February 5, 2013
In 1950 in far north Queensland, a pregnant 19-year-old boards a train with her baby boy, only to have her child wrenched away by her violent husband. Years later, the loss of Peter still haunts Yvonne, even as she tentatively begins to create a life with a new partner. Kristina Olsson, the eldest child of Yvonne’s subsequent marriage, was never told the details of her half-brother’s abduction. She writes: ‘the story had its own force-field … our mother’s sadness as effective as any electric fence’. Growing up, Olsson and her siblings were aware of their mother’s subterranean grief but it was only much later that Olsson gathered enough of the missing pieces to be able to re-imagine her mother’s early life, as well as to track the grim trajectory of Peter’s: motherless, afflicted by polio and in and out of state care. What makes Boy, Lost such a powerful memoir is its echoes of bigger national stories of lost children, whether it’s the stolen generation or unwed teenagers forced to relinquish their newborns or poor British children separated from their parents and sent to remote institutions in Australia. Olsson’s prose is lyrical and heartfelt as she sensitively explores her family’s history.
Thuy On is the books editor of the Big Issue and a Melbourne-based reviewer and manuscript assessor