A mother's dying words leads Capel man to discover he was adopted
A few days before Anne McDermott's mother died, she pulled Anne aside to reveal a cryptic premonition about Anne's husband, Peter.
"[She] took my hand and said, 'Annie, I'm just gonna let you know everything isn't as it appears with Peter and his family.'"
Anne had always thought of her mother as psychic, but in that moment she fobbed it off.
But the message would stay with her.
The coffee date with a question
A few years later, Anne's sister-in-law, Kerry, invited her to go to the movies and for a coffee.
It was an innocent catch-up, but something was on Anne's mind that day.
"I'd been thinking of mum that day for a bit," Anne said.
"And all out of the blue this question came into my head."
Over coffee, Anne asked if her husband Peter was adopted.
Kerry's silence said everything.
"She just looked at me and I knew straightaway," Anne said.
At first, Anne was furious at the news.
A few years earlier, Anne and Peter had asked all family members for their medical history after their son, who had autism, had fallen drastically ill.
"They told me all the family history, which was totally irrelevant," Anne said.
"We were asking because we'd already lost a child and we needed to know the history to help save our other child."
The deadline
After the anger subsided, Anne realised she was now in possession of life-changing information.
"I said, 'they've got 'til Friday to tell him [Peter] themselves. I'm not going to say anything.'"
A few days later Peter's parents arrived at his house and delivered the shocking news.
"Straight to the point — they were always straight to the point," Peter remembered.
"At 55 years of age, I found out I was adopted."
Peter hugged his parents and told them he loved them.
The truth, a lawyer and a mysterious letter
Peter's parents had little information about his birth.
The adoption was conducted via a lawyer who had died and all of his records were lost.
So Peter decided to contact an organisation that helped adopted people track down birth information.
Five days after sending the request for information, a letter arrived.
It was addressed to "Peter John Hanney".
All of his life, Peter had only known himself as Peter John McDermott.
Inside was his original birth certificate and right in front of him was his birth mother's first and last name, Edie Hanney.
When he later mentioned the news to his boss Jamie, there was a startling recollection.
"[Jamie] said, 'I'm sure [The Hanney's] were the owners of the bakery back in Dunsborough many years ago. I'll check with my next door neighbour who's an 80-year-old veteran of Dunsborough.'"
The next day Jamie arrived with a list of his birth mother's family member's names and phone numbers.
"It blew us away," Anne said.
Capel, 210 kilometres south of Perth, where Anne and Peter had moved more than 30 years ago, was a 40 minute drive away from where Peter's birth mother had lived.
"I was just blown away," Peter said.
Peter couldn't bring himself to make the phone call, so Anne stepped in.
"I thought I just want to find this out and solve … this issue and work it out," she said.
So she rang Edie's brother.
"I said, 'Oh, hi, my name is Anne McDermott, we live in Capel. I'm going to be asking you a very difficult question, because my husband's adopted'.
"He said 'pardon' and I could tell straight away by the voice and the way he answered me.
"He said, 'I've been waiting for this phone call all my life.'"
The brother called back the next day after speaking with his sister Edie and told Anne that she wanted to speak to Peter.
The phone call was arranged and finally Peter was able to speak to his birth mother.
"The first thing he did was burst into tears, he was an emotional mess," Anne recalled.
"So we had to calm him down.
"She was an emotional mess. So they were just emotionally crying with each other, talking to each other about nothing."
Eventually the topic of his adoption was brought up.
"His birth mother said she did her best at the age of 18 to bring him up. She didn't want to give him up," Anne recalled.
Edie had Peter out of wedlock in 1958 and did not know his father.
The embarrassment became too much for the family.
After two months, she was asked to give him up.
"[Credit] to [Edie's] father, he let her have the baby for that two months to see how things would go," Anne recalled.
"But the ridicule and the criticism that they were getting was affecting everybody. So this is when they asked if, you know, we need to give this little man up."
After speaking on the phone, Peter was desperate to meet his birth mother.
"I walked straight towards Edie and it was like looking in a mirror," Peter remembered.
"Absolute [spitting] image. Except she had hair," he laughed.
When Peter and Edie first met in 2018, she presented him with a gift.
It was two folders with 25 poems in each.
"She wrote a poem on my birthday, every year," Peter said.
"That's how traumatised she was."
But it was a trauma that helped Edie cope with the other tough moments of her life.
"She said that when she had difficult times in her life, she would always revert back to Peter, holding him as a two-month-old baby," Anne recalled.
"[She thought] giving him up was the worst thing she could ever think she could do, so what I'm going through now is nothing."
Shock adoption stories not unusual
Kaila DeCinque is a counsellor from Adoption Research and Counselling Service in Western Australia.
She said stories like Peter's were common.
"We see lots of clients who have found out [they were adopted] in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s," she said.
"Adoption has wide-reaching impacts in the family.
"Your siblings might feel a similar sense of betrayal by your adoptive parents or perhaps they are 15 years older and were aware of the adoption and felt that they had to keep this secret as well."
Ms DeCinque said with ancestry research becoming more common, families were being forced to cope with shock adoption discoveries.
Edie died in 2018, five years after reuniting with Peter.
But Peter said he was grateful for the time they had.
"Never been angry because I've had a good life," he said.
Peter also met his three half-brothers, a major change in his life after growing up with one sister.
It had been a life-altering experience, but one that was almost never uncovered.
"If it hadn't been for my mum saying what she said it would never have [happened]," Anne said.
"We probably would have gone to our grave [without knowing]."