I Carried This, by Nicola Pauling (Photo: Supplied)
I Carried This, by Nicola Pauling (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureJune 14, 2024

A powerful reminder of New Zealand’s dark era of forced adoption

I Carried This, by Nicola Pauling (Photo: Supplied)
I Carried This, by Nicola Pauling (Photo: Supplied)

I Carried This tells the stories of five of the estimated 100,000 New Zealand women who were made to give up their babies in the 1950s and 60s.

On a crisp June Wellington night, I call my 18-year-old daughter for a chat. I tell her I’ve watched a powerful play based on the true stories of five unwed women who fell pregnant in the 1950s and 1960s and had their babies taken off them when they were forced to give them up for adoption. “What do you mean?’’ she asks me from her university hall. “That’s not possible?’’

Yes, it does sound almost unbelievable when you look back on it, that women who fell pregnant without a husband – or the promise of a husband – in the pre-pill and pre-DPB area generally weren’t allowed to keep their babies. Instead, they were typically banished to farms, to homes for unwed mothers, or to stay with relatives in the country, and they often had to give birth in secret away from their own families.

An estimated 100,000 New Zealand women adopted their babies out during this forced adoption era. They usually lost their babies to a married couple because there wasn’t an option B, unless the man who impregnated the woman agreed to put a ring on her finger.

Wellington playwright Nicola Pauling’s documentary theatre work, I Carried This, is a play that really leaves you sitting on the edge of your seat. She rightly thinks our government should follow Australia and issue these women a big apology for human rights violations – and the actors call for this at the end of the one-hour work. More than a decade ago, Australia’s then prime minister Julia Gillard apologised to birth mothers, fathers and the babies who were handed over to married couples in Australia’s forced adoption era. The Australian government has also financially compensated those birth mothers whose babies were whisked off them often while their breast milk was just letting down, while the fathers – the men who got these women pregnant – often continued their lives as though nothing had happened.

In Pauling’s play, we see the stories of five birth mothers cleverly acted out by three actors – Pauling, 78-year-old Hilary Norris, and Mycah Keall – who show how the story of adoption changes over a woman’s lifetime. Just like childbirth, no single story is the same.

Based on Pauling’s interviews with birth mothers in their senior years, there’s an overwhelming theme of loss for the five women the play is based on. Patricia can only handle it by meeting her daughter once and then wanting nothing to do with her. Mary never knew she’d even had sex and realises, at age 80, that her illegitimate pregnancy came from what we today call date rape. One of the most heartbreaking stories is shown at the play’s end when we meet Jane, who is not allowed to see her son after his birth and tries to contact social workers to say she wants to keep her baby, only to be told it’s too late and he has been adopted out. Jane spends 47 years searching for him but finds it’s too late because he has died from suicide.

I Carried This explores a dark period in New Zealand’s past (Photo: Margot Boock)

Norris delivers a moving performance when she acts as the older Jane and says: “Women made a terrible mistake… we made a mistake and had to pay the penalty. Had to be quiet, had to shut up, couldn’t speak out. Oh, we had to control lives for everybody around us. We had to keep lives as normal as it could be for everybody, like the husbands, who were better off not knowing, the children who were never told. But we carried this. We went for decades walking with shame or grief or guilt or loss, but we carried it quietly.’’

I Carried This is about misogyny and female control. It’s telling when a male doctor tells one of the women she must breastfeed the baby she is about to lose while she is in hospital – and he also lies that she will see her baby again. She never does.

The birth mothers often spent their lives hoping to reconnect with the child they lost. If they did, it was often complicated. As one puts it, she was searching for the baby she gave away and didn’t recognise the adult child she later met.

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Their babies were born in the illegal abortion era and there are stories we don’t see in this play: the pregnant women who had to go across to Australia in the late 1960s to get an abortion or have a back street one here; we only get a glimpse of what adoption is like for a child, who often struggles with a lifetime of feelings of rejection and loss of identity.

While we’ve progressed since then, I Carried This also reminds us that women’s reproductive lives continue to be ruled by the patriarchy. Women in some parts of the world are banned from getting a legal abortion and, everywhere, contraception still remains a woman’s responsibility.

I Carried This (written by Nicola Pauling and directed by Jacqueline Coats) is on at Hannah Playhouse until Sunday, June 16.

Keep going!
Who goes there?
Who goes there?

Pop CultureJune 13, 2024

‘Let the mind games begin’: What we know about the new season of The Traitors NZ

Who goes there?
Who goes there?

Featuring a cast full of normies, a well dressed Paul Henry and a new castle of nightmares.

Light the lantern, don a cape and creak open the coffin lid, because the first trailer for the new season of The Traitors NZ is here. If you’ve been trapped in a cryogenic chamber for the last two years, The Traitors NZ is a murder-mystery game where not a drop of blood is spilled. A group of strangers move into a castle, and some are secretly chosen as traitors. They must “murder” the other players one by one, while the remaining players (the faithfuls) work to expose the traitors and banish them from the game before they themselves are killed.

It’s intriguing game of strategy, skill and luck, and this new trailer suggests that season two of The Traitors NZ has plenty of wild and ridiculous drama in store. I’ve watched the trailer more times than Colin Mathura-Jeffree ate eyeballs last year, and here’s everything it reveals about the upcoming season. 

It starts on Monday July 1, 2024

That’s only 18 more sleeps! July 1 is also the day that sunglasses were first invented back in the year 1200. Coincidence? Absolutely. 

Paul Henry is back to run the show…

The broadcaster and Act Party supporter has emerged from his basement filled with gin bottles for another season of strolling around a castle while wearing a very nice three-piece suit. “Who you choose to trust will decide your fate, and possibly your funeral,” Henry announces in a low key, completely normal start to the series.  

…and is accessorising to death

Henry might be ready for the mind games to begin, but my aged noggin started spinning the minute I saw him wearing what appears to be a… beaded necklace? A scarf? Some kind of jazzy lanyard? Might be a trick of the light, might be the final thing we see before three shrouded strangers drag us to our deaths. Either way, lock me in a turret and throw away the key if we’re not all wearing Paul Henry-esque brooches, pocket-kerchiefs and rounded owl spectacles by the end of this well-dressed nightmare. 

There’s not a celebrity in sight

Big news: this trailer suggests that there’s NO celebrities in this season of The Traitors NZ. In fact, the only slightly famous person I recognised was this guy, who looks exactly like the character who ran around killing people on Shortland Street last winter

Celebrities are all well and good, but there’s always something compelling about watching ordinary New Zealanders on the telly. As complete strangers (as opposed to last season, when all the celebs had been to each other’s weddings), they’ll have to build relationships quickly and we’ll get to revel in their idiosyncratic New Zealand selves in a very weird situation.

It is set in a real castle

The sprawling Airbnb from season one is dead and buried, replaced by this spooky gothic mansion (rumoured to be Claremont Castle in Canterbury). Like all good murder sites, this castle features a verandah, some lovely leather armchairs, and a clock. There’s also thunder and lightning in the skies, crunchy gravel on the driveway, and probably three witches standing over a cauldron out the back. Five stars, will stay again. 

The gameplay is fierce

“I’ll put it brutally, I’m more than happy to [beep] him up,” this sweet grandmotherly figure declares, and we can only assume she’s not talking about Paul Henry’s choice of pocket handkerchiefs.

They seem to hunt down a traitor early in the game

This dramatic moment shows some hearty celebrations from the packed round table, which suggests that either this is a group of clever people who know how to sniff out a traitor early in the game, or we have some lousy murderers on our hands. Whatever happens, let’s hope these guys pace themselves. Eventually the cheering will stop, and they’ll probably be in a bathful of maggots when it does.   

Whatever the hell is going on here

Run for your lives. 

The Traitors NZ premieres on Three and ThreeNow on Monday, July 1.