The Mothers features four Australian women from three generations—each revealing how ‘having’ a child radically alters her life. Through their eyes, we see the less-than-pretty history of our nation, in which there was no support for women struggling on their own with children and where the forced adoption of the babies of unwed mothers was socially and legally sanctioned. This is a moving novel, made more so when you learn how much it draws on Rod Jones’ own life.
In 1952, Anna gives birth in the (eerily named) Haven—a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers in North Fitzroy in Victoria. While pregnant, Anna lies awake at night telling her baby how much she loves him. She vows to ‘keep her baby safe from these inhuman, baby-stealing fiends at the Haven’, but the Salvos crush her spirit and she surrenders him under duress.
Rod Jones was also born at the Haven in the 1950s. At six weeks old (just like Anna’s baby) he was adopted out.
Even before they take Anna’s baby away, she thinks that having to ‘go through the rest of her life searching for him, was unthinkable’. It is these spare and haunting words that most intimately conveyed to me the grief that these young mothers (including Jones’) experienced. There was no guarantee that mother and child would ever see each other again, as secrecy provisions were common in (State-based) adoption legislation until reforms in the 1980s. ‘The legal effect of adoption was to sever relations between parent and child.’
Shame and social stigma
Pan back to wartime 1917 and we meet Alma. Her husband brings home his mistress, so she leaves, taking the children. They end up living in a sleep-out at the back of Mrs Lovett’s house in Fitzroy where Alma falls pregnant to Mrs Lovett’s son Albert. Their daughter Molly is born in secret.
Albert won’t marry Alma and Mrs Lovett is unsympathetic to her plight. This means Alma must move out and try to feed and clothe herself and her three children on her own. It’s not easy and she eventually places Molly into Brighton’s Melbourne Orphan Asylum.
Leap forward to the 1950s and Molly and her husband adopt a baby boy they call David. He is a difficult child—but Molly dotes on him.
Jump further ahead to the mid-1970s where (in the volatile political context of the Whitlam dismissal and the last stages of the Vietnam War) David lives with Cathy, who discovers she is pregnant to him. They both want to keep the baby but it’s not a sure bet that David will be a stable father. He is often angry and primed for a fight. He’s also a Marxist and a fledgling author who’s quite petulant—a troubled child.
Jones was 17 when the mother he’d known all his life told him he was adopted. It was almost two decades later, in the mid 1980s, when the law changed to give adoptive children the right to contact their biological parents, that Jones located his birth mother. He felt an instant bond with her because they looked so much alike.
Jones praises his adoptive parents for loving and caring for him so well but also recognises that being adopted gave him a sense of otherness that shaped his personality and response to life.
He admits there’s a great deal of him in the character David (anger included) but also says other traits (from his more feminine side) are fused into the women in The Mothers.
Just to be sure of which mothers, exactly, we’re talking about here, the four women are: David’s adoptive grandmother, Alma (Footscray 1917); his adoptive mother, Molly (Brighton 1925, Footscray 1928 and Essendon 1958); his birth mother, Anna (Cockatoo 1990); and his girlfriend, Cathy (Fitzroy 1975).
Collective failure at fatherhood
The men in The Mothers are portrayed variously as extremely selfish, childish, gutless and bubbling with repressed violence. Alma’s husband is a philanderer and Albert won’t support her. Neil abandons Anna, and David is too immature and angry to be a proper support for Cathy.
Having such collective failure at fatherhood dangled in front of me revealed my uncertainty about whether the majority of Australian men now take responsibility for the babies they breed and act with civility towards the women and children in their lives. The law now enshrines this attitude as our gold standard … and I’d really like to believe a high percentage of our men are upholding it. Are they?
What I know for sure is that too many Australian women are still dying or injured as a result of domestic violence. What I also know is that it took until 2013 for our nation to apologise to the victims of the forced adoption practices that were in place in Australia from the late 1950s to the 1970s. During her apology, the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said that separating mothers from their babies like this had created ‘a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering’.
Jones’ book personalises this suffering and shows its generational reach.
Difficult to write
To write the novel, Jones drew on his birth mother’s experiences and the public submissions of mothers to the 2011 Senate inquiry into forced adoption practices. It can’t have been easy territory to chart but, to his credit, no stress is evident in his measured sentences—which I found elegant, understated and a pleasure to read.
I also enjoyed how the lives in The Mothers intersect—and, yet, how each woman’s narrative remains distinct and unique. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout comes to mind here. Jones’ well-observed historical detail doffs its cap at Poor Man’s Orange by Ruth Park. Also, if you want to read a memoir that unearths a real and specific experience of giving up a child—and the public shame visited on ‘a fallen woman’ as a divorcee—you should read A History of Silence: A Memoir by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. His grandmother reluctantly surrendered his mother when she was four.
The Mothers is Jones’ sixth novel and it compels me to look back at his other titles. I loved Billy Sunday but somehow missed his first novel, Julia Paradise, published in 1986 and translated into ten languages. This much-acclaimed novel has more recently been released as a Text Classic—so it’s easy to find.
If you haven’t read Julia Paradise, but feel brave about bearing the sadness you’ll encounter in The Mothers, I’d suggest reading it first. It is a rich and unsettling story about what it has cost some women to be mothers in our land. It also shows the pain and familial fracturing that the forced separations of mothers and babies visited on our people.
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