Kathy’s fight to have her real identity recognised

As Kathy Hodgson tells her remarkable story from her home in Kingston, south-east of Brisbane, her husband, Jim, chips in from the sidelines with the odd encouraging comment to lighten the mood. “She’s come back from the dead,” he quips, and they laugh together at the bizarre situation Hodgson finds herself in.

If they didn’t laugh, they would cry. Humour has got them through some difficult times. For more than two years, she has been trying to convince NSW authorities that she was illegally adopted. That she is not the biological daughter of her parents, as listed on her birth certificate. She believes she was whisked away after her real mother was told she was stillborn. “It wasn’t legal what they did,” Hodgson says. “It was all a lie.”

The 68-year-old is steeling herself to appear at a crucial hearing in Sydney on Tuesday. Representing herself, she’ll try to convince the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) that her existing birth certificate with her adoptive parents’ names on it is a fiction and should be replaced with the real thing. She has gathered significant evidence, not least the official DNA testing of her biological mother, which shows “a relative chance of maternity of 99.9999971747 per cent”.

Even that wasn’t enough to convince the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages that her birth certificate should be changed. The registrar declined her request. It’s that decision that NCAT is reviewing.

But Hodgson’s long battle to reclaim her identity is taking a toll. She has been suffering from repeated illnesses and has lost four kilos. This is about a lot more than a piece of paper. It’s about family secrets, trust and truth.

The story dates back to 2006 when her older brother – her adoptive brother, as it turned out – paid her a visit with some “horrible” news.

“He said ‘Dad’s not your dad. You were adopted’,” recalls Hodgson of the encounter, shortly after both parents had died within a year of each other. “It just broke me up.

“He was in tears, I was in tears. Your whole world falls apart.”

It couldn’t be true, she thought. They’d had a good upbringing. She’d been close to her father. Plus, she had a birth certificate proving her identity. When the NSW Department of Communities and Justice confirmed that there was no adoption order in their records, Hodgson put the whole thing aside.

Two years later, the issue was firmly put on the backburner, after a family tragedy. One of her sons died from a blood clot after a football injury and for a long time, finding out her origins just wasn’t important.

It wasn’t until 2022, when questions were still playing on her mind, that she decided to put her brother’s claim to the test. Home DNA testing kits had become available and were proving a game changer for people wanting to delve into their ancestry. “I thought, why not? I’ll just do this,” Hodgson recalls. “But what a shock when the results came back.”

A few weeks after supplying a saliva sample, an email dropped into her inbox. “I thought, hang on, what’s this?” The report back from the company stated that she had a close family match to a complete stranger, a woman named Kylee, aged in her 30s, who lived on NSW’s Central Coast. The two connected through the website and Kylee, aware of a family story of a baby lost at birth, asked her mother, Vivyene, if she would be tested. Vivyene came back as a full sibling match. It was a revelation.

Hodgson then discovered she had another three full siblings and two half-siblings. Not only that, but it turned out they had grown up a few streets away from her in Fairfield, Sydney.

It was too late to meet her father, William Annesley, a motor mechanic and farmworker who died in 1993, but her mother, Nita, was still alive and living in a nursing home in Forbes. Hodgson’s new-found family were excited to meet up. Vivyene said she had been looking for her too. Her grave, that is.

Vivyene said that Nita had told her 32 years ago of a baby who was stillborn and was taken away from her at birth and never seen again.

It was just before Mother’s Day in 2023 that Hodgson set off on the 13-hour drive south to meet her new-found relatives face to face, sharing the driving with her two sons, Lee and Jon. “They were keen as,” she recalls. “C’mon Mum, we’re going to do this.”

Nervous and unsure of what to expect, they met the family for dinner in the town of Parkes, not far from the nursing home. Hodgson says right from the start, there was a connection. “As I walked around the corner, they just took one look and came racing over and put their arms around me,” she recalls. “And I thought, dear god. And then we all just burst into tears.

“They said ‘it’s like you’ve always been here Kathy. You’ve never been away.’”

The next day, her two sisters took her to meet Nita. Their mother had dementia, but the sisters had been preparing her for Hodgson’s arrival. Hodgson says she was overwhelmed by the reaction. “She would not stop holding my hand and telling me she loved me, you’re my baby girl,” she recalls.

Photos of the two at a similar age show an incredible resemblance, including a distinctive gap between their front teeth. Two peas in a pod separated for more than 60 years.

The mystery of how it happened is unlikely to be solved. There’s little trace now of Fairview Private Hospital in Fairfield listed on Hodgson’s existing birth certificate. Apart from birth notices in newspaper archives, the hospital did make headlines in 1955 when its proprietor, a registered midwife, Marion Ellery, was fined in court for an “audacious fraud”. An article from the time says she faced 27 charges for claiming hospital benefits for fictitious babies and forging birth certificates.

The registrar named on Hodgson’s birth certificate on April 30, 1957, three weeks after she was born, has long since died. Another document shows that two days before the registration, she was baptised at Fairfield Catholic Church. Other family members who may have been able to shed light on what happened at the time of the birth are also no longer around.

It’s impossible to verify whether the stillborn account that the family was given is accurate. Nita was married and already had four children when she became pregnant. One of them, Divina, was just 15 months old at the time and believes there could be another explanation for why Hodgson ended up with another family. “I think Mum and Dad, having too many kids at that time, too young, couldn’t deal with another one, because Dad wasn’t working at the time,” she says. “I think they made a really hard decision, which I think is very sad.”

Hodgson accepts it’s a possibility, but believes Nita thought she was stillborn. Another brother remembers his mother speaking of a stillbirth just after she went to hospital to give birth but returned without a baby.

With so many unanswered questions, Hodgson was determined to at least get her real birth certificate while Nita was still alive to show her that the truth of their connection was finally in black and white. It was a race against time.

Nita, in her 90s and frail, died in June even as Hodgson was jumping through bureaucratic hoops. ″⁣She didn’t make it,″⁣ Hodgson says, brushing away tears. ″⁣It just wasn’t meant to be.″⁣

While unusual, Hodgson’s situation has a precedent. Another NSW adoptee, Peter Capomolla Moore, appealed to NCAT in 2023 and won after his application to add his biological father’s name to his birth certificate was refused.

The president of Adoptee Rights Australia hopes the tribunal will also find in Hodgson’s favour, adding that the registrar has an obligation under the law to bring the registry into conformity with the most reliable information. “Basically, it wasn’t a legal adoption,” he says. “She has given them everything they [the registry] want.

“They need to call off their lawyers, stop being adversarial … [and] instead, right the wrongs in a compassionate and empathetic manner.”

When asked about Hodgson’s case, the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages said it was unable to comment on individual matters. However, in a statement, it said that under the law, a parent could be added to a birth record (including a pre-adoptive record) in specific circumstances. These include when both parents apply together and when a court makes an order.

The Registry pointed out that its “vulnerable communities team” attends more than 100 events a year providing advice and support. “Fee waivers are also available for people affected by former forced adoption policies,” it said.

Elise Fordham, principal lawyer at family law specialist Watts McCray, sympathised with Hodgson: “It is difficult for people in this situation to reconcile that the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has a strict set of legislation to work under, and it can be complex to navigate.”

Hodgson’s case has parallels to the experiences of many other adopted people who were removed from their mainly unwed mothers during what’s called the “forced adoption” era from the 1940s to the early 1980s.

A Senate inquiry report into former forced adoption practices, published in 2012, referred to the illegal removal of children where there was no paperwork. Although Nita was married at the time of the birth, the report also refers to cases of single mothers being told that their baby had died when the child had been taken away for what was referred to as a “rapid adoption”.

Broadly, the report called for greater support for survivors trying to access records and reclaim their identities. It also recommended that there be a national framework to co-ordinate the changes, led by the Commonwealth.

That adopted people are still struggling to overcome significant hurdles over 10 years since the report and a subsequent national apology by Julia Gillard is a concern for Capomolla Moore.

Loading

“This is just trauma on trauma, and it’s bureaucratic trauma that is completely unnecessary,” he says. “I am personally aware of a number of people in this [Hodgson’s] situation. There needs to be a pathway for cases like Kathleen’s.”

For these vulnerable people, their birth certificate isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s an integral part of understanding who they are, according to VANISH, a support group for people affected by adoption in Victoria.

Chief executive Michelle Blanchard says records and information have been flowing faster to survivors since Victoria completed its inquiry into forced adoption responses in 2021, but there has been no sign of a consistent national approach.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek was approached for comment on the national framework, but declined. Instead, the Department for Social Services provided a statement, saying it was continuing to support affected families with ongoing funding for the Forced Adoption Support Services program that delivers tailored trauma-informed care.

Loading

For Hodgson, who is living on an aged pension, the experience of reclaiming her identity has been long, traumatic and costly. She says she can’t afford to hire a lawyer and will continue to represent herself. She is prepared to get a court order – the next step if the tribunal does not find in her favour – but does not believe she should have to.

“It’s not as if I’m asking them for a million dollars. All I’m asking them to do is to correct the details in the registry,” she says. “Just to give me some peace.”

There will be a big celebration, she says, when the document is finally granted. She’s got plenty of family members in her corner. “Now, I’ve found my real family, and they’re just wonderful,” she says. “They are backing me all the way.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.