My birth mother's file, Porirua Hospital

John B Turner’s photograph My mother’s file, Porirua Hospital 1982 is very much like an in-absentia family portrait. The artist never met his mother and this was the closest he got to anything that she had a hand in making. He only saw photographs of her when he had become an adult and was never told by his adoptive parents who his birth mother was. In many ways, this photograph is like a first meeting with a mother the artist never knew.

The image shows how significant the process of accessing archives has become for the presentation of identity in New Zealand art. By 1981 the New Zealand Government had made it easier for children who were adopted to contact their birth parents. John B Turner discovered the name of his mother and traced his birthplace to the Karitane Home at Melrose in Wellington. He learnt that he had been separated from his mother at birth as she was then a patient of the Porirua Mental Hospital.

During 1982 he gained access to his mother’s file at the Porirua Mental Hospital (previously the Porirua Lunatic Asylum, Porirua Asylum, and later the Porirua Psychiatric Hospital). In 1943 it was New Zealand’s largest Hospital; having 2000 patients.

Turner was quietly given access to a room where his birth mother’s file had been placed so that he could access it. Using a Leica M3 camera, he photographed some of the documents from her time as a committed psychiatric patient of Porirua Mental Hospital – a massive closed access facility that was known in the Wellington region for its ‘out of sight, out of mind policy’.

The resulting image is a tableau of documents that Turner knew nothing about. He concentrates on Joan Bunting’s letter asking to be given access to her son. A snippet of the Matron’s file note response records that Miss Bunting’s enquiry was not answered by her.

Turner never met his mother and he subsequently discovered that she never revealed who his father was. The pathos of this story is delivered by the photograph with a mixture of directness and self-discovery.

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