Ten Hail Marys

Description:

In January 1966, Kate gave birth to a healthy baby boy at St. Margaret's Home for unwed mothers in Sydney. In the months before the birth and days after, she resisted treatment that has been deemed tantamount to torture when she steadfastly refused to sign the consent for adoption, becoming one of the few mothers ever to leave the institution with her baby. She was only sixteen years old.

In Ten Hail Marys, Kate Howarth vividly recalls the first seventeen years of her life in Sydney's slums, suburbs and rural New South Wales, Australia. Abandoned by her mother as a baby and then by ‘Mamma,’ her volatile grandmother, as a young girl, Kate was shunted between Aboriginal relatives and expected to grow up fast. A natural storyteller, Kate describes a childhood beset by hardship, abuse, profound grief and poverty. Buoyed by the determination to one day make a better life for herself.

At age 54 and motivated by rage, Kate found the courage to tell her story. In doing so, she challenged the evidence taken at the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Adoption Practices 1950-1998 from the spokesperson from St. Margarets Home for unwed mothers, which was totally at odds with Kate’s experience.

It's a frank, funny, incredibly moving, true story without an ounce of self-pity.

Following publication in 2010 by the University of Queensland Press, Ten Hail Marys was shortlisted for the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Indigenous writing. It went on to win the Age Non-Fiction Book 2010.