Tell No One

With special guest:

• Brendan Watkins
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

The title of this book Tell No One has an ominous ring to it. We can imagine sex offenders threatening their victims should the story ever get out. As Brendan discovered there may also be another reason for this instruction involving a power imbalance.

Brendan knew at a young age that he had been adopted but when he started looking for his biological parents he did not know if his conception may have resulted from a sexual offence or young love or something else. One thing that kept driving Brendan was his desire to know the truth wherever that may lead.

The first part of his story was surprising. His mother had been 27 when Brendan was born so she was not the teenager in trouble who adopts out her child under pressure from her family. Then the shock of finding out that his mother had been a nun, a bride of Christ. Having made this discovery Brendan was mightily disappointed when the Catholic agency acting as intermediary advised that his mother said they must never meet.

As we learn through the story Brendan is persistent and he kept trying through correspondence and phone calls until he finally did meet his mother although it was not the warm welcoming into her life that he had hoped for. That seemed to be as far as he was going to get because Brendan’s mother actively tried to stop him finding his biological father’s identity sometimes with patently false excuses.

It happened that the reason for his mother and some of the institutions hiding the truth of his father’s identity was that his father was a Catholic priest.

Along the way the science of DNA testing became widely available. Through Ancestry.com.au, the database of Trove and a lot of detective work Brendan found his man; a man who was 30 years older than his mother but who had died long ago.

As Brendan investigated further he found out that he was far from alone in being the child of a priest. Many of these children of priests around the world have suffered enormously in the community for being the innocent evidence of priest relationships. We ask Brendan what can be done to help in these situations and he provides us with some carefully thought out recommendations.

This is an amazing story of love, lies, cover-ups, persistence, religion, good will and discovery. It is a page turner and we get to feel what it was like for Brendan as he goes on this long voyage with the support of his own loving family.

Brendan Watkins

Brendan was 8 years old when he was told he had been adopted by his loving parents. At 29 he decided to find his biological parents. It is never easy for adopted children to do this but Brendan found it even harder than he had expected. He kept running into barriers. Brendan had some understanding of what confronted him when he found out that his mother had been a nun. Then years after that he found out that his father was a priest who had remained in the priesthood until the day he died. In his memoir Brendan takes us along for the ride as he searches for the truth and gets help from some unlikely places.

Brendan has two children, a loving partner and he swims, a lot. He lives in Melbourne.

Song selection by our guest: I’m On Your Side by Paul Kelly

Note: This program is an encore presentation of the one aired on 14 September 2023.

Podcast (mp3)