Nellie's Baby (COPY) (COPY) (COPY)

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At the beginning, all we had to go on was a few meagre facts, typed on yellowing paper, by a social worker who would later turn out to be somewhat selective with the truth.

Nellie Wilson, the woman whose life we were trying to unravel, had been a life-long psychiatric patient at Porirua Hospital. She liked animals, particularly cats. She was horrendously, irretrievably addicted to cigarettes.

And when she was 43-years-old, Nellie had a baby, who was adopted out and raised by a family who lived near Wellington. Now, that child, a 39-year-old woman called Sarah, wanted to find out what had happened to Nellie, and she wanted my help.

It was September 2022 when I received Sarah’s email, with the subject line: “Investigating the possible murder of my mother.” Sarah outlined what she knew of Nellie’s life. It was, to put it lightly, bleak. Nellie’s family - her sister, her niece - suspected Nellie had suffered some kind of sexual abuse as a teenager, and maybe had a baby which was taken from her. They believed the trauma of that experience had led to a breakdown, which saw Nellie committed at Porirua, a huge sprawling institution housing hundreds of patients with alleged psychiatric problems. Nellie, who also had an intellectual disability, never really got free of Porirua after that.

Sarah, who now lives in the United Kingdom, wanted to know why Nellie was locked away for life. She also wanted to know how Nellie got pregnant with her, in 1984, and who her father was. Was it rape, or not?  And what about this possible first baby - did she have a sibling somewhere? Most importantly, was her death as suspicious as the family believed? They’d seen an autopsy report - which Sarah had read briefly - that seemed to suggest she had a fractured nose when she died. That suggested foul play, the family said, even though the pathologist had ruled her cause of death was heart failure, brought on by a bout of pneumonia.

Sarah had emailed me because of my history reporting both on psychiatric facilities, and violence against women. But what she didn’t know was that I’d recently decided to step away from those subjects because I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of other people’s trauma. My husband and I were trying to have a baby, and failing. I became convinced the endless stream of stress was soaking through my pores, settling under my skin, being absorbed by my organs. I didn’t need any more trauma in my life, I thought.

And yet, despite my desire for a change of direction, I found myself unable to step away from Nellie’s story. Part of it was ego -  I felt I was uniquely qualified for the job. But a bigger part of it was sheer curiosity. Who was this woman? What did society do to her? Her story felt so unique, but so familiar. I wanted to know more.

For months and months, Sarah and I struggled to get answers. Here and there, we eked out scant details - after getting hold of Sarah’s adoption file where we learned Nellie had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. It also told us that she used to be a seamstress. That she carried a photo of her baby, Sarah, with her everywhere. That the doctors believed that due to her “problems” she would never be able to live outside Porirua. I felt furious at the oblique language, the coded implication that there was something the social workers and doctors weren’t quite saying. “What is it?” I wanted to shout at the documents. It felt like there was a secret simmering under the surface that I could feel, but couldn’t see.

Then, I interviewed another patient who had been in Porirua at the same time as Nellie, who would have been about ten years younger. She didn’t remember Nellie but she remembered everything about the hospital - the way that when she was first admitted she was stripped of her own clothes. How the nurses forced her to take drugs and then dragged her to what was, effectively, a cell. The screaming. The violence. The long, mundane days in the “dayroom” where everyone endlessly smoked cigarettes. The lack of autonomy and the futility of trying to escape. Suddenly, Nellie’s life came into sharp focus for me. I could see her there, among the other, desperate, sad, lonely residents locked in rooms along a wooden corridor, where the doors had no handles on the inside.

As we slowly discovered more and more about Nellie’s life - by talking to her sister, reading her doctor’s notes, finding the forms from the care home where she moved after Porirua closed, I kept wondering: can you ever know someone through the lens of others? Nellie, who died in 2008, kept no records of her own - there was no diary, no letters. There are a few photographs which show her at her mischievous best - in her fancy dress, hamming it up for the camera, smiling her wide, cheeky grin. But even then - those were posed photos. We had no idea really of her internal life.

Reports from Nellie’s psychiatrist would sometimes give a glimpse into her deeper psyche. The psychiatrist described Nellie’s paranoia, her hallucinations, her self-harming behaviour, learned from a life institutionalised.

But the psychiatrist also saw her as more than her symptoms. She made her human. My favourite passage describes Nellie dressed as Greta Garbo. Clutching a bag of Minties, and greeting the doctor happily, with a kiss on both cheeks.

“She had thoroughly enjoyed a visit from her sister and nephew yesterday, and laughed with childlike glee when recounting how the Pepsi they had brought for her had fizzed over when the bottle was opened, spraying one of her relations,” the report read. 

I delighted in learning the little things about Nellie - about how she once hid the cat from her father as a child, and it was discovered in the fireplace. I loved how she was so impatient she could never wait for the jug to boil and was always drinking lukewarm, sugary tea. I laughed when I read that Nellie was convinced she had special powers because she was a Gemini. I cried when I found she had tried and tried to talk about her first baby, but no one ever really took her seriously - except her sister, Mavis, and when Mavis had asked the family doctor about what happened to the infant, she was told she best “leave it in the past”.

Sometimes, reading the details of Nellie’s life felt too personal, too raw. I’d never met this woman - she hadn’t asked me to pry into her records - and by the end of our investigation I knew the most intimate details of her daily schedule, her medical issues, her sexual history. Even after death, I knew the state of her body’s every organ. I knew she was covered in two white sheets at the morgue. I knew there was a plastic nametag on her ankle to identify her.

Even now, I wrestle with whether we - her daughter and I - have the right to tell Nellie’s story to the world, because we too are recreating her portrait through the words of others. I’ve questioned if the picture we’re painting is accurate, and if sharing her trauma without consent is the right thing to do. But Sarah, her daughter, was adamant: Nellie would have wanted her story to be known. She liked to help others, and one way to help was to expose the horrors inflicted on the vulnerable in our very recent past, to stop it happening again, Sarah thought. And, Sarah says, she knows her birth mother would have relished the attention. Nellie would have hammed it up for the camera, and then demanded another cigarette and a sugary, half-boiled cup of tea.

Writer / Presenter:

Kirsty Johnston

Executive Producer:

Tim Watkin
John Hartevelt

Producers:

William Ray
Justin Gregory

Sound Engineers:

Phil Benge
William Saunders
Justin Gregory
Marc Chesterman

Production Coordinator:

Briana Juretich

Visuals:

Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Angus Dreaver

Design:

RNZ