“One of Us”: Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography

Abstract

Orsino: And what's her histor y?Viola: A blank, my lord.-Shakespeare, twelfth night, Act II, Scene IVWhen she is brought before new south Wales Children's Court aged fifteen, sharyn Killens has already spent seven years of her life in an orphanage. she is charged with being uncontrollable, and her mother suggests to court that would be better for everyone she was placed in an institution until she is eighteen (Killens 88). so it is, with her mother's blessing, that sharyn is sent to notorious parramatta Girls' Home (in western suburbs of sydney) and from there to even more notorious Hay institution for Girls in Central new south Wales. But sharyn's history is anything but a blank, and she recounts how she filled in those blanks in her autobiography, The Inconvenient Child. Born in 1948, sharyn was illegitimate daughter of a white Australian woman and a black American sailor, but it took until 1989, forty-one years later, that her mother revealed his name. in her ten years in three state-sanctioned institutions, sharyn is physically and emotionally abused and humiliated; during a short period institutions during her adolescence she suffers an episode of multiple rape. As a stripper, alcoholic, drug addict, and, in later life, a highly successful cabaret singer on ocean liners, sharyn has only wanted two things in life: to be loved and accepted by her mother, Grace; and to know her father's identity. this paper examines selves, in which autobiographer is both in sense of not knowing one or both birth parents, and in sense of being estranged from a fully formed and completed self.Sharyn's narrative is about belonging; or, as one who feels estranged by circumstances and consequences of her life, about desire for belonging. According to social theorist elspeth probyn, if you have to think about belonging, perhaps you are already outside (8). that is, at one level, seeking belonging already positions seeker on outside. this might be social, but it also ref lects a self-identity in which one's connectedness with people, families, communities, and an almost infinite number of other possibilities for identity formation is forged. rupture between world and self-identity is, in part, what i mean by orphaned selves. of course, sharyn is also in sense that her biological parents take very little active part in her upbringing, but i am more interested in desire for completion-that is, to inscribe oneself into a genealogical history-and repercussions of orphanhood for self-identity. in addition to The Inconvenient Child (2009), i will also consider Robert dessaix's A Mother's Disgrace (1994), Gordon Matthews's An Australian Son (1996), and Kate shayler's The Long Way Home (1999) with its sequel A Tuesday Thing (2004).SEEKING COMPLETIONInstitutional dwellings such as foundling hospitals, poor houses, orphanages, and asylums have a long and infamous history. By early twentieth century, in Australia as elsewhere, it was considered more beneficial for children to be boarded rather than housed in asylums for destitute; whereas this idea of boarding out had been based originally on teaching a child a usefulness (usually exploiting their labor), notion of adoption for love took hold, becoming known as sentimental adoption (Forkert 25). For children born out of wedlock, their lives were begun filius nullius, literally the children of no-one (Marshall and Mcdonald 4). Adoption law was state-based, and it was not until rise of feminism in 1970s-and with legislation protecting rights of unmarried women-that there was a significant shift toward women keeping their children. With this came impetus for legislation to allow adoptees and birth parents to find one another, followed by legislation enabling rights of access-e.g. …