There is a half-crumbling church, covered in red dust, at Radium Hill, a former uranium mine deep in the South Australian desert. It was built by Father Vincent Shiel, with his own hands, in 1956. Six years later, his son Brendan was born in Melbourne to a former nun — a secret the priest kept until he died 37 years later.
Brendan was one of the lucky ones. Both he and his brother Damien were adopted by Roy and Bet Watkins, in Richmond, Melbourne. As Damien, who was adopted two years before Brendan, recalls: “One day a clergyman was talking to Roy and said, ‘Uh, how come you don’t have children yet?’ And Roy said, ‘Well, we haven’t been blessed’. And he said, ‘Maybe that’s something we can help you with’.”
Brendan and Damien had an idyllic life with Roy and Bet, who were huge Richmond Tigers fans. They told the boys they were adopted when they were young, but it was Brendan who was most curious about finding his biological parents.
In 1990, at the age of 29, Brendan decided to apply for his original birth certificate because it would carry the names of his biological parents. A meeting was set up at the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau in Melbourne. But it wasn’t what he expected.
“I was hoping that the birth certificate would have both parents’ names,” says Brendan. “It just had my mother’s”. And she wasn’t 16, 17 or 18, as he expected, but much older — 27 — and from South Australia.