FINDING MY MOTHER
Former Home and Away actor and now author Cameron Stewart reflects on being adopted as a baby and finding his birth mother. His debut novel explores the themes of love, loss and the kindness of strangers
Cameron Stewart was “plucked from a ward of babies” in 1960s Adelaide – it was his smile that clinched the deal, apparently. His mother was 16 and unwed, and Stewart (who grew up to become an actor on Home and Away) became one of the 250,000 Aussie newborns separated from their birth mothers in the three decades to 1980. The NSW actor turned author met his mother 25 years later – and when she laid eyes on him, it was for the very first time.
“On a cool, sunny day in Adelaide, we approached each other as strangers,” he recalls of meeting her.
“I immediately recognised my eyes in hers. “We hugged. We were both emotional. “Moments after our embrace, my birth mother told me it was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on me. She told me that midwives held a sheet across her body during delivery, to shield her from viewing me.
“At times during our meeting, she touched my shoulder or forearm or wrist as if to check that I was real.”
He later discovered that adoption in Australia in the 1960s had two key features: “clean break theory” and “closed adoption”.
Clean break theory meant that babies were removed from the mother immediately after birth and that no contact took place between mother and child. Adoption then followed as soon as possible.
The closed adoption component involved the closing of the record of adoption, so all parties involved remained permanently unaware of the identity of the others.
“It wasn’t until laws changed in South Australia in the late 1980s that I was able to access information about my birth mother, and get in contact, and arrange our meeting,” Stewart says.
“Oddly, growing up, I resembled my adoptive father, something that people unaware of my origins would sometimes comment on.
“I don’t remember the specific moment of being told I was adopted, but I must have been very young, because I’ve always known.
“It didn’t particularly bother me. I had a family that felt like my family. But there was always an awareness, particularly on my birthday, that my birth mother was out there somewhere.
“I understand that other adoptees have had a different experience, an adverse experience, but I was never resentful about being adopted.
“Even when I was young, I somehow knew that it wouldn’t have been easy for someone to give up a baby.”
In the 1960s, unwed mothers were given little choice, and Stewart, now a 56-year-old father of two, says that his mother was encouraged to give birth 400km from her family home. Alone.
“The first two months of my life were spent at the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies’ Home. This was where many unmarried mothers in South Australia gave birth, away from their families and away from the neighbours,” he says. “The home also doubled as an adoption agency.
“My adoptive father talks about picking me out of a ward full of babies – apparently I smiled and clinched the deal.
“As I was being driven into the Northern Territory to live, my birth mother was back with her family. She later told me that her pregnancy wasn’t spoken of and that many of her own family weren’t aware of me until they learned of our meeting 25 years later.
“How she processed and lived with this experience, and others like her have had to do, is difficult to imagine.”
Stewart lived in Alice Springs, Canberra and Cairns before his adoptive parents divorced and his dad remarried.
He lost touch with his first adoptive mum, and travelled across Australia with his ornithologist dad and botanist second adoptive mother.
“Eventually we came down to northern NSW and settled in Wilsons Creek, which is a valley outside of Mullumbimby, the town where I went to high school,” he says.
Remarkably, Stewart’s case isn’t unusual. Between the 1950s and 1980 it’s estimated some 200,000 to 250,000 children were adopted Australia wide – and those figures don’t include the thousands of indigenous children who were removed from their families by Australian governments and church missions.
In 2013, then prime minister Julia Gillard made a national apology to those affected by forced adoptions in Australia.
“I was watching the news on television with my own sons – they were 14 and 10 at the time,” Stewart recalls.
“Skinny boys … like I was growing up. I remember looking at their faces. On certain angles they still reflected the babies they once were, but I could also see the emergence of young men. It really hit me then, what my birth mother had missed.”
Stewart and his birth mother have caught up many times over the years and chat on the phone every few months.
“She is a remarkable woman – kind and patient and without bitterness,” he says.
“Twenty-five years was a long time apart, so it hasn’t been an easy journey in getting to know each other. We started as strangers but now we are close. I’m very glad we found each other.”
It’s not surprising that Stewart’s childhood shaped his keen interest for observing human behaviour and his attraction to storytelling. First in acting – on Home and Away and countless other Australian theatre and TV productions before calling it quits – and now in writing.
After spending four years on Home and Away as the senior sergeant of Yabbie Creek, which seemed to be a hotbed of crime for such a small community, he says he got tired of arresting and interviewing the same people and was happy to move on.
“My most satisfying acting experiences tended to be in theatre, such as Belvoir Street or the Sydney Theatre Company,” he says.
“I’ve always been interested in story telling and the creative process, so moving into writing seemed like a natural progression.
“Even when I was working as an actor I used to write – in writing groups, or by myself, on various projects.
“Then six years ago, I enrolled in an MA in
Creative Writing at UTS Sydney. I’ve been writing fiction ever since.
“Firstly, short stories. I used to keep a chart of the submissions I made to journals and publications around the world, where I would send my stories.
“I made over 500 submissions for five publications – not the greatest record – but each publication gave me encouragement to keep going.
“Even the rejections weren’t a bad thing. It kept me working on my craft.
“I was never discouraged. Having been an actor for years. I was used to rejection.”
But, now, success.
His debut novel, Why Do Horses Run? follows Ingvar, who leaves his life behind after his daughter dies in a car crash. Ingvar stops talking and lives as a nomad until he eventually settles in a valley in Mullumbimby.
“Why Do Horses Run? is a story about a man’s search for a home when no home can be found,” Stewart explains.
“After a traumatic event, this man, Ingvar, wanders the country for three years and refuses to speak. If forced to communicate, he uses a pencil and a pad.
“He walks in all weather, across all kinds of terrain, day or night, until he can go no further, then he gets back up and does it again. Day after day. Month after month.
“He sleeps rough and bathes in creeks. Sometimes he’s forced to eat roadkill.
“Having been an ecologist in his professional life, he takes solace in the natural world, but he also sees extinction and death everywhere he walks.
“Eventually, and on his last legs, he comes to a remote tropical valley where he meets Hilda, a tough woman in her mid-70s recently widowed. She allows him to stay in a shed at the bottom of her property for a few days. But Ingvar stays longer.
“Over time, he interacts with other characters and misfits from the valley and the local town and the story develops from there.
“My book asks questions about love and loss and what might make a person never want to be found, but is also about the redemptive power of kindness, that people still need each other despite desperately wanting to run away.
“I wanted to write a story where readers would be transported – where they could imagine what it would be like to lose everything but find hope, where they could follow an intriguing story and enter into the lives of some fascinating characters.
“It’s up to each individual reader to take from it what they will, but I was interested in exploring our shared human experience of connection and disconnection, emotion, our relationship to nature and our relationship to each other.”
Stewart, who is in the early stages of his next novel, titled Cosmonaut, says he wants to leave readers “with a sense of hope”.
“In a best-case scenario, fiction can be transportive,” he says.
“I love that good literature, as well as great music and art, and even sport, can galvanise people and make us more aware of the things that bind us together and not drive us apart.
“There’s a mountain of work ahead of me.”
Why Do Horses Run? by Cameron Stewart: Allen & Unwin: $33