ABSTRACT
In Australia, a range of practices associated with adoption provide contexts for persons to experience ‘kinship’ and ‘family’ in rich, but often contingent ways. Relations between persons that are shaped by adoption can be ambiguous, fragile or subject to transformation. While kinship in Australia is homologous in many respects with Western or ‘Euro-American’ kinship, some research has pointed to distinctive characteristics. Stivens has noted a predilection for geographical clustering by mothers, daughters and other female relatives in suburban Australia and a marked difference in the constitution of kinship and family for and by men and women. Women are ‘the custodians of kinship’ (1985: 31). Wearing’s (1984) study of Sydney suburban mothers suggests that the ideology of motherhood is pervasive for Australian women, and plays a central role in their lives. Such cultural patterns raise questions about precisely how experiences of affiliation, exclusion and kinship might proceed through a myriad of circumstances that pivot on adoption.
