Discovering Dianne: from stolen generation baby to proud Indigenous woman
Growing up, Dianne O’Brien thought life was good until her mum died and the mirage imploded. Her story from stolen generation to finally meeting her people is tragic, shocking, miraculous and ultimately uplifting.
It was love at first sight the moment 15-year-old Dianne Westman set eyes on her baby daughter. She felt she was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen, with long black hair right down to the nape of her neck. “Hello, sweetheart!” she cooed when the baby was placed back in her arms after being bathed by the nurses. “I’m your mum. I’ll always be your mum, you hear me? We’ll never let anyone separate us.”
Back then, in 1962, Dianne was right to be so protective. Already the nurses at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital had tried to persuade the single mum to sign adoption papers to give her child away to a “more respectable” married couple. But knowing how many other young unmarried women had already been tricked, pressured and sometimes even drugged into giving away their children (the forced adoption scandal was later uncovered officially by an Australian Government Senate Inquiry in 2011), Dianne had resolutely refused to sign anything – even if it meant she’d be denied pain relief during the birth.
“I was just very, very determined to keep my baby,” Dianne says today, on the eve of the release of her memoir, Daughter of the River Country. “She was my only family and I wanted to make sure I was always there for her. I wanted to make sure she’d never suffer in the way I’d suffered.”
For although Dianne was still two weeks shy of her 16th birthday, she’d already endured more hardship than most people four times her age. Her beloved mum had died when she was 14 and, suddenly, her father no longer wanted to know the couple’s only child. He went off with a series of women, leaving Dianne fending for herself, alone, in their house in Sydney’s western suburbs.
When concerned neighbours called the police, and officers berated him for leaving a young girl on her own, he installed a stranger he’d just met into the caravan sitting in their backyard to keep an eye on her, in return for Dianne cooking his meals. It was a move that was to scar her life.
Late one night, the man, a violent alcoholic, attacked Dianne, smashing her over the back of the head with a heavy object and then raping her when she crumpled to the ground. The police arrested him and took Dianne to a girls’ shelter as a neglected child “exposed to moral danger”. At the Parramatta Children’s Court hearing to decide what should be done with Dianne, she received one of the biggest shocks of her life. Her dad told the judge he wanted to disown her. “But Mr Westman,” the judge told him coldly, “you cannot disown an adopted child.”
Skin deep
It was the first time Dianne had ever heard she didn’t belong to the parents she’d grown up with. “I’d always felt vaguely that I didn’t really belong, and that I was different to my mum and dad and my relatives,” she says now. “My skin was a bit darker, but I didn’t think much about it. I thought maybe I had a bit of Italian blood, or Maltese or something.”
There was a lot of discrimination in those days against those with darker skin, and the White Australia policy kept out overseas people of colour. For Aboriginal Australians, it was even worse.
“When I was a kid, they weren’t included in the census and there weren’t even laws against racism,”
“I’d always felt that I didn’t really belong and that I was different.”
says Dianne. “But hearing that in court was such a terrible shock. I could hardly believe it. Mum had been a wonderful mother, and we’d really loved each other. She’d always said she had a secret to tell me, but had been saving up for us to go to the NSW country town of Parkes, where we’d lived when I was a child and where she said she’d tell me.
“Maybe my adoption had been the secret, but she died suddenly – Dad said of a weak heart – before she had the chance. And Dad … I think when Mum was alive, she looked out for me with him. With her gone, I was just in the way. But when I heard those words, they set me off on a lifelong mission to find my real family.”
Yet there were far more horrors in store before Dianne could track them down. The court sent her to the notorious Parramatta Girls’ Home, a place which, bizarrely, held two quite different types of adolescent girls – those who’d been tried and convicted of some kind of crime, and those who’d simply been neglected, abandoned, orphaned or who were destitute and had nowhere else to go. Originally, the authorities intended to separate the two groups. But they soon discovered it would take more staff and money to run it that way.
“It was a hideous place,” Dianne says now. “We were all lumped in together and known only by the number we were given. The guards abused and raped so many of the girls, and if we didn’t do what they told us to, we’d be locked in the dungeons underneath in the pitch darkness. All you could hear was girls screaming and the rats running around.
“But I was luckier than some as I was never raped there. They’d discovered I was pregnant to the man who’d raped me at home, so I think there were easier pickings elsewhere. And I always tried to stand up for myself. Mum had taught me that was important.”
Many years later, Dianne got together with some of the other former ‘Parra Girls’ and finally, in 2014, the home was investigated by a Royal Commission which unearthed the horrors of the place, and one of the surviving superintendents, Noel Greenaway, was jailed for 20 years.
Dianne’s choice
Yet when Dianne was moved from the home to hospital to have her baby, and then to stay with her in another care facility, the nightmare still wasn’t over. The matron started pressing her again to have her child, Debbie, adopted. When Dianne refused, she was told she had a choice. As an unmarried state ward, she could either put Debbie in an orphanage for five years until she was no longer a ward, and had proved she had a place to live and a job and could look after her baby – or she’d have to marry the child’s father.
“It was a terrible choice,” Dianne says, her face pained even after all these years. “My baby wasn’t an orphan, so why put her in an orphanage? But I knew it would be so hard to get her back, and after five years, she wouldn’t even know me anymore, and I couldn’t bear to be separated from her.
“But the other option was just as terrible. They were saying I’d have to marry my rapist! How could they even have thought of such a thing, and forced me to do that? I realised, though, that I just didn’t have a choice. I’d have to marry the man who’d battered me and then raped me, if I stood any chance of keeping Debbie.”
Dianne married her attacker, Colin O’Brien, in an absolutely joyless wedding ceremony, and then the pair headed off by train to the house owned by his parents in Cobar, 570km north-west of Sydney. There Dianne was routinely bashed and raped by her new husband, with his parents ignoring her plight. She had another daughter, Linda, and kept trying to run away, but it was hard in those days for a single mum, with no real welfare system. Eventually, Colin gave up on bringing her back, and she fled. Sadly, however, she ended up with another violent boyfriend, Michael. “You look back and think, ‘Why did I end up with such terrible men?’” Dianne says. “But I always felt sorry for the underdog and thought – quite wrongly – that I could help them change.
“But you have to remember, I was still very young, and I’d had no good male role models in my life. I had no experience of anything else. I thought male violence was just the way men behaved, and if they hit you, it meant they loved you.”