Anne Phelan exclusive:
She is one of Australia’s most loved actresses from Prisoner and Winners & Losers, but Anne Phelan has a truly personal story she’s never told: she gave a baby up for adoption and, despite enormous odds, they have just reunited. Michelle Endacott discover
‘Reunited with the baby I gave up 50 years ago’
As young Anne Phelan climbed on board the train, she belted her cotton dress tight to conceal her shape.
Her dad stood slumped on the platform waving goodbye, their fox terrier, Timmy, on a lead by his side. “Dad had tears cascading down,” says Anne.
The much-loved Aussie actress was not yet a star, but a naïve teenager, seven months pregnant and travelling from her home in Melbourne to a convent in Adelaide to keep her secret safe. It was what you did in 1966, in the family way with nobody to marry.
“At the time, I was a clerk at the railways, and in the back row of the chorus of Kismet. I was possibly in denial of being pregnant, and I don’t think I grasped what being pregnant was, quite honestly. Had I not been as naïve, I probably would have had an abortion,” says Anne, now 68 and an Australian TV legend, revealing for the first time the secret she’s been keeping for five decades.
“We are talking the 1960s,” she says. “I was 16 and it was a one-night stand. He [the father] was 18 or 19 and probably as scared as I was. When he found out, he wanted nothing to
do with it. So I just wiped all memory of him.”
Her parents were musical (Mum played the piano, Dad the spoons) and supportive.
“There was no, ‘You’ve got to do this’. There were choices laid out for me, but I was in no state, mature-wise, to raise a child,” says Anne.
So that’s how she ended up working in the convent commercial laundry in Adelaide by day, sleeping in dorms by night, waiting for her time.
“When the baby was born, the doctor said, ‘Oh, a little girl’, and was about to hand her over, but a nurse whispered in his ear, and then she took the baby and turned and went away,” says Anne.
That was the rule for unmarried teens, their feelings seen as irrelevant.
“But I chose to see her in her crib. Just the once. I think I stroked her. I didn’t pick her up,” Anne reveals.
“That was it really. It wasn’t traumatic. I could see that she was a bonny person and that she was the image of my dad.”
Then Anne was back on the train home to Melbourne.
“The most amazing thing I remember about sitting at the table on my first day back was the dog, Timmy, just staring at me because
I’d been gone two months,” she says. “He didn’t take his eyes off me. That’s a very strong memory.”
Nobody much talked about their feelings in those days, so, as the decades passed, Anne and her mum and dad never discussed the convent to spare her feelings. The baby girl was never mentioned. And Anne never saw her dad cry again. In Anne’s words, you “just get on with it”.
Australia soon fell in love with
Anne for her starring roles in Bellbird, Prisoner (as top dog Myra), The Harp In The South, Something In The Air and Winners & Losers. She is now the nation’s most recognisable “toughbut-loving gran”, but in all those years remained unmarried and child-free.
“There were a couple of times when I was doing theatre in Adelaide,” she says, “and I’d see a woman in the street, very tall, looking exactly like one of my cousins ...”
And so Anne’s mind would wander, just for a moment, but her thoughts would soon return to the theatre, or her charity work with HIV/AIDS or refugees, or her wide circle of friends, or her army of nieces and nephews.
Meanwhile, over in Adelaide, the baby girl was taken home by a local family and named Sandra.
That little girl rode her bike until the street lights came on and caravanned at Easter. Money was tight, but her parents put Sandra through private Catholic college and loved her and her brother, Andrew, fiercely through Band-Aids on skinned knees and hot cooked dinners.
Then, when Sandra was 13, she was assigned a family-tree project at school. “Mum and Dad always told us that if anything happened to them, all the insurance records and family papers were in a cupboard in the lounge room. And that’s where I found my adoption certificate,” says Sandra.
“I was quite shocked, but I never told Mum and Dad, or used it as a weapon to throw in their face. At
13, you are going through a lot, so I never, ever told them I’d found it.”
So Sandra McInerney joined the Australian Army and at the pinnacle of her career was a driver for then Chief of the Defence Force Peter Cosgrove, (now GovernorGeneral) and she was awarded the Order of Australia.
Yet, even as the decades passed, Sandra never told her mum what she had found in the lounge-room cupboard.
It was only in her 40s, when GPs started asking, “What’s your family history?”, that she became anxious about saying, “I don’t know”.
In 2013, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard made the national apology for forced adoptions. “Some of the stories that came out were horrific and I thought maybe my birth mother had been looking for me.
“I thought it wouldn’t be fair unless I put myself out there so she could find me. So I decided to apply for my information,” says Sandra. “You can never know if yours is a dreadful
I chose to see her in the crib. Just the once.
story – if you are a product of incest or rape.”
Soon, a life-changing envelope arrived, revealing her birth mother was Anne Phelan, born 1948.
“I was told my case was strange – that my birth mother shared the same name as a famous Australian actress, but Wikipedia said the actress was born in 1944,” says Sandra. “So that Anne wasn’t my mother. I’d need to keep searching.”
She did her own research through the electoral roll and Google, and came to a stunning conclusion. Wikipedia had the wrong birth date.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, my mother is an actress’,” she says.
Sandra decided to reach out to
Anne. “I didn’t want her to think I was after her fame or fortune, so I wrote that if I didn’t hear anything back, I wouldn’t pursue it.”
Sandra mailed that letter. And heard nothing – for three long years.
Can you even imagine that wait? Eventually, desperate for closure, she visited a Relationships Australia counsellor, who suggested they write to Anne. And, almost immediately, Anne contacted the counsellor. She did want to meet her daughter.
So a phone call was organised between the pair. It was March 2016.
And at that moment, five decades of doubts and emotions and fears engulfed Anne. What if the baby had had an awful and unloved life? Would she hate her? Would her daughter resent her acting career and the spotlight Anne had since enjoyed?
Had her actions, all those years ago as a naïve teenager, damaged another human being forever?
She was soon to find out. The phone rang and rang ... and then a strong, confident voice answered.
For the first time ever, Anne was hearing the voice of her then 50-yearold daughter. “Anne told me she was terrified to find out if I had resented her or had a dreadful life,” says Sandra. “I reassured her I was happy and life was good, and I didn’t resent her for anything.”
So, several days later, Sandra knocked on the door of the woman who gave birth to her.
“When I walked in, Annie offered me a cup of coffee and the first thing I thought was … there are my eyes,” says Sandra.
And suddenly all that waiting and wondering was over.
So what of that first letter sent more than three years ago? Anne says she had been travelling at the time and her neighbours had – by accident – thrown it in the rubbish with the junk mail.
“I can’t imagine what it was like for her, thinking I hadn’t replied,” Anne says.
So why has the legendary actress decided to tell her story now? For starters, Anne says she had always
told her closest adulthood friends that she had given up a baby.
And she didn’t want it to break as a tabloid scandal. After all, she had seen what her good friend Ian Smith (who stars in Neighbours as Harold Bishop) went through.
“Ian and I go back to the Bellbird days on TV – we were husband and wife,” says Anne. “Ian found out very late in life that he was adopted and it was very tumultuous for him. A tabloid paper from England rang him and said, ‘We’ve found out’.
“And Ian could tell from the tone that they were going to make it a not very nice story, so he told his story to Australian Story. So Sandra and I chose to tell our story to The Weekly. I knew it was always going to be The Weekly.”
It was the day after Boxing Day 2016, just a few weeks before The Weekly went to press with this story, that Sandra took her 87-year-old mum, Colleen, to the movies to see Allied.
When they arrived home, Colleen made a throw-away comment that actors must have a funny, tough and strange public life.
If ever there was a sign that now was the time to talk, this was it.
Sandra says, “I showed Mum a photo of Anne on my phone and said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ And then a pause. ‘It’s my birth mother.’”
Colleen got up, hugged Sandra tight, and said, “I’m so, so sorry for not telling you. I knew I had to tell you before I died.”
Sandra says she and her mum had the most open and honest conversation of their lives over the next two hours. Both felt overwhelming relief.
“Mum told me my father [Ronald] had said on his death bed, ‘You must tell her’. But Mum just didn’t know how,” says Sandra.
Colleen then asked, simply, “What happens now?”
And Sandra’s reply was to the point. “I’m still here for Christmas,” she told Colleen. “You’re still Mum. Nothing changes.”
Back in Romsey, Victoria, Anne lives alone in her pretty weatherboard cottage. Newspaper posters about her career adorn the walls and a new Equity Lifetime Achievement award sits by the window. Sandra was there to see her accept it in October.
Anne is clearly happy to have found her daughter again, but it’s there the sentimentality ends.
“I never wanted children,” Anne says. “Sandy and I have talked about this because she doesn’t either. Amateur psychologists will go, ‘Oh, it’s because ... ’ but, no, it’s not.
“We can both talk very openly about stuff. I think people expected us to fall into each other’s arms, à la Hollywood. It’s not.
“We’re total strangers, but we do get on and if we’d met under other circumstances, we’d be good mates – and we are good mates. We’re going to be friends. There’s no maternal daughter bond there at all. Even when I was little and used to play doctors and nurses, or husbands and wives, I never saw kids in the picture.
“Sandra’s mum is still her mum.
I’m just Anne.”
And good mates they are, both with a huge burden lifted.
As Anne reveals, “The secret has been burst and now I am free. I no longer have to think twice when people ask me if I have any children.”
And Sandra feels as though decades of unspoken tension in her family have been released. “Mum told me that there was a cooling-off period for six months after the adoption, in case the birth mother changed her mind. Every time the doorbell rang, she was terrified someone would take me away.”
As The Weekly photo shoot enters the afternoon, we finally coax Anne’s nervous little dog, Tilly, into a photo. The two women clearly feel a little self-conscious at hugging and posing … but there’s a bond that can never be broken as two families are now finally at peace.
The secret has been burst ... now I am free.