Darryl Nelson

Darryl Nelson is an adoptee, born in 1964 in Queensland, Australia. Like all adoptees at the time in so-called 'closed adoptions', his birth certificate was altered by the Government to reflect ‘as if’ he was born to his adoptive parents, his name was changed, and his original birth certificate marked 'unofficial' and hidden away by the government.

During puberty, at 14 years old he discovered he was adopted.

It was not until he was 30 years old that laws changed in Australia and he was allowed to apply for information about his birth mother, who had tragically passed away when she was 30, from a brain hemorrhage.

Darryl was raised an only child. After a long search, Darryl met his natural father in 1994, and then his two full brothers, and half-sister.

In 2020 Darryl took a case to the Supreme Court of Queensland for his adoption to be discharged. He represented himself, and won. Darryl then took on his true ancestry. Darryl did not discharge his adoption out of malice against his adoptive parents, rather to just set the record straight to do with his true identity.

In preparing his case, Darryl found it curious that his 'best interests' under law seemed to be disregarded by the Government in his placement. The idea that a child could just be taken and given to someone else seemed to be against human conscience. The forced separation results in life-long mental anguish for many adoptees and their natural mothers, and it was interesting to Darryl that the law could support it. Where did these notions originate? How did laws evolve to a state that gave a mother the 'choice-less choice' to relinquish her child?

After the discharge, and in the process of recovery from this significant experience, he researched and wrote this book; "A timeline of the injustice of Adoption law" to try and help others who were affected make sense of the practice, of how incremental decisions over many years culminated in disrupting lives today.