Separated At Birth

Carol Maney was drugged and her child was taken from her at birth, and that was just one incident in generations of family trauma. Now she speaks with Susan Chenery about family secrets and lies, and her quest to find her lost brothers.

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Carol Maney never got to hold her baby, or even see him. She didn’t know if she had given birth to a boy or a girl. She remembers her waters breaking and then waking up in an operating theatre with green tiles and chrome. All she knew was that she had gone to bed pregnant and woken with a torn birth canal and stitches.

“I was cold, I woke up, I got off the bed and all this blood went everywhere. The nurse came in and told me off for making a mess. For nine days I had no memory. I think I was drugged the whole time,” she tells The Weekly. And she was traumatised.

When Carol came to, her baby was gone, ripped away. She was 17 years old, alone, without support – a naïve, unformed country girl who hadn’t even known how babies were made. To avoid bringing shame on the family, she had been sent to Elim House, an institution in Hobart, Tasmania, where pregnant girls could avoid the social disgrace of a child out of wedlock – of loose morals – where, for the term of their pregnancy, they could disappear.

Run by The Salvation Army, it was a brutal place. “It was dreadful,” says Carol. “We were treated like rubbish, as if we were nothing, like we were not human. The staff were cold and unfeeling. I don’t think anybody talked to me as a person. I never had a conversation with anyone. You were something they wiped their feet on. There was no counselling or support.’’

Instead, even though they or their families were paying board, the girls were punished for their sins. They were made to work in the commercial laundry, to scrub steps, slave in the kitchen. Heavily pregnant, Carol was cleaning the bathroom with a toothbrush just before she gave birth.

She knows of “young women tied to the bed, faces covered with pillows so they couldn’t see their child and bond. There was a whole industry of taking babies.”