From India With Love

Indian born and Bathurst (NSW) raised from the age of eight months, Australian journalist Latika Bourke grew – happily settled and loved – in a large Australian family of three adopted children from India and five naturally born to parents Penny and John Bourke. Latika Bourke never questioned her Australian identity and was even adamant she would never set foot in India. And then it all changed. In her first book, From India with Love, she charts her unique journey to discover her Indian heritage. Latika Bourke addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 29 July 2015. The paper, which follows, is from an edited transcript of the talk.

FROM INDIA WITH LOVE

LATIKA BOURKE

Good evening and thank you Gerard for the invitation to speak at The Sydney Institute. It really is an honour to be invited to join such an illustrious list of journalists who have addressed this forum in the past, including Annabel Crabb, Michelle Grattan, Niki Savva, and Laura Tingle. These women were not only personal role models, but also inspirations to me as a junior journalist in the Canberra Press Gallery. This is not lip-service. Many years ago I nearly gave up on journalism all together, but for one of these women.

I was living in Sydney, working as a pool reporter, or a general cadet dogsbody, at 2UE in Greenwich. The rental crisis had gripped the city. My credit card was being rejected at Coles and I was desperately trying to envisage a day when my working day might begin at 7am instead of 7pm. There’s that old saying that journalists know a little about everything and a lot about nothing. I think that’s mostly right. So what would an ex-journalist aged 24, with not much more than an Arts degree to her name, do if not work in the media?

All I knew at that stage was that I desperately want to travel and see the world before I died. With no financial or romantic ties in Australia and no immediate prospect of being able to fund that sort of lifestyle by myself, I had only one option; become a flight attendant. I did get through the first rounds, but failed both Virgin and Qantas’ second rounds of vigorous personality testing exercises. It’s funny now, but, back then, I felt defeated. The truth is that entry-level journalists are paid dismally in this country. Sydney life was taking its toll and I could see no end to overnight, early morning week-to-week, back-to-back shifts.

There was one thing that kept me going – inspiration. I recalled how back in 2006, when I had just arrived in the big city for my first metro job at Radio 2UE, I felt I had my foot in the door and I was on my way. Journalism was my life. My days began with early ABC AM and ended with Lateline.

That year I watched the Walkley Awards being televised live on SBS. Michelle Grattan was being awarded the Journalism Leadership award. I remembered how inspired I felt as they showed photographs of her as a young journalist, and now as the icon she is. I felt that that was my life’s commitment too; to always be inquiring, understanding and then explaining. I tapped back into that well of certainty and inspiration.

My failed shot at becoming a flight attendant turned out to be quite fortuitous. A few months later, at the end of 2008, the number two radio journalist working in 2UE’s Canberra bureau quit. My incredibly supportive boss, 2UE’s News Director Clinton Maynard, had wanted to give me a new opportunity for months and he knew that this was my shot. He encouraged me to give Canberra a try and posted me there with one piece of advice: “Don’t get trapped in the bubble.”

I’m happy to say that Michelle Grattan welcomed me to the Gallery enthusiastically, as did many of the stalwarts I’m so proud to work alongside now. A year after I moved to Canberra, the first of the six leadership spills I’ve now covered began. The Liberals rolled Malcolm Turnbull at a time when several things in the national debate and the media were colliding.

These included a shift in climate change politics, the emergence and rapid take-up of social media or real-time reporting, and the start of what I believe is a new paradigm in politics, where personal policy conflicts are fought internally through the prism of leadership. They were very heady, often 14-16 hour days, and they were fascinating. Maybe it is just because it coincided with my arrival in the gallery, but it did feel like a new stage was being set for the sort of politics and debates we’ve seen since.

Over the six years that have passed, it’s fair to say that every leadership contest since 2009 has seen the media cover itself with just as much glory as the feuding pollies – as journalists and outlets race to not simply predict the news, but also be a playmaker.

Back in 2009, reporting the climate change battle within the Liberal Party, via social media, was not just new but genuinely interesting, insightful and exciting for journalists and our audience. Leadership contests are bit déjà vu now as the years from 2009 to early 2015 have seen tumultuous times in Canberra. But what I want to talk to you about tonight, is the very positive but great upheaval that was taking place in my own life, behind the scenes at the same time.

As I settled down into Canberra life – and into the bubble – the time was right for some personal stocktaking. I’m adopted, and proudly so. My parents, Penny and John, adopted me when I was aged 8 months. They live in Berowra. I was from an orphanage in Bihar, India. Shortly after my arrival, they moved to a small farm in a tiny town called Hobby’s Yards. The population was about 100 at the time and it is just outside Blayney in the central west of New South Wales.

Penny and John had two biological children. Then, they adopted three from India, including me, and later on had three more biological children. In case you’re wondering, we are a Catholic family. I felt we lived a very quintessential Australian childhood, growing up in the country. My earliest memories are of shearing sheds, haystacks, snow drifts, climbing trees with my big brother Damien who also taught me to swim, and being taught to look out for snakes. At Hobby’s, snakes were the tigers and later, when we moved to Bathurst, the deadlier snakes were king browns.

Because we were a big family, there were certain expectations of us that I felt my friends in smaller families didn’t often experience. My oldest sisters, Melissa and Rani, did a lot of babysitting of us younger ones, while Dad was still teaching. Mum tutored after school to help pay the never ending school fees. We children were expected to pull our weight and not wait to be ask to do jobs. Or as Dad called it, “show initiative.” Some of us did more and less in this regard.

As a Catholic family, we went to Mass every weekend, at least until some of us got old enough to learn how to skive off or arrive late enough and fool Mum and Dad into thinking we had been there the whole time. But we took their values seriously. For instance, Dad’s pet demand of family loyalty was non-negotiable. It was up to us to look out for each other on the playgrounds, never air our internal grievances publically, and intervene if we saw anyone being hassled. And Dad was right to instil this into us. We were a conspicuous family. But I never thought it was because some of us had brown skin and others had white skin. I only ever thought it was because we were so damn big. And we had the most embarrassing van to take us around town.

Our adoptions were only ever unusual to others. “Where are you from?” was a constant refrain from perfect strangers throughout my life. What did they mean, “where was I from”? “I’m from Bathurst”, I’d reply. “No, no. Where are your parents from?”, they’d say. “Well, mum’s originally from England, Dad’s Aussie but his grandparents are Irish.” And then they’d look at me like I was a bit thick. “No dear, what’s your heritage?”

They wanted to know why I had dark skin, why to them I looked different. But I felt as Ocker as the next country kid on the bus. I hated this question, growing up. I absolutely despised it. When I made it clear that I considered myself Australian by naming my hometown as Bathurst and that my accent was perfectly clear, the question was why was there any need for anyone to persist? Did I go around asking people questions based on their personal appearance?

Now I do want to say that I never felt that this questioning was racist. I just felt – and I still do – that it was curiosity, manifesting itself through some acute social awkwardness. But this didn’t make me feel any better at the time. Rather, I felt it set up an animosity about where I actually came from – India – for many years to come. Asking me where I was from meant that the person making the query was seeing me through the prism of my skin colour. And that is the last way I would ever begin to define myself.

For years, I resented any mention of India. I didn’t want anyone associating me with it. I hated any time I had to prove that I was Australian. Put simply, I was adopted at eight months old. I had no connection, no memories and no reason to feel like my birth right was anything other than the country that I grew up in. I avoided all the topics relating to India that I could. My diet, nutritionally and mentally, was totally American with a tiny bit of British thrown in.

It’s trendy now to talk about the Asian Century but the truth is that, where it really matters to most people, understanding or connecting the east with our popular culture has been left lacking, then and now.

With her adopted children, Mum would try and interest us, as best she could, in our home country. But we wanted nothing of it. We were all just happy little Australians, preoccupied with the regular concerns of children: not enough pocket money, too much work and whether we’d get the latest gaming consol. Even in our household, where there were concerted attempts to engage us beyond Australia, India and Asia as a whole, it rarely entered our day-to-day thinking.

This is not to say we were an ignorant family; we were not. Dad still is a news junky. As a young girl, I woke up to Tracey, Steve and Monty on The Today Show, and we sat down at 6 pm sharp, with dinner, to the local news. Then we watched Ray Martin on A Current Affair and listened to Hendo deliver the nightly news from Sydney.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when in year 4, aged ten, I started telling my teacher my opinions on John Hewson’s GST. But the curiosity I’d always had never applied to India or anything to do with wanting to know about my birth country. Deliberately. Until many years later, when I was living in Canberra, trying my luck in love and I was on a date that was clearly going nowhere. We finished eating at the Chinese restaurant in Kingston but it was only about 7.30 or 8 pm – a bit early to call it a night with no hurt feelings or egos. So when my date suggested we go back and watch a DVD, Slumdog Millionaire, I put up no protest. But this was after months of avoiding seeing the film.

Various friends had told me about Slumdog Millionaire and a quick Google had confirmed my worst fears; this was a film about India. And, worse, one of the main characters had my own name. I’d spent so long trying to convince everyone that I had nothing to do with India, but now there was a box office sensation threatening to undo all my years of hard work. Mum had tried to get us to watch City of Joy, years back when we were kids, but the film had barely made any sort of impression. My only take from City Of Joy was that the older females in my house were signed-up members to the Patrick Swayze Appreciation Society. I wasn’t allowed to watch Dirty Dancing for a few years.

But Slumdog was different from City of Joy. It did make the impression that Mum might have hoped for a decade earlier. It’s no exaggeration to say that Danny Boyle’s film triggered a great change within me and started me on a journey that I never thought I would take. Indeed, it was one I had insisted, to anyone that knew me, a journey I would never take.

Slumdog Millionaire was the first time I saw India. It opened my eyes to my birth country. I recall the sensation of wanting to take my eyeballs out of my head and glue them to the screen. I’d never wanted to know anything about India but now I wanted to drink in every single sight, sound and impression that Danny Boyle had to offer. All at once, those eight invisible months loomed very large over my identity. Suddenly what I never cared about became important and, I felt, it needed acknowledging.

Over the course of the next year, I began to contemplate going back. I have detailed this journey in my book, From India With Love, which was published in April this year. I’ve now been to India three times and my partner Graham and I have pledged to go back every year, and possibly even live there.

My first trip to India was in 2012. As you know, I was wilfully ignorant about India and in particular the state of Bihar, where I was born. I was also very scared. So I did as little preparation as I could, procrastinating, although really nothing could have prepared me for such a personal journey.

My birth certificate says I was born in a city called Bettiah in the rural and very poor state of Bihar, on 9 March 1984. Bihar is India’s third most populated state. Almost 55 per cent of its more than 100 million people live below the poverty line and 36 million live in abject poverty. On 10 March, my 14-year old biological mother, grandmother and uncle gave me to the nuns at Saint Mary’s orphanage in a suburb called Fakirana. The orphanage no longer exists. The nuns stopped taking kids many years ago. But the centre still pulsates with purpose as a home for the destitute, a school for deaf children and a place where the young village girls come to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills, amongst some other things.

Bihar has seen some progress in the past decade. Nevertheless, it took us five and a half hours to drive from the capital, Patna, to Fakirana – 183 kilometres. When we finally arrived that night the nuns greeted us with a hearty welcome to my first home. I remember accepting that sentiment but inwardly thinking that I’d never regard this place as my home – first or otherwise. Deciding to visit India at this point did not mean I had accepted it.

Fakirana is its own self-sustaining community. It’s now a learning centre. The nuns grow and harvest wheat for naan. They grow Jack fruit, peas, potatoes and tomatoes. They keep pigs, horses and cows and what they don’t eat they sell. We sat down one morning and looked through the only records for me, and my adopted older brother Damien and all the other children whose brief existences had been there. It was a very simple book; a double page allocated to each child with hand drawn columns to list our details: Date of birth, transfer to the sister Delhi orphanage for our adoptions, the names and addresses of our parents, now scattered across the world.

The details were scant and, as the nuns explained, back then they were dealing with scores of babies, sometimes 70 at a time. Their priority was caring for the children and finding them loving homes, not keeping records which was a second order issue. They told us that they never expected to see grown adults coming back through their gates, 20 or 30 years later, seeking answers.

It was at this point that one small sentence changed India, for me, from a regular sight-seeing trip to a very personal and meaningful journey. There is often a reluctance to allow young children to be adopted out into Western countries for fear they’ll lose their culture. I broached this subject cautiously as I spoke with the nuns. I told them I did not feel Indian. I could hear the guilt in my voice and the hesitation. But one of the nuns said, immediately, of course you don’t, you’re Australian – that’s what we wanted for you. A great ease settled over me at that. Later that morning, we visited the room where we were kept as babies. That room is now a chapel for young nuns in training. It’s easily the most spiritual place I’ve ever been to. I knew I’d been there. At that moment, I accepted Fakirana as my first home. There was no denying it. I could feel it.

If it is the most spiritual place I’ve been, it’s also the most humbling. As we came back from a visit to Bettiah, and the hospital where nuns from the same order worked, we were greeted by the sight of young girls we’d met before, dancing in the central open courtyard. It was a sight; flashes of colour moving in unison. “What were they doing?” we asked. “Oh, we teach them karate, so that when they get married, if their husbands beat them up, they’ve got some self-defence skills.”

We argue a lot about feminism in Australia, about what it means, about who is and who isn’t in the tent. About why women should or shouldn’t be and whose version is more correct. But this Indian feminism didn’t need debating. It was alive and kicking, quite literally, before me. Earlier, I had asked the nuns how many of those young village girls would go on to work, study or just do whatever they wanted. The answer was none. Even today, they would all be married in just a few years’ time.

The nuns’ canniness, their determination to better the lives of young women around them in those circumstances was ingrained. None of the nuns at Fakirana were there at the time of my adoption. But their communal tenacity was the same. By 1984, Mum and Dad had had a remarkably easy run adopting Rani and then Damien. Of course, now it’s near impossible to adopt from overseas. Would-be parents in Australia can wait up to a decade, yes, ten years, to know if they’ll get a child. In 2013/14 there were just 317 adoptions across Australian, and only 36 per cent of those were from overseas. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says this was the lowest annual number of adoptions on record for Australia, and a 76 per cent fall from the 1294 adoptions which took place in 1989 and 1990.

In 1990, I turned six and was blissfully unaware of the life I might have lived. I was also happily unaware of the efforts taken to deliver me to my family’s arms. Even though Mum and Dad had had little trouble adopting Rani and Damien, by the time they got to me things were changing in India. The Indian authorities were not inclined to let parents adopt more than two children. Mum and Dad had already filled this quota, plus they had two of their own. The view in India at the time was why on earth would this crazy Australian family want so many children? They’re not alone.

Mum decided to give it one last go. I was born on 9 March, but it would be eight long months before Penny and John first laid their eyes on me. For months, the authorities rejected the nuns’ bid to send me to Australia. Until, seemingly at their wits’ end, an ingenious idea came to light – in what turned out to be a great stroke of luck for everyone involved. I was apparently the most hideous, disgusting baby ever born. In fact, I’ll read you the account of the doctor at the time. He wrote a letter detailing my condition, describing me as having, “sores all over her body, inflamed and infected”. He added that, due to these ulcers and boils, I smelt badly and somewhat repulsive. It was so bad, he had said, that I had to be kept in isolation from the other children.

But the upshot of this was that if I could get a family who accepted me, gave me patient care and was not over anxious about my future looks and scars which might remain, I would have the best chance to heal. He ended by writing, very dramatically, “She would not be the right choice for a single couple with no children. If she could be amongst other children, this would be the best for the baby. I would hope for the child’s sake that such a family might be found.” Well, who was the judge to disagree with such a medical opinion? With that, and a lot of prayer and sheer tenacity on the part of the nuns, I became a Bourke.

I stopped going to church long ago and I doubt I’ll ever spend another Sunday in Mass again. For all the usual reasons, Church is out of date, boring, and it doesn’t speak to me or speak for me; it’s irrelevant, sexist, hasn’t properly atoned or held itself accountable for the abuses that too many have suffered. They’re all the reasons I’m not afraid to tell you that here, from my position of privilege, and relative professional and financial security.

But I faltered when, over dinner, the nuns at Fakirana asked me if I still attended Mass. In one of my rare moments of thinking before speaking, I stopped myself from launching into the well-cited reasons why a 30-something living in Australia might not want to go to Mass. How could I give those reasons there? The Church is irrelevant to me. But not to women whose spiritual ancestors had literally given me the life that I’m so grateful for, purely as part of their devotion to their religion, faith and church.

I’m not in a rush to head back to Mass, even now. But I do think, sometimes, it’s a bit too easy for us to be smug about institutions and ignore the incredible good they also deliver. Once people find out you’re adopted, the follow-up question is, “Have you met your real mother?” Interesting, isn’t it? They always ask about your mother and not your father. I never really thought about him either. To this question, I respond immediately with the following: “My mum is my real mum. My dad is my real dad. And my brothers and sisters are my real brothers and sisters.”

On my biological mother, all we know is that she was 14 years old when she gave birth to me me on 9 March and on the 10 March took me to Saint Mary’s. I’d never really appreciated those two actions until I went to India. While child marriage was common, and is still too high in India, my biological mother was an unmarried Hindu woman. Mum had always said to me – you should thank your mother for taking you to an orphanage from day one, because it meant you got the love and care, right from the start, unlike many, many babies in India.

Once I’d fallen in love with India it unlocked a natural thirst and curiosity for information that I’d always had about every other topic. Once I began reading into what it means to be a woman, a girl and a child in India, I was staggered to realise how easily I might not have been born at all. In short, baby girls are not prized let alone wanted in India. The UN Women’s 2014 Report showed that the ratio of girl children to boy children has begun to plummet. This is not a problem of the past. The makers of a 2013 documentary It’s A Girl, focusing on gendercide in China and India, subtitled it, The Three Deadliest Words In The World, to highlight how many lives are lost before they even begin.

So my 14-year old biological mother not only gave me the gift of life itself, but a double shot of it, by taking me to a place where I might have a future of choice, rather than expectation. In the end, that is fundamentally what I believe adoption comes down to. It is not some rags-to-riches story of a poor little girl, plucked out of Bihar, who becomes a publicly well-known journalist in a well-off country. My parents, although proud of my career achievements, would be the last people to measure me by my professional success. To them, a person’s humility, spirit of generosity, loyalty and compassion are the tests of character and success.

To me, adoption is an enabler; it is the act of delivering choice and opportunity – two qualities which define Australia. Of course, it is just another of the many varied ways that loving families can be formed in our society. And, what is a normal family these days anyway?

Adoption is the choice to study hard or wag school. Adoption is the choice to travel the world or stay content in your home town. Adoption is the freedom to choose. Adoption, unlike India, was always the most positive word in my vocabulary because to be adopted you cannot be a surprise. You cannot be an accident. Far from being abandoned, or unwanted, adoption means that you are sought after – in my case, fought for.

As a journalist, I stand before you uneasily because it is not the story of others that I bring to you, but my own. To talk about oneself is surely a cardinal sin in journalism – well, for some anyway. But I hope that you see that this story is less about myself and more a tribute to the people who sacrificed and persevered to give me a chance to live in this free, clean, fast and wonderfully opportunity-rich country that is Australia. It is also to say that sometimes a happy story is worth telling.

In the late 1990s, when I was 15, the budding journalist within me had made me the school’s youngest subscriber to the paper I now write for, The Sydney Morning Herald. On one particular morning, I was flicking through the paper in roll call when I came across a piece in the features section about adoption. As an adoptee, any time adoption was mentioned in the media, my ears would prick up. I’m sure you know the sensation, that kind of hyper sensitivity to media coverage when something like a rare disease that might affect your family is mentioned.

This article detailed the experiences of a group of adoptees from Vietnam. They’d all had a terrible experience and felt that by being adopted they’d lost their culture and their chance of knowing their biological family and they’d all suffered racism in Australia. I know the media. I don’t need Tolstoy to tell me that every marriage or every family is uniquely unhappy. Bad stories sell, I get it. What I wanted to do by telling my story was to share loudly and clearly the experience of my family, and the testament it is to our country that three kids can be plucked out of nowhere in India and be raised as proud, contented Australians. This is not to say that in my family we don’t have the regular conflict – of course we do. I put my poor mother through hell when I was a feisty, know-it-all, “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do”, “how-could-you-possibly-understand-me” teenager. But our conflicts were never rooted in us being adopted.

As the publication of my book drew near, I fretted, wondering if the community was ready for a happy adoption story. But the reaction has overwhelmed me. Quite literally. I have received numerous emails, Facebook messages and tweets telling me how much people enjoyed my story, but also found a part of themselves in it too. I’m going to read you one or two of those now.

Easily the most humbling response was from Ryan. Ryan lobbed me a Facebook page message at the end of May. He grew up in India and came to Australia in 2001 aged 23. He wrote:

Since I landed here, I systematically – perhaps my subconscious made me do it – started distancing myself from everything Indian. From not speaking Hindi or eating curries and many other little things, just like you mention in your book. I would get annoyed if somebody asked me where I was from. However, reading your book has opened my eyes a little. India is a part of me and I am going to embrace my Indian-ness with gusto. I’ve realised I have the benefit of embracing the best of both worlds.

I cannot tell you how overwhelming, exciting, but also humbling it is to think that something you can write, that you can feel, that you can think, can have such a profound effect on someone else. I’ve also received many messages from parents of adopted children, hoping that their little proud Australians will one day also have an “a ha!” moment, and want to go back to their birth countries. Anna who was adopted from Sri Lanka and raised in regional Australia recently wrote to me of her reaction to reading a negative adoption story in the media, like the one I’ve recounted.

Because I’d experienced a really positive adoption I found it a bit confronting reading stories where people felt like they didn’t have a proper identity, and were troubled by their adoptions. Anna and her adopted sister had declined to be a part of that article, she said, for fear of their life story being read by a whole bunch of strangers. But now, she says, “I think it would be a different story. I’m more comfortable with who I am and I realise what an interesting story my adoption is.” In no way do we diminish the experiences of people who have not had adoption stories. Not at all. This is simply to say that every adoption story is unique. And the good ones can be celebrated, as much as the bad ones should be told.

So I’m very proud and grateful to my media colleagues who have seen my family story for what it is, and given me a platform for a good-news tale, against what we all know are the media’s norms. I’m also grateful to my publisher, Claire Kingston, at Allen and Unwin who guided me through the monumental and, what felt at times, insurmountable task of completing the manuscript. It has been the most difficult thing I have ever done but it’s also the most satisfying.

So far the reviews, which I am mostly trying to avoid, have been positive. The most important, of course, has been mum’s reaction. I gave her my one and only copy in the world weeks before it was released. She texted me that same night, at midnight, just after I’d drifted off to sleep, to tell me that she loved it. Unlike Dad, who only decided to tell me a couple of weeks ago that he’d actually read it and loved it. I had spent weeks thinking he had hated it or hadn’t bothered to read it. “Oh no, why would you think that love?” he said.

But the best review goes to my big brother Damien, whom I’m pretty sure has never read a book in his life. He gave my book to his fiancée to read so she could tell him whenever he’s mentioned. He’s told me he’s waiting for the movie. Big families – they keep your feet on the ground.