50 years later, adoptee Robert Bender reflects on his role with Jigsaw Victoria – the adoptee rights group which operated from 1976 to 1986 and successfully campaigned to open up birth records for adult adoptees.
Content warning: Robert’s story contains a description of family violence from his childhood that may be distressing to read, particularly for survivors of past abuse, violence or childhood trauma. If you need support around these issues, you can contact Blue Knot Helpline on 1300 657 380 for support relating to complex trauma and childhood abuse, or 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 for support relating to domestic, family or sexual violence. Information about additional support services is also available by contacting VANISH on (03) 9328 8611 (Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm) or by visiting our Contact Us page.
Robert Bender is eighty-one years old, and most mornings find him up around dawn doing conservation work by the Yarra. It is one of several projects that began for him as a passing interest – in this case, to give his children something meaningful to do – and evolved into mastery and leadership through his quiet diligence and endless curiosity. Starting out as a “deeply ignorant volunteer, knowing no botany or zoology or much of anything”, over time he has become increasingly involved in conservation volunteering, research and advocacy, and led the Friends of Organ Pipes National Park committee for eight years. After moving to Ivanhoe, in 1996 he initiated another conservation volunteer group, Friends of Wilson Reserve, that has just celebrated 30 years of operation, transforming a very degraded riverside Council reserve to a showpiece of ecological restoration.
These days he also spends part of the week at Melbourne University’s Baillieu Library with his laptop, working his way steadily through the archive of Jigsaw Victoria – an adoptee rights group which campaigned for years alongside the National Council for the Single Mother and her Child (CSMC) and ARMS Victoria to achieve the landmark law reform of 1984, which opened up birth records for adult adoptees.
A difficult childhood
Robert was adopted as a baby in 1945 by a wealthy Jewish family in Melbourne. His adoptive father was already 55 and his adoptive mother was 38, married for 14 years.
Robert attended Mount Scopus College and grew up comfortably in successively grander houses in Brighton and then Toorak. He describes his parents as “close to illiterate, coming from Jewish Poland, where education for small town Jews was very substandard” and their household as completely devoid of books, music, or ideas discussed around the dinner table. “I grew up almost a blank slate,” he says. “An empty shell.” This cultural ignorance led to a deep sense of shame and inadequacy: “I’ve made up for it now, but it’s been a lifelong struggle.”
His adoptive mother was violent and unpredictable. “She was a smacker,” he says. “And when she smacked, she didn’t have a stop button. She just smacked and smacked and smacked and didn’t know how to stop, because she got hysterical and lost control.” As a small child he ran away from home many times. One memory has stayed with him for seventy years. When he was about six or seven, he’d run two or three blocks, and his mother pulled up in the car and told him to get in to go home. “I said, ‘I don’t trust you. If I get in the car, you’ll just hit me.’ And she said, ‘No, I won’t. I promise.’” He reluctantly got in. She closed the door, started driving at a walking pace, and hit him all the way home. “That day, she lost any trust I ever had in her about being honest and being a caring mother,” he says.
Finding out he was adopted
Nobody told Robert he was adopted until he was nineteen. His adoptive mother, struggling in the aftermath of his father’s death, had been seeing a series of social work counsellors and telling them about her ‘difficult adopted son’. When each of them advised that she needed to tell Robert that he was adopted, his mother simply changed counsellors, until she found one who said, “He really must know, and if you don’t tell him, I will”. Robert was invited to join her next appointment at the counsellor’s office in South Yarra and found his mother sitting there terrified that her adopted son would walk out and never see her again.
But Robert instantly felt compassion rather than anger towards his mother, realising that she had been living with the fear of her son finding out the truth for 19 years, as well as astonishment that nobody in such a large extended family had ever let anything slip. Soon afterward he went to the County Court and asked the chief judge for his original birth certificate, but the judge said no, after consulting with all his fellow judges. So for years, he put his questions aside and got on with his life.
Feeling unparented
The questions returned when Robert became a father himself. After his son was born in 1971, witnessing his wife’s fierce, instinctive bond with their baby made him intensely aware of what he had obviously never had. “My adoptive mother was not motherly in any sense at all,” he says. “She got a mothercraft nurse to come with me from the hospital, who did all the mothering, while she tried to wiggle her way into the family business. I got to adulthood feeling unparented. Essentially, I still do.”
That realisation tipped over into a long depression. “I went through quite a long phase of being really depressed about all that, and feeling that adoption had, in its many aspects, severely blocked my emotional growth into adulthood, and that I wasn’t ever going to get past that unless I sorted out this adoption business.” He spent a lot of time curled up in bed, feeling that there was nothing he could do.
New doors opening
For the next five years, Robert developed himself in all sorts of ways but made no progress in making sense of his adoption, until he attended the first Australian conference on adoption in Sydney, 1976, which introduced him to the whole field of adoption: its structure, institutions and problems, and facilitated connection with a small number of adult adoptees and natural mothers.
Through Kath Lancaster, the chief social worker at the Royal Women’s Hospital where he was born, he learned that he was entitled to non-identifying information about his mother and discovered that she was 26, single and from Sydney at the time of Robert’s birth. Two years later, a close friend of his adoptive mother’s pushed her to reveal the fact that she’d always known his natural mother’s name. Robert, then a schoolteacher, waited for the September holidays, drove to Sydney, and within 24 hours of arriving had traced her through electoral rolls and a synagogue. His mother agreed to contact, and they met at a café near the wine shop that she managed.
A decade of closeness, followed by an ending
What followed was everything Robert had hoped it might be. “I had for quite a few years a really lovely relationship with her,” he says. “I had this really positive relationship with someone who had just accepted me as I was, who didn’t just automatically reject every aspect of me, as my adoptive mother had always done.” He brought his children to see her in Sydney nearly every school holiday and she was a wonderful grandmother. He took her to visit the grave of his father – a man who had promised to leave his wife for her and then vanished the instant she told him she was pregnant – where she cried because she had really loved him.
In later years, his mother was absorbed into an intensely religious community when one of her children from her later marriage became an Orthodox Jew, and if the community learned of Robert’s existence, she would have been expelled from it. “My relationship with her pretty much died because it had to,” Robert says. “She needed, in her old age, a welcoming, supporting community, and I could not offer that to her. So she kept quiet about it and stopped relating to me in any way at all. That was rather sad.”
Robert does not tell this part of the story with any bitterness. “In terms of my adoption quest, I got everything I wanted. And any questions I asked her about understanding my adoption situation, she freely told me,” he says. “In terms of a lifelong relationship, I didn’t. But I can understand why.” Reflecting on his adoption and reunion overall, he says, “When people talk about win-win solutions, there is no such thing. Everything in life is win-lose. You gain something, you lose something. And I gained, and I lost.”
From five members to adoption law reform
Meanwhile, within months after attending the first Australian adoption conference, Robert helped to establish Jigsaw, together with American adoptee Rona Devlin, who had been a member of Florence Fisher’s Adoptee Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) in the US. Jigsaw began as a tiny self-help group, where adoptees would discuss the importance of adoption records for their lives and mental health, but soon diversified to include natural mothers and some adoptive parents. Because Rona felt too shy to represent Jigsaw in the media, she assigned Robert as the first president and herself as secretary.
Jigsaw advocated to give adult adoptees in Victoria the right to their own original birth certificates for the first time, as well as equivalent rights for natural mothers to learn the adoptive identity of their children on them reaching adulthood. In the early years of the campaign, they faced resistance from all sides – adoptive parents, the County Court judges and the major political parties. Robert recalls the profound conflict between those who believed in secrecy and those who believed in openness and honesty. There was an argument at the time that adoption was a contract, based on the fundamental principle of confidentiality, between a natural mother and the adoptive parents. “The contract said, ‘you will never see your child again.’ And the natural mother said, ‘Yep, that’s exactly what I want,’ as though adoption law is a branch of contract law, but of course it wasn’t a contract in any meaningful sense,” he says.
Ultimately it took eight years, from the Statute Law Revision Committee’s enquiry into whether adoptees should be given access to their birth records in 1976, to the passing of the Adoption Act in 1984 – greatly aided by Pauline Toner, the first female Minister in Victoria, “as always, a lone voice of progressive thinking.” Minister Toner attended several Jigsaw meetings, Robert recalls, always positive and supportive, and accepted that law reform should be evidence-based, not based around the fears and anxieties of consumers.
Managing a rapidly growing organisation
During this time, Jigsaw continued its search and support work, running entirely on volunteer goodwill. Jigsaw’s phone rang from six in the morning until midnight, overwhelming rostered volunteers who found they could not hang up on someone pouring out a lifetime of grief, could not leave for the school run, and in one case, couldn’t even get up to go to the toilet between calls. “People required counseling to recover. Many of them had very sympathetic spouses, but who also said, ‘This is taking over your life. I’ve lost you,’ and that caused problems in their lives as well,” Robert says. Turnover was constant. At one point there was great internal debate about whether they should pay their search volunteers for their time and expertise, but turning Jigsaw into an employer with tax and workers compensation obligations proved too complicated.
After five years, Robert stepped down from the presidency, not because the work was finished, but to devote more time to a new relationship after his divorce. “Within a few months, she said, ‘Jigsaw takes up so much of your life. There’s no room for me.’ I saw that this relationship was doing amazing things for my appallingly low self-esteem, and I thought, I don’t want to lose this,” he says. He was careful to step back only once he was confident other people were capable of running it well and remained on the Standing Committee on Adoption for a while afterwards. Getting Jigsaw out of his head, he says, took far longer than getting out of the role. “It had taken over so much of my life.”
By the time he stepped back from Jigsaw in 1981, the organisation had grown to nearly a thousand members and had managed searches that led to over one hundred successful reunions. On finding the first-ever submission to the Statute Law Revision Committee’s enquiry that he wrote for Jigsaw 50 years ago, in the archival boxes at the Baillieu Library, Robert was pleased to see that its ideas are almost exactly what was provided in the 1984 Adoption Act.
Fifty years on
Robert is currently working his way through the boxes of Jigsaw’s original records, digitising documents one by one. He is up to box seventeen of forty. It was David Hirt, Jigsaw’s last president, who insisted the material be preserved rather than thrown out, while he was dying of prostate cancer in the early 2000s, and Robert is making sure that it happens. He juggles this archival work alongside his conservation volunteering, a busy social calendar, and other intellectual and cultural pursuits. In 2019 he received an OAM, nominated by the Friends of Organ Pipes National Park, in recognition of both his conservation work and his role in adoption law reform.
Given Robert’s ability to show up patiently and consistently for two very different fights over the years, it would be easy to assume that he’s naturally optimistic about change. But he’s quick to clarify. “I’m a natural pessimist, a very, very deep pessimist, but it’s mixed in with some hopeful optimism,” he says. “I spend a very large fraction of my waking day these days doing conservation work, which, in terms of the long-term future of planet Earth, I am totally convinced is a complete waste of time. I am swimming against a massive tide, and I can’t stop it from doing the very destructive work that’s going on.
“But I can’t lay down and die while I’m alive. I’ve got to try, even though it’s a lost cause, because while I’m alive and I’m still doing the work, it looks as though for the moment that I’m winning. When I retire, because I get too old and decrepit to keep it going, I will lose, and the weeds will take over, and it’ll be a complete waste of time, but I’m not there yet, so of course I have to keep trying. I’m not going to behave as though I’m dead.”
*VANISH recognises that people impacted by adoption prefer to use different terms to describe their family members. The language used in this article is Robert’s own.