For 20-odd years, Graham Rossiter had been driving past his biological mother's home in a small regional West Australian town, completely unaware of her existence.
Then, three years ago — at 51 years of age — his father asked to see him and his life was turned upside down.
"At the time, my father was quite ill and he called me over one Sunday afternoon and said 'can you come over, I've got something I need to tell you,'" Mr Rossiter said.
"I sat down and he just started saying 'you know you are adopted' and in my mind, I'm just thinking, 'you're joking, what are you talking about?'"
Mr Rossiter's traumatic experience was mirrored on the other side of the country in regional New South Wales by another man, Peter Capomolla Moore.
Both have had their lives up-ended in recent years, with the sudden mid-life discovery that they were adopted out as babies.
They were suddenly faced with the realisation their parents — and society — had been keeping that secret from them for decades.
They are both now calling for people who have been adopted to have a right to know, instead of finding out the truth the hard way, if at all.
Mr Capomolla Moore, who runs support group Adoptee Rights Australia, said there had to be a better way.
"People deserve to know, it's a human right," he said.
"Not by finding out by DNA. Not by finding out by a disgruntled adoptive sibling who blurts it out in the middle of a heated argument.
"I think the governments have a duty of care to adoptees to notify them of their adoptive status."
Hidden in plain sight
To varying degrees, state adoption laws across the country have evolved since the late 90s to recognise adoptees' right to know their origins.
But Adoptee Rights Australia said there was nothing in the legislation that legally forced authorities or adoptive parents to tell children they were adopted.
Under the "historical forced adoption" practices of the 1950s to the early 1980s when over 150,000 babies were removed from their unwed mothers, in many cases adoptive parents were advised not to tell children they were adopted.
Some of those children, who are now adults and well into their middle age, are finding out the truth at the 11th hour.
They are called Late Discovery Adoptees.
Graham Rossiter never got the chance to quiz his adoptive mother about the detail of what had happened as sadly she had already passed away
Understandably, Mr Rossiter had lots of questions. Even his birth certificate had his adoptive parents' names on it.
It was a document he would later learn had been created by authorities after he was officially adopted when he was just three weeks old.
Once Mr Rossiter got over the shock, which was considerable, he started what turned out to be a tormenting search for his biological mother.
Even if she was still alive, she could be anywhere, he thought. Perhaps interstate, even overseas.
He sought help from WA's Department of Communities.
Six months later, he got the news.
It turned out his mother Jill was living in Harvey, a country town about 90 minutes drive south of Perth. It was a place he had spent decades driving through as part of his work as a delivery driver.
"When Jill told me she was living in Harvey, it was just like, 'oh my god, you’re so close,'" he recalled.
"Why did it take me so long to find you?"
Little did he know that about the same time, Jill Church had also started to look for him.
Uncovering a painful past
Mrs Church had waited until her husband, who was not Graham’s father, had passed away before beginning the search for the child she gave birth to at Perth’s King Edward Memorial Hospital in 1967.
At 18, she had fallen pregnant to a worker in her hometown of Manjimup and soon found out how society treated unmarried mothers.
“When I started to really show, they’d walk past me and look at me sideways,” Mrs Church said.
Although her father was supportive, Mrs Church said her mother would not talk about the pregnancy because it was "a blemish on her".
As with thousands of other young single mothers of that era, she was given no support to keep the child and was left with little option but to give the baby up for adoption straight after the birth.
"No holding, nothing, I couldn’t even see him at King Edward,” she said.
"They said, 'it’s not your child anymore.'"
Decades later, when Mrs Church finally begun the search for Graham, her daughter Cheryl, who helped unearth a vital piece of the jigsaw, was by her side.
Buried under old paperwork inside a wooden writing box that belonged to Mrs Church's father, they discovered a birth registration card that contained some crucial information.
A hug 53 years in the making
From there, state authorities tracked down Graham Rossiter and a meeting was arranged for January 2020.
“I was a bundle of nerves,” Mrs Church said.
“I kept saying to Cheryl, 'what if he doesn’t like me or what if I don’t like him?' And Cheryl said 'well just wait and see mum.'"
But from that very first morning tea, they clicked.
Since then, Mr Rossiter has seen his new family regularly and has also tracked down his biological father with whom he has a good relationship.
But, he is sad about the "missing years".
“I hear stories that Mum and Cheryl have told me and it would have been nice if I had been part of those stories, and part of the family growing up,” he said.
"You can't get back those years."
A right to connection
Mr Rossiter believes there are many practical reasons why people who have been adopted should be given the choice to find their natural family, including accessing crucial family medical history which could ultimately save their lives.
"I had medical issues back in my 40s … the doctors were looking for anything to try and help me with an illness I had at the time," he said.
"…having family medical history back then, would have been fantastic."
That is one of many issues Peter Capomolla Moore believes state governments, who each have their own adoption laws, need to address.
"Number one, they need to red flag and identify who the adoptees are, and this could possibly be done in conjunction with cross-referencing to Medicare," he said.
“This would have the dual advantage of, for the first time, actually having data that we can look at the longitudinal health outcomes of adoptees.
"Overseas studies suggest adoptees have far higher rates of suicide, substances abuse, incarceration, homelessness."
DNA unveils indigenous roots
Five years ago, in his other life, Mr Capomolla Moore was a family genealogist who had identified thousands of people on his family tree.
He had travelled to family reunions and hosted one himself. He had even refurbished the grave of an Irish convict ancestor.
But, at 59, he discovered via a DNA test that he had been adopted.
“I was just shell-shocked. It was surreal. It was a road of high highs and low lows,” he said.
“A roller-coaster ride.
“My life to that point had really been based on a lie.”
Sadly, it was too late to find his father, who had already passed away but he has reconnected with his mother and the rest of his new-found Aboriginal family.
Compounding Mr Capomolla Moore's trauma was the fact that years earlier, as a 12-year-old boy, he had asked his parents if he was adopted, and they had put his mind at rest by showing him a birth certificate with their names on it.
He later discovered the birth certificate had been a "fake", created by authorities after the adoption.
He has been fighting for adoptees' rights since then, arguing little progress has been made since the 2013 national apology to survivors of forced adoption.
Australia has a patchwork of state adoption laws, which he said, should be repealed.
"Adoptees aren’t given the same rights as non-adoptees," he said.
"We're tied up in this secretive legislation that controls our lives for life."
The 64 year old last year gave evidence to a Victorian Government inquiry into historical forced adoption that has resulted in a redress scheme for mothers whose babies were removed.
Since then, there have been calls for Western Australia to launch a similar inquiry.
But Adoptee Rights Australia is calling for redress to be extended nationally to adopted people.
Also on the group's wishlist are free and simple procedures for finding family and accessing documents to help adoptees who want to reclaim their original identities.
For example, it is calling for "no fault, no fee" adoption discharges, where people who have been adopted can have their adoption reversed, without an arduous court process.
"Not all adoptees want to reverse that but the option should be there for those who do want to do it. It shouldn’t cost them anything because we didn’t put ourselves into the situation," Mr Capomolla Moore said.
So-called "vetoes" which operate like restraining orders between those involved in adoption should also be cancelled, the group claims, because they treat adoptees and mothers like "criminals".
The group has partial support from a retired Family Court judge who chaired the Commonwealth Government’s Forced Adoptions Apology Reference Group.
Former professor of Law at Monash University, the Honourable Nahum Mushin AM, said during that process he came across large numbers of people who had only found out late in life they were adopted.
"Entirely understandably, they were significantly affected by that and I think that does wrong by them," he said.
"I think to a significant degree, the adoptees are, together with the adoptive parents, I might say the forgotten people in forced adoption.
"The sooner we cure that, the sooner we will make significant advances in this field."
But he said fixing the system was complicated because of the sometimes competing rights of adoptees, mothers and adoptive parents.
He said there needed to be a national conversation, perhaps an inquiry, hearing evidence from those affected, and that the Commonwealth should take over adoption powers from the states.
"We have six states, six adoption laws. In my view, that's bad policy," he said.
"I think the first thing that needs to happen is that the states should refer their powers in adoption to the Commonwealth," he said.
In Mr Rossiter's home state of Western Australia, a state government spokesman said Department of Communities' files showed that since the 1970s adoptive parents had been "strongly encouraged" to inform their adopted children of their origins.
"The right for adoptees to know their identity and where they came from is in current legislation and is emphasised in all aspects of adoption in WA," a spokesman said.
With regards to contact vetoes, the statement added that although existing vetoes were still in place, no new vetoes had been allowed following a review of the law in the late 1990s.
The New South Wales government said an integral part of its adoption legislation and practice was the principle of "open adoption".
"This recognises there are benefits to a child being aware of their background and being able to develop and maintain a relationship with their birth family," the statement said.
