The Shocking True Story of an Abandoned Australian Child’s Struggle to Survive a Harrowing Childhood. Triumphant She Embraces Celebrity Success then a Journey To Find Her African American Father and Her True Identity
An unacceptable liaison, a secret birth, a mother’s silence and her black child’s determination to discover the truth after a search spanning two continents and 48 years …
Determined to find her African-American father, Sharyn sets out in search of her roots; a quest taking her across the world and eventually to America’s Deep South. But will she find the loving family and belonging she has yearned for all her life?
It is 1948, Sydney Australia. Pretty, blonde Grace discovers she is pregnant to a black merchant marine who has sailed back to America. The White Australia Policy is in place and society’s judgment matters; so what will Grace do with this baby?
This is the extraordinary true life story of Sharyn Killens – The Inconvenient Child.
Rescued from squalid foster care by visiting champion African-American boxer Freddie Dawson, the baby Sharyn is taken to live in a party house in Sydney’s red light district of Kings Cross. But at age five, her absent elegant mother then abandons her in a convent–orphanage, where she suffers years of abuse at the hands of a cruel nun.
By fifteen, discrimination within her family, resentment and clashes over her father’s undisclosed identity see the troubled teenager running away to the streets of Kings Cross where she’s arrested, sentenced and suffers violent abuse at notorious juvenile detention centers in Parramatta and Hay.
Throughout, her solace was her love of music and her burning ambition to become a singer as she battled for her mother’s love and approval, and her black American father’s denied identity. But can she realize her dream if, by twenty-four she is again caught up in the degenerate Kings Cross lifestyle?
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At the writing of this book in 2009, Sharyn and I had been treasured friends of more than 20 years. During the many years of our friendship, Sharyn the glamorous and successful singer and entertainer gradually revealed to me the horrors of her early childhood and young adulthood, sharing with me as her confidant the pain, suffering and humiliation of those awful years and her battle to survive them. “We must write this down and tell your story and that of the girls who suffered with you” was always my answer. Then as the years progressed, during my business career while visiting the US at various times, I was able to get to know … Oh but I don’t want to pre-empt her extraordinary life story!
“We must write it down and tell your story; the story of the Inconvenient Child and the girls who suffered with you”
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