Tree of Strangers by Barbara Sumner

Tree of Strangers by Barbara Sumner

'I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road'. I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I’d never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing?

What does it mean to grow up adopted in New Zealand?

How do you make a life when there is no history to build from ?

Recommended in episode 190