family photo album is a work of Australian art in itself. Dan and Terry recently built a barbecue. There they are, big black son, small white father, standing proudly beside their Aussie icon. There's Berris, seemingly the most suburban of souls, in a crowd at a football match in Shepparton. Her excitement is not difficult to see. She's the only white face in the picture, and the black baby on her knee is her grandchild. Both Jeremy and Dan now have children of their own. Twenty-odd years ago, a seemingly ordinary white couple adopted two black children into their family. Now they find themselves being adopted into large black families. Paul Briggs sees reconciliation as a pretty straightforward matter. It's about respect. It's just not for the faint-hearted, that's all. To Kaye Briggs, I remark: ``The Fallas are brave, aren't they?'' ``Unbelievably,'' she replies, but Terry Falla says he's grateful for the journey. The rewards have been real. Recently, as they were driving along in a car, Jeremy, now both a father and an artist of emerging potential, turned and said: ``Thanks for being a dad, Dad.'' Under the title The Journey of Healing, today's National Day of Healing celebrations will begin at noon with a march from the Melbourne City Hall across Princes Bridge to the Alexandra Gardens where a ceremony will be performed. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." 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