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    The Little Mongrel - free to a good home

        Genre: Autobiography
        By: Merlene Fawdry
        350 pages

        ISBN: 978-0-9802845-2-2

        RRP: $29.95

The psychology and sociology of adoption is complex. Many adoptive parents have experienced the grief of their inability to bear a child; a deep disappointment leading to uncertainty and  loss of self esteem. Through adoption they restore, to some extent, their social respectability and personal worth, oblivious to the child’s primal wound of separation. The child who is placed with adoptive parents soon after birth is denied the experience of the biological sequence that begins in the womb; the merging of the physiological with the psychological that forms the post partum bond. The resultant collision between the needs of the adoptive parent and adoptee has the capacity to magnify the pain for each and shatter the illusion irrevocably.

In The Little Mongrel, Merlene writes about her personal experience of growing up as an adoptee in the 1950s, her sense of disconnectedness within her adoptive family, and her longing for her birth mother’s return. This mother/child separation forms the genesis of the many fears that dominate her life and drives her search for invisibility. This journey provides a colourful illustration into the cause and effect of welfare practice, within a historical context that also has contemporary relevance.

The Little Mongrel is the true story of Merlene, who is relinquished for adoption at birth to become the fourth child adopted into a family already in a crisis of dysfunction. She lives with her family in an affluent suburb, where the secrets of the family are hidden behind a veneer of respectability and within the attic bedroom she shares with a growing family of adopted and fostered siblings, a colony of bush rats, and the eerie spectres of her troubled mind.
     Merlene spends her childhood in a struggle to understand who she is and what her place is within the family, as she seeks refuge in the fantasy of her birth mother’s return, and in her quest for invisibility against her adoptive mother’s rage against life. As Merlene enters adolescence, her mother embarks on a campaign to have her assessed as mentally impaired and placed in institutional care. When she is unable to find a psychiatrist willing to become complicit in this, her irrational behaviour escalates.
     At thirteen Merlene is sent to live with a family in another town; another household of internal secrets and oppressive silence. She is sent home in disgrace, as a result of false accusations made by her would-be abuser, and the seeds of her rebellion are nurtured further. She spends most of the next three years in institutional care, which includes the notorious Mt St Canice, Convent of the Good Shepherd, in Hobart, and Winlaton Youth Training Centre in Victoria. It is in the latter that she is subjected to a regime of physical deprivation and psychological abuse that tests to the limit the survival skills she has practiced throughout her childhood. She absconds over the barbed wire fence and for two months, she lives by her wits on the streets of Melbourne and the highways of Victoria before her apprehension and return to the institution.
     At sixteen, Merlene is released to her home in Tasmania, with only her determined attitude and a defiant optimism that she will never be deprived of her liberty again, to stand against the whims of her adoptive mother.

Tasmanian born, Merlene Fawdry spent over a quarter of a century working in Youth and Family Services, working toward de-institutionalisation for children and young people and alleviation & prevention of youth homelessness. 

 $29.95 + $10.00 P&H anywhere in Australia

Read an excerpt from The Little Mongrel

For more information or make a comment please email to:  infowrite@fixwrite.net

Ex-state wards and others placed in institutional or alternative care as children and young people seeking information visit CLAN

Forgotten Australians: - A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children

Forgotten Australians website - A website is for women who experienced incarceration in the Convent of the Good Shepherd, also known as Magdalen Homes, in Australia in the 20th century.

Writing links

Famous Reporter

FAW Victoria