Australian Dictionary of Biography

Dorothy Mittas and her son Peter, 1991, by Elizabeth Dobbie

Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 1991, p. 8. Courtesy of Fairfax Media.

Dorothy Jacqueline Mittas (1934–1999), adoption reformer, was born on 22 March 1934 at Cambridge, England, daughter of John Arthur Wright, railway goods guard, and his wife Dorothy, née Biggs. After leaving school at the age of fifteen, from 1949 to 1967 she worked for several local businesses, holding roles as a cashier, accounts or invoice clerk, telephonist, and receptionist. When she was twenty-four, Dorothy gave birth to a boy in a church-run home, where she looked after him for seven weeks. She signed the adoption papers because the father was married and she could not afford to keep the child. It was an era when sex education was minimal, contraception unreliable, and abortion unavailable. She and many others consented to adoption because society did not provide adequate financial assistance or child care, and both mothers and children were stigmatised.

Some women sought to put the past behind them by moving overseas after their baby was adopted and, nine years after giving birth, Wright migrated to Australia. She settled in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield. In 1968 she was appointed a telephonist in the Postmaster-General’s Department in New South Wales. On 31 October 1973 she changed her surname by deed poll to Mittas. It is unknown why she chose this surname.

Feminist campaigning prompted significant social changes in Australia in the 1970s. The pill provided effective contraception; a supporting mothers’ benefit was introduced in 1973, and child care became more widely available. Single women with unplanned pregnancies had choices, and were better supported to raise their child themselves. Women from previous generations had not been, and many felt depressed, helpless, and alone when they relinquished their children. These women became more outspoken about their experiences in the mid-1970s when they joined support groups including Jigsaw, Adoption Triangle, and ARMS (the Association of Relinquishing Mothers).

In the 1980s Mittas was a member of several of these self-help groups and spent years of unpaid work supporting women in their bids to reunite with their children. She played an important role in political campaigns for reform, which ultimately resulted in the passage of the Adoption Information Act (1990), giving adopted children and their birth parents in New South Wales the legal right to identifying information about each other. At the same time, from November 1981 she worked full time as an enquiry officer at the State Government Insurance Office (GIO). It was an ideal job because colleagues were sympathetic about her work as a volunteer with ARMS and helped her locate documents that enabled reunions. She attended some of these as a support person to ensure that such emotional meetings were handled sensitively.

In 1976 the New South Wales government had established an Adopted Person’s Contact Register, amid discussions about the right to know. The government responded to pressure for greater rights to information by establishing the Legislative Council standing committee on social issues to review the matter in 1988. During the ensuing inquiry Mittas took notes in the visitors’ gallery, attending every day to assist the ARMS coordinator, Judy Hutchison, to compile submissions. Journalists and politicians knew and respected Mittas, who often made night phone calls to Max Willis, the committee chair. It handed down its recommendations—most of which were accepted—in October 1989, and the Adoption Information Act was passed the following year.

Mittas had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977 and, prompted by thoughts of where her property would have gone had she not recovered, wrote in 1985 to the Cambridge offices that had arranged her son’s adoption order, eventually receiving details of his adoptive parents. After exchanges of letters, photographs, and phone calls, she visited England twice and, after years of separation, was delighted to meet Peter, her ‘good looking, tall, blond haired son’ (McHutchison 1999, 20). She felt that the seven weeks she had originally had with him had ‘sustained her,’ and believed that the experiences of mothers who were permanently separated from their babies from birth would be ‘unimaginable’ (McHutchison 1999, 20).

In 1991 Mittas told the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Catherine Armitage that she had been ‘naive’ (1991, 8) when she became pregnant in 1958. After she gave birth, the nurses in the home told her: ‘just go away and you will forget about it. You will resume a normal life; you will get married and have children’ (Armitage 1991, 8). Their advice was wrong: her life was shattered, she never forgot her son, she did not marry, and nor did she have additional children. Drawing on her own experience, she was determined to help other women locate their children, and she inspired them to speak out in the media and to send submissions to politicians. While she was not a sophisticated political activist, she had a warm, larger than life personality, a great sense of humour, and the ability to make people laugh. New South Wales politicians were responsive to her as an ambassador for adoption reform; her polite persuasion made them reconsider and reject formerly stigmatising views.

During the mid-1990s Mittas retired from the GIO because of ill health and relocated to Lake Macquarie, where she painted landscapes and continued her advocacy. Shortly before her death, she ‘described her contribution to adoption reform as one of the most satisfying experiences of her life’ (McHutchison 1999, 20). Thousands of birth parents and adoptees had sought information under the legislation she had worked for, and she had ‘helped facilitate hundreds of reunions between family members separated by adoption’ (McHutchison 1999, 20). She died of a heart attack on 17 September 1999 at Newcastle and was cremated; she was survived by her son. In March 2025 the ACT place names committee approved the name of Dorothy Mittas View in the Australian Capital Territory suburb of Denman Prospect.