Pain that will never go away

But the little body beneath the earth is not alone, sharing its resting place with 24 other babies.

They are just a few among the many who were stillborn in the early 1970s and who were never given to their mothers to hold or to name – simply taken away without ceremony and placed in an unmarked grave.

Only recently has the plot been identified as the resting place of one particular baby boy, and the plaque commemorates the love of a mother that 46 years of loss can’t quench. It also bears witness to all the other little lives that share that small piece of ground.

In 1970 Ika Bilic, a young Croatian woman, recently arrived in Melbourne and in an arranged marriage, went into labour with her joyfully anticipated first child.

As her husband was at work, she was rushed to hospital by a friend.

Ika felt something was wrong and desperately tried to tell medical staff in her broken English, eventually becoming hysterical. The staff laughed at her fears and hysterics and told her to keep quiet. Shortly afterwards her son was born dead with the cord around his neck.

What happened next beggars belief. The baby was whisked away without Ika ever seeing him.

She was soon bundled into a car by her obstetrician who only told her she had delivered a boy child. Ika was dropped off at home with instructions “to get over it” and have another baby.

When Ika’s husband arrived home, she told him the baby had been stillborn. He rushed to the hospital but he was also told “bad luck, go home and try again”.

Ika never did “get over it”. Grief-stricken, without family and with few friends, she fell ill from panic attacks and anxiety and was put on huge doses of mood altering drugs.

There was no counselling, no support, no understanding.

For almost 45 years she lived in a state of overwhelming grief controlled by drugs.

Eventually Ika and her husband had two daughters.

Although looking after her babies was a joyous distraction, Ika remained fragile and on heavy medication and would never speak of her experiences, going into hysterics if her daughters attempted to discuss the brother they had never known.

Harrowing though Ika’s story is, it is not unusual. Until the 1980s, stillborn babies were routinely whisked away from their mothers.

These births were not registered with births, deaths and marriages. Hospital mortuaries would wait until they had a sufficient tiny corpses before sending them to funeral homes to be deposited in unmarked mass graves. It wasn’t unknown for twins to be separated and buried in different plots.

There are thousands upon thousands of stillborn babies, or those who died just after birth, lying unwitnessed in graveyards around Australia. Their mothers are now in their 60s, 70s, 80s and older. Most have grieved in silence.

Ika, 76, has found the resting place of her son, whom she then named Ante – the name she had chosen while she was pregnant.

Her daughter Ana Gidari contacted the Older Mothers Support Group of the Victorian branch of SANDS, an organisation that provides support and advice to people who have lost a child before, during or shortly after giving birth.

With a family name and an approximate date of birth, she was helped to find her brother lying under a patch of earth where Ika had often walked on her way to other funerals.

Ana, who has four children, has the names of the other babies in the plot. She can’t reveal them owing to privacy concerns.

“As a mother I felt I had to give back to my own mother,” she said. “I thought how horrible it would be if one day she passed away without knowing where her son is.”

Ana describes the behaviour of the doctors and nurses who denied women the chance to grieve their dead children as “horrible, callous and cruel”.

She knows of another mass grave where mothers, who will never know the exact spot their child lies, go to release balloons in acknowledgement of the part, however brief, the child played in their life.

She would like to see a national database developed to help parents and surviving siblings locate the missing babies.

SANDS believes it is never too late to grieve. The Older Loss Support Group, formed in Melbourne in 1996, has helped hundreds of women find their babies and to learn that it is all right to grieve, to cry, to talk; and that someone will listen and understand.