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The B-Side Left Off the Sleeve: Forced adoption and Aussie rock
Some albums carry a hidden track. It sits at the end of the final song, after a long stretch of silence. It isn’t on the sleeve. It isn’t in the tracklist. Most people never hear it, because they lift the needle or stop the stream when the listed songs run out. It was always on the record. You just had to keep listening. Australian rock is full of hidden tracks. Not songs. Children. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, an estimated 250,000 or more Australian babies were taken from unmarried mothers and adopted to strangers. The mothers were mostly young, often teenagers, frequently pressured, drugged, lied to or simply ignored. The paperwork sealed the children inside new names and new families. The Commonwealth eventually called it what it was. In March 2013, the Prime Minister stood in Parliament House and apologised for forced adoption. That era is also the era of Australian rock. The pub circuit, the Countdown years, the bands that built a national sound. Young men in vans, young women at gigs, very little contraception and a great deal of shame. It would be strange if the two histories had not crossed. They crossed constantly. The records just left it off the sleeve. I know this from the inside. My birth father was one of the most important record producers this country ever had. I am his hidden track. Bon Scott: the son in Geelong In 1967, before AC/DC, Bon Scott was singing in The Valentines. According to the man who says he is Scott’s son, a 16-year-old girl met Bon at a Valentines gig. She became pregnant. At three months old, her baby was placed with a family in Geelong and grew up as Dave Stevens. He found his history the way adoptees of that generation had to: through a formal application to the state, once the law finally let him ask. By the time his mother told him the name of his father, Bon Scott had been dead for years. They never met. Stevens has never had a DNA test, and online sceptics have used that against him. AC/DC’s original bassist Mark Evans and Scott’s widow, Irene Thornton, both accept his account. I don’t hold the doubt against him. I hold it against the system. A man whose father’s name rests on his mother’s word alone is not a weak claimant. He is the product of an adoption regime that recorded the mother, erased the father, and sealed the result. The gap in the evidence was manufactured. He did not create it. He now plays his father’s songs on stage, and he is careful about the language. Bon is his father, he says, not his dad. Every adoptee hears exactly what that distinction costs. Jimmy Barnes: the son raised as something else Jimmy Barnes was born James Dixon Swan in Glasgow. The family came to South Australia when he was small. His father drank and fought, his mother left, and she came back with a quiet man named Reg Barnes, who married her to give the children some stability. Jimmy took Reg’s surname. He has said his father was his father, but Reg was his dad. So the man who became the voice of Cold Chisel was already carrying an issued name before he was famous. Then he repeated the pattern in a new shape. Barnes was 16 when his son David was born in Adelaide in 1973. David took his mother’s surname, Campbell, and was raised by his maternal grandmother. For around a decade, nobody told him who his father was. The secret held until he was ten or eleven. This was not a formal adoption. There was no agency and no court. But it was the same machinery, run inside a family: a child placed with grandparents, a surname that covered the gap, a truth kept from the person it most concerned. Barnes has since said the long silence was a mistake. David has said that becoming friends before he knew made it easier to become father and son afterwards. Both of those things can be true. The silence was still a decision made about a child, without the child. Rob Hirst: the daughter from the 1970s Rob Hirst co-wrote some of the most morally serious songs in Australian music. “Beds Are Burning.” “The Dead Heart.” “Blue Sky Mine.” Midnight Oil spent decades confronting institutions about land, power and who gets erased. Hirst was 17 and his girlfriend was 15 when their daughter was born in the early 1970s. The baby was adopted. She grew up as Jay, and became a country singer. They found each other in 2010, through her mother and through Midnight Oil’s bassist, Bones Hillman. In 2020, Hirst recorded an album with his daughter’s band, O’Shea. When he died this January, the obituaries listed her alongside his two daughters with his wife. Most of the coverage says Hirst “gave her up”. I don’t accept that framing, and I don’t think it serves him either. A 15-year-old mother in 1970s New South Wales was not making a free choice, and neither was a 17-year-old father. The decision belonged to parents, social workers, hospitals and an adoption system with quotas to fill and a moral story to protect. The teenagers were the people it happened to. Mark Moffatt: ...
