I arrived on Australian shores a few weeks after my third birthday, in December 1951. My mother, father and younger brother and I were ‘ten pound poms’. The promise of a new life, employment and sunshine had lured my family, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to leave the challenges of life in post war Britain and embrace a fresh start in Australia. We eventually s....
Madeline Jessica Ramsey was born on 15 January 1994 at Gosford Hospital, NSW, Australia. When she was seven months old, she was adopted by Michael and Carol Ramsey. Madeline has Down syndrome and lives with her family in Wollongong, NSW, Australia. Here is a letter that she wrote to her birth mother for Mother’s Day. Dear Lynda, I want to tell you about my life. I have two co....
I am a mother of three amazing kids. Their ages are: fourteen, twelve, and six. Two boys and one little girl; each delivered into my life in different ways. My eldest son was delivered “biologically,” his younger brother was delivered out of Russia, and my youngest — the girl — was delivered out of Ethiopia. It is true — the method by which each of my children was del....
My first real memory of God is from when I was about five years old. My father was Hindu and my mother was a nominal Christian but the people who worked for us in and around our home, practiced a mixture of, Islam, ancestor worship and animism. One day one of the kitchen staff told me that they had put a curse on me. I still remember very clearly that my first response was t....
13 years ago my marriage was headed for divorce. From the outside everything looked fantastic. My husband Rick and I had four beautiful daughters, a very successful business and we had just moved into our dream home, an impressive rural retreat on the South Coast. But I was miserable. Rick and I only really communicated when we had to and most of the time those conversations en....
