1. 

Our forgotten ones, our foundlings. The birds of heaven have made their nests in you. The nest is the cradle of civilisation, our hotbed of hope. These breeding grounds are where we come to fit inside one another, as clans of people who belong. And yet, it is not where we find ourselves burrowed in. We find we have lived outside these ordinary hopes for the birdhouses of our youth. We find ourselves outside of our ordinary lives, where we have been birthed as the babies of chance, drifting on the wind, for other people to call down from the skies, and complete their family nest. 

2. 

"Professor Google," I type, me, the adopted one, trying like countless others, to understand what it means to live, assigned as the adopted one. Trying to understand what ordinary life might be for other people, for those who have not lived their life outside of the ordinary nest. "Google,” I type, after pressing backspace countless hesitant times, “help me understand what is a nest."  

Rather than answer my question, the knowledge doctor shows me a range of inter-related objects. Shows me how each tiny piece fits inside the nest. And then, in a single breath, the internet shows me what legislators all over the world seem to find so hard to understand, and so ready to overcomplicate.  

The primary function of a nest is to provide a place for parents to lay their eggs and raise their offspring.  

Of course that’s what a nest is for. It seems quite simple, when it’s put like that. It seems the success of the nest hinges on a process of 'environmental adjustment.'  

Fortunately, Google tells me, there is quite a lot that can be done to help a fledgling adjust to the alien nest, adjust to the circumstances of their new environment. A fledgling, for example, who has drifted on the breath of chance and landed in the wrong nest.  

3. 

Set the  

gunpowder alight  

whoever you are 

set it up like 

charcoal fuel whoever you want me to be 

blow  

it  

all up  

4. 

Boom ba laaaaa.  

Here is the lost child Esmerelda at the age of ten and nine whole days, snuggled in the small space by the fire on a soggy Saturday afternoon, with 'Sequential', her birthday cat. Esmerelda thinks the cat's golden eye might be a portal to a secret shiny garden. She wants to name the cat 'Sequin', but the word comes out wrong and once it is spoken, 'Sequential' it is. 

She carries the cat into the kitchen, and watches the mum-lady fill an electric frypan with the pallid crusts of gristly meat pies. 

As Esmerelda reaches for a banana, the cat jumps from the kitchen chair to study a twitch outside the window.  

"Why didn't you just name it Puss?" the lady says, her pale hands placing the lid on the pan and squeezing the last of the deep red sauce to plates. Then, while they wait for hot lunch, the lady heads down to the TV lounge to watch WWF World Wrestling. 

Esmerelda carries the cat back to the fire, her fingers seeking out the notchy spaces along the cat's long spine. They kneed and preen each other as the fire spirit dances. 

The lady shouts ‘g’annnn, g’annnnnn’ as the Lycra wrestlers prance around the padded ring, whumping the floor in violent brawls that make the cat sting Esmerelda's leg with pin-sharp claws.  

Esmerelda knows the fight is not real. Ever since she was eight, she's known the Demolition Tag Team's Mr Fuji and Murphy the Surfie were actors, pretending. 

5. 

That's the truth about Esmerelda's nest. 

That's a version of Esmerelda’s truth.  

It’s mostly an invention - though not one imagined by a young girl that people have come to call Esmerelda.  

This version of the truth was contrived by everyone around Esmerelda - the Mum-lady, some lawyers, doctors, some social workers and judges, all of whom thought up the whole plan, long before Esmerelda was ever born.  

Her name was never Esmerelda, though she won't know that for quite some time, if she ever finds out at all.   

6. 

Fortunately, the internet says, there are many things that can be done to help the misplaced child adjust, a girl just like Esmerelda, who has landed in the wrong nest. 

Google frames these ideas as if they were thoughts of its own creation, property that belongs to Google.  

The truth is that Google is the surrogate. A proxy.  

The true creator of the story, the person who birthed these words, is a psychologist from the blogosphere who writes on cats and human adoption, whose words Google uses to explain how to care for the misplaced child. 

A child from another nest, the psychologist says, can benefit from set routines, and being allowed to make her own choices.  

She does not drift so far as suggesting Esmerelda might choose to use her own name. 

7. 

Esmerelda doesn’t know her name has been changed and sealed away in a government department. One day, she may get to see it written on a piece of paper.  

She has lived like a cuckoo in a nest she was assigned to by the state. 

8. 

We are human.  

We are Babushka dolls that nest within each other. We are born as immature replicas. 

This is how we have always lived as human beings. This is not how we have lived in our hiding places.  

We, the adopted ones, have lodged elsewhere. We have been cast outside our fledgling nests.  

9. 

Here is Esmerelda after thirty-six years. At the grower's market, drizzling her hungry brain in dopamine, like dark, waxy honey.  

Neuroscience might say the chatter she hears is soothing, that the colour of the summer basil she places inside her basket releases feel-good vibes. 

Later, Esmerelda's hands reach for the blender. She enjoys the tactile pleasure of substituting pine nuts with raw almonds and an olfactory hit of smashed up garlic.  

She flakes in a few salt crystals from the edge of the jar of preserved lemons. After tasting the gustatory stimuli of a deep-green paste, she pours the rinsed residue from the blender onto the garden. 

10.   

Adopted people have bad karma. #ThingsMyDoctorHasSaid 

11. 

The next day, Esmerelda knocks at the door of the old family home where she grew up.  

"Pity the wrestling isn't on anymore," her Mum says, flicking the TV to another channel. 

Esmerelda hands her Mum a jar of pesto and a potted flower she has grown as a birthday gift.  

"You have green thumbs, Esmerelda." 

"I don't think so, Mum," she says, helping herself to a banana. "I just have a sense for when things are hungry, and what they need to eat. Would you like some fresh green pesto with your pie? It tastes good. And it’s good for you as well."  

12. 

Anahata.  

The heart chakra wraps the soul in verdant coils. To gaze into lush green viriditas is to spare us from hardness, to revive us with love. A person with a blocked heart chakra may feel fearful.  

Adrift.  

Lonely like Esmerelda, still learning how to call the lady 'Mum'. 

13. 

Mum…shall I call you that now 

that’s a radical change, let the 

gunpowder 

unsettle the status quo   

14. 

On her way to the gate, Esmerelda waves her Mum goodbye, then places her banana skin around an orchid growing over the cross that still bears the faint lettering 'Sequential.'  

She takes an Uber to the train. She flies to Canberra where she is met by a lady with a placard - a social worker, who stands at arrivals handing out zip-locked bags of fresh green grapes.  

15. 

All over the world, Google says, people want to know so many things about adoption. People, Google says, ask: 

Are adopted people damaged?

What is adoption syndrome? 

Why do they push people away? 

16.  

See the 6.00 am crush, the suits in the lobby. See the voiceless goldfish, Cher, mouthing a mute scream at Meatloaf on the TV behind the concierge. See the lady with the long strained neck walk out of the lift behind the man with the straight grey hair. See shoes shine on polished marble walk across to the bus; the social worker, thumb to phone, organising lists. The present, the missing. The lady in linen, the man in the sports cap handing a lanyard to the woman whose glimmer print and race day heels seem at odds with the spitfire sky as the Capital throws its tantrum.  

See them join the bus that joins other buses filled with people who have come to hear the Minister for Onkaparinga say she wants to blanket their memories.  

See the heads on the bus turn as the bus goes round the lawns of Parliament House, the ripple of shoulders shrinking down in seats at the sight of the guns, held by men and women in white uniforms and tight chin straps. Seatbelts tighten as the solemn mood turns to panic.  

"They're not for us," a man on the bus says, facing the glass, a frizzed goatee flicking the early sun.  

"Us?" the lady next to him says. "Those guns are for us?"  

At least eight guns, ten, maybe more, with support trucks guarding the rear.  

"No, I don't reckon the guns for us," the guy next to me says, as the bus heaves down into the bellows of parliament.   

The guns make the people on the bus take fright, heading in through the gates of parliament. Their own government produced pieces of paper that blew up the family nest, ordinary life, replacing it with a mystery that required an extraordinarily large environmental adjustment. For the greater good, they were taken from their families as babies, and placed in the arms of those who could not start families on their own. 

17. 

After they were reassigned for the greater good, nest, as place to live and love became a place of past tense. A past participle of never land. Target practice, afterwards, seemed inevitable.  

Lost  

on  

the   

breath   

of  

chance.  

18. 

Even her own mother didn't love her.  
#ThingsPeopleSayAboutAdoption 

19. 

For those who drifted on the breath of chance  
For those about to explode the myth  
For those who are here as witness,  
We, the rest of the country, who believed in the need for babies to be sent elsewhere,  
We Salute You  

20. 

The only thing the people on the bus know about one another is that they too, have lived as outcasts. Fending for themselves in the grips of the alien clan.  

Theirs is a solitary unity. A presence that whispers beneath the spoken word, cushioned in the amnionic of pre-verbal trauma.  

The man next to Esmerelda on the bus has stopped looking out the window at the people in uniform, the young men and women, climbing over the nation’s guns in stark white uniform. He closes his eyes and cries.  

“I have never felt so alone and connected at the same time," he says, and Esmerelda does not know where to look.  

She does not know his name and he does not ask hers. They do not ask which wind they drifted in on or how they fill their ordinary days. 

And the wheels of the bus meet up with other busses that go round and under the houses of parliament, where all the adopted people here to bear witness for what Australia has done to them, are walked inside and treated as dignitaries. For the first time they are not shushed away, like guilty secrets. They are witness to what the government calls the atrocities that drew them out of the nest.  

Inside the foyer of Parliament House, Esmerelda and her unknown friend reach for cocktail sausage-rolls.  

Discomfort food.  

They lift champagne from young men and woman, aprons strung at the waist.  

And they stand there, unspeaking. Adopted people marking time on blackened tiles, not knowing what to say or where to look. Some wear badges as tokens of fidelity, having lost, irretrievably, a piece of themselves that cannot be returned.  

One lady’s breast is pinned with three loss buttons. One baby was returned, she tells Esmerelda. But the toddler she got back was never the same as the newborn baby she lost.  

Time has a tendency to explode that way, until we no longer recognise what was or might have been. 

21. 

On 22 March 2023, Prime Minister Albanese will say: “This is not ancient history. Not some distant tale from the banished past. The Australians affected are with us still.” 

22. 

We are with him still, seated above the Prime Minister in the galleries of Parliament House, where Julia Gillard is supposed to commemorate the decade that has gone by since her National Apology for Forced Adoption in March 2013. Instead, she is stranded somewhere. So another woman is assigned to deliver.  

Our substitute, Minister Rishworth from Onkaparinga, stands before the house, in her parliamentary white pants suit, as crisp as a 1970s nurse’s uniform, a podium and thick red glasses shielding her from our witness jitters.  

23. 

The six R’s of an effective apology – recognition, responsibility, regret, reasons, redress and release. - Deborah Glass, Ombudsman  

24. 

In the corridor, Esmerelda inspects the portraits of the Prime Ministers who presided over past adoption policies, hung beside Australia's only female Prime Minister.  

Julia. Juliar, Ditch the Witch. A woman who was hounded until she quit. Whose name is now whispered like the Abbess of Adoption, our own Hildegard, protector of the clan.  

The social workers wearing coloured lanyards approach the disengaged with casual check-ins.  

Esmerelda hides her wet face after Rishworth remembers the feather-filled pillows placed over post-partum faces, so a baby would not fall in love with her mother. But around the table we all know the truth, that we were not delivered from the womb into the arms of new love. We were shelved in hospital cribs and foster homes. Often for many months.  

Governments never thought to write this down.  

Once we were sent to our final nests, our history was erased.  

25. 

The guns have beat their retreat by the time the busses emerge.  

Countless Australian families were exploded by forced adoption, policies the government now says were reprehensible, immoral, inexcusable.  

"And above all,” Rishworth bravely says, “it was illegal. It was wrong. It was cruel. And people were expected to live ever after in silence."   

26. 

Allow the spark
within you
to
shine, shine, shine.
— Hildegard 

27. 

        They shine and speak out now, those like Hildegard who became the token women.  

        They were told their time for babes in arms would come later on, and that for now, someone more competent could make the better nest. Many of them later died, by suicide, many never married, and never had that replacement child.  

        On the bus we remember the full house of Australian parliamentarians. Our elected representatives including members of all Australian political parties, who said "hear, hear!" and buttoned their jackets as they left the House in the middle of the speech, but would not look up as they walked beneath us, seated in the public gallery. We remembered the handshake of the Attorney General, receiving us into a room in the hallowed halls of the nation where legislation that allowed 250,000 Australians to be handed on, during Australia’s Force Adoption era. 

        Even now, they will not witness our nest of faces, we, who inked past adoption practices with every breath we ever chanced, and every eyrie hope we had to simply belong. We, who walk each day from cradle to grave, feathered on the breath of chance.