By Pam Bayfield
The Inconvenient Child
I have just spent four days in bed with the flu reading the above book and it made being sick worthwhile as I have been on an incredible journey with Sharyn, told so wonderfully by her friend Lindsay. I was along side Sharyn all the way from her unwelcome birth and shocking treatment from her mother and grandmother, with feelings of being unwanted and hidden behind closed doors all through her childhood. Everything Sharyn did was to gain some recognition and love from her Princess Mummy but each time she was rejected by being put in a nunnery where she was badly abused by one of the nuns. Being a coloured child with an Afro-American father who didn’t know of her existence as she had been born just after the war and he was on an American ship calling in to port in Sydney, her mother was ashamed to call her her child and hid her from the world. I felt every bit of pain that young child endured as she kept running away from the nunnery so she could be with her mother.
Finally having to take Sharyn to live with her, Princess Mummy soon had her sent to Parramatta Girls’ Home as uncontrollable. Her experiences here and later at the Girls’ correctional centre in Hay are hard to believe and when you think it can’t get any worse it does. How any teenage girl could come out of those horrific times and still be sane is a miracle. Still her mother didn’t want to know. All Sharyn wanted all along was her father’s name but each time she asked she was told he was dead. Finally Sharyn can’t take it any more and runs away from her mother’s home to Kings Cross and lives on the streets for a while until she finds work. After an unsuccessful marriage which produces a son she becomes a stripper to support her child.
At this time you begin to wonder if Sharyn will ever find contentment and peace as her life lurches from one disaster to another. Her mother keeps appearing and disappearing throughout this story but everything is all right as long as Sharyn doesn’t ever call her mother. When she finally gets a break to do some singing with a band I heaved a sigh of relief believing this was how she was going to get herself out of poverty and hardship. Indeed Sharyn becomes Sharyn Christal, the night club entertainer who goes onto achieve great success as an entertainer on cruise ships. We share her success and the applause awakes in the reader a feeling of hope that everything will turn out all right.
Without telling too much of her journey to find her American roots we laugh and we cry with Sharyn and feel every emotion with her on her quest to find herself. This is a book that will uplift you but also make you angry at how she was treated. A little coloured girl in a White Australia was difficult to slot her into our way of life in those times. No wonder she rebelled and became difficult to handle.
I would thoroughly recommend this book to all readers who like reading true life stories and I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed. I certainly wasn’t.
Pam Bayfield
President of The Society of Women Writers NSW
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