Reviewed by Elizabeth Walton
Mother Shadow
by Cynthia Banham
Upswell Publishing
April 2026, A$32.99, ISBN: 978-1-7642397-1-4, Paperback
In 2007, long before she began writing this book, Cynthia Banham was reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald when she was posted to Indonesia. After her flight overshot the runway and landed in a rice paddy, Banham was medevacked to Perth. Upon waking in the recovery ward to discover she had lost both legs, 34-year-old Banham had only one question for her medical team: Will I still be able to have children?
In her exquisitely crafted response to overcoming infertility and navigating motherhood in a wheelchair, Banham’s mothering instincts soon become inextricably linked to other women in her family—particularly her Nonna, Natalina.
Born in Bologna on 23 December 1898, Natalina had always been known in the family as the little orphan girl. Shocked to discover that her grandmother was never an orphan at all, Banham embarks on a European research tour, to find out why Natalina, the “unwanted Christmas gift” was raised in an Italian foundling home.
In many European countries at that time, it was common for a token to be tucked inside the swaddling—perhaps a coin, or a significant medal, or sometimes a ribbon—cleaved into two matching pieces. The other half was kept by the mother. If her circumstances changed, she would be able to use it if she attempted to reclaim her child. In truth, this was rarely allowed, and most foundlings went to their graves without finding their mothers again.
Whether the infant was moved to a wet nurse or foster home, the token preserved the child’s social history—a practice which became a precursor for the closed adoption practices of the late twentieth century, where birth records were once again kept, but withheld from mothers and their children.
As the foundlings aged out of care, the tokens which held the only knowledge of their origins were rarely handed on. Many foundling institutions now hold hundreds of tokens, collected over decades and sometimes centuries of mother and child separation.
An easier writing project might have seen Banham’s lucid prose flow chronologically onto the page; or perhaps concentrated on the grandmotherly line. Instead, Banham dedicates years to the writing and rewriting of this complex history, through mentorships, and attending Varuna as one of the first writers to occupy the new accessible writers’ space as she tries to find the true heart of her story.
Banham eventually finds the shimmering gold hidden inside her story and presents it on every page. Yet the writer feels initially feels that her judgement of Ersilia is so harsh that she is compelled to investigate what is driving it. No matter how much light Banham shines into the darker histories of time, the shadow of this response never completely fades.
Although Banham wants to know why Natalina’s mother, Ersilia, declined to be named on the birth certificate, this question seems to suggest that Ersilia had significantly more agency than single mothers in her circumstances had, either at that time, or for most of European history.
It is possible that Ersilia was recently divorced, abandoned or widowed. This seems unlikely, as the archival research meticulously presented in Mother Shadow does not reveal such possibilities, though the idea of “abandonment” repeatedly haunts the book: “The provincial official who recorded Natalina’s birth ordered the baby be dispatched to the foundling home in Bologna and charged the midwife who oversaw her birth, Rosa Rizzi, with the task. It made sense now. The mother was unmarried. Her daughter was illegitimate. She had abandoned her,” Banham writes.
Although it is the official who orders the midwife to take the baby away; it is the birthing mother who carries out the act of ‘abandonment’. And here we roller-skate into Banham’s self-declared judgement.
Banham uses the word ‘abandon’ and its derivatives to describe her great-great-grandmother’s actions dozens of times. This aligns with the meticulous background research consulted to craft an imagined version of Ersilia’s life story, most of which uses the same term.
The idea of abandonment suggests that a peasant woman in rural Bologna in 1898, who is dependent upon her father and his itinerant farming life—a woman who is working as a domestic servant for other families—nevertheless has parenting choices.
Banham soon begins judging herself for judging Ersilia, as she begins to wonder what kind of sex-life Ersilia had. Yet her self-questioning rarely reaches the same intensity as her questioning of why Ersilia did not raise this child, and Banham feels indignant that descendants have been abandoned too.
Australia has its own recent history which renders the word ‘abandonment’ even more difficult. These practices peaked around the time Banham was born and were eventually documented by The Australian Senate. These testimonies reveal that Australian women who lost children to adoption have spent decades describing how little “choice” they had and challenging the language of “giving up” a child. It was often the choice of doctors, nurses, social workers, priests and parents, who wished to avoid the stigmatisation of an illegitimate child in their family.
In most circumstances, whether present or past, it was the system who made the choice – a conclusion Banham eventually reaches, as she imagines officials searching the swaddling for a token, in “a system designed to irreparably sever the bond between the unwed mother and her child.”
Throughout Mother Shadow, social attitudes towards mothering remained complicated, even in more recent generations of Banham’s maternal line. Banham’s mother was threatened that if she came home pregnant as a teenager, she would soon be expelled from the family. Many pregnant girls of that era were told by the people in charge—who were not enduring the vulnerability; the exhaustion of recovering from the labours of birthing—that their child would be better off with other people.
These pressures– now recognised as coercive, illegal practices—were often managed by the same Catholic church which upheld cultural practices against unmarried mothers at the time Natalina was born.
The shock discovery that Ersilia was unmarried shatters Banham’s illusion that her great-grandmother was orphaned after her parents died. Perhaps this shock arises from the terms commonly used to differentiate between various means of separating a mother and child. Once again, the answers are clothed in our choice of language.
To birth a child as an unmarried woman made Natalina’s mother a sinner against the state. Such a woman was a criminal who was often jailed, because the birth was evidence of the crime of extra-marital sex. Her child becomes a foundling.
The orphan’s parents on the other hand, are presumed to be married and then deceased. This child is made an orphan merely by the death of a parent, rather than a mother who was seen as a ‘criminal’ in the eyes of the church and the law at the time.
Yet this simplicity overlooks the fact that orphans often have parents who are alive and well, including children presently living in Cambodian, Ghanaian, Haitian and Thai orphanages. These children may be ‘orphaned’ because of poverty, lack of access to health services, or political conflict. No doubt, some are recruited by institutions. To suggest that is or ever was by choice would be a difficult reading of their circumstances.
The same Catholic church which was influential in Ersilia’s world oversaw Ireland’s infamous Magdalena laundries and Australia’s Magdalena homes for mothers and babies too. National enquiries and apologies for these practices began during the years Banham was contemplating adoption. This is not to say that Banham or anyone else has a deep familiarity with these events. She may have thought, as many do, that adoption simply means ‘abandonment’, as once again the language around child separations becomes a microcosm of who gets to mother.
The word ‘abandon’ – or even the words surrender/give-up/relinquish – implies that a mother simply does not want her child. Banham eventually begins to feel “foolish to have been shocked at the surveillance of pregnant women in nineteenth-century Bologna, who were treated as outlaws and imprisoned until their babies were born.” Yet Banham assumes Ersilia decided to reject Natalina; and worse.
Nearly three decades after her father, Teodoro, sent Ersilia’s six-year-old sister away, Ersilia is living with her father, and her six-year-old son, when Natalina is born. This discovery transforms Ersilia from an ‘ambivalent’ mother, into a mother who was selectively ambivalent, as Banham’s line of enquiry escalates from what kind of a mother abandons her own child, to, what kind of a mother keeps one child but not the other. This is scaffolded around the author’s own maternal doubts, which are similar to the doubts which surround all mothering and the context into which we birth. “I had to piece together the shards of my great-great-grandmother’s broken, troubling story because I needed to learn what it means to be a mother, so that I might forgive my own maternal failings — and understand that sometimes the failings aren’t necessarily my own, but society’s,” Banham writes. This becomes the eloquent quest at the heart of this book: “In trying to understand my great-great-grandmother, I realised something about myself: how urgent my own need for self-forgiveness is. Uncovering her shame, I found my own.”
Yet Banham soon unveils a potentially deeper shame: did Natalina’s birth involve incest, since the only man apparently living with Ersilia was her father? This we can never know, given the crumbling spaces between the cobblestones of archival histories; though we do know that Natalina and Ersilia’s paths never crossed again.
This is not a writer who takes the easy way out. As she learns to mother her son, she leaves delectable signposts for the reader, as the page turns from journalism to inventive forms of speculative and factual nonfiction. Not only is this her story, but it is also the story of what this all means to the writer—and ultimately the reader— who is offered the gift of witnessing how Banham’s approach to mothering and its history in her family unfolds. This is presented as narratively themed fragments, beginning with a chapter entitled ‘judgement’ and ending shortly after ‘forgiveness’, as she learns that the gifts she brings as a mother are enough.
In interviews about Mother Shadow, Banham offers more deeply compassionate reflections to her maternal heritage than what surfaces in the book. She also writes of her struggles with memoir as a form, and the personal cost of negotiating what a writer can and can never tell.
Mother Shadow might equally be called shadow mother. We abandon our children, either in small or profound ways—rarely of our own choosing. When this happens, any one of us might become the shadow mother, whose children are taken away, cleaving mother and baby in two.
About the reviewer: Elizabeth Walton is a freelance writer, musician and visual artist/photographer writing about nature, the arts and life. She has a Masters of Creative Writing and Masters of Research (Creative Writing) and is presently completing her PhD in Creative Writing. Alongside artistic work, she has presented her academic research at conferences and produced journalistic work for Reuters, The Australia, The Guardian and The ABC. Her first solo publication How to Read a City was released in 2026 by 5 Islands Press. Find out more here: https://www.elizabethwalton.com.au/