Rob Hurst

So years later, when her birth mother, with the help of her husband, went looking through docs...

and all the details that both parties put in, in other words, the exact place and minute of birth were put in, that's how we found each other after 36 years.

Well, Jay's birth mother put a letter in my letterbox explaining how our child had last been found and that our child had been also looking at a previous point but had given up hope and how already birth mother and the child had made a connection and basically asking, do you want to know this child?

And, of course, I immediately rang the number back and said, yeah, of course I do.

And then it was apparently already Jay knew that I was her father and put the pieces together.

It's like, oh, that kind of explains this music, this damn music that's been going around in my head for years.

First of all, I got online and looked at her amazing career because she'd eventually got a publishing deal with Warner and gone to London and made a couple of Kate Bush kind of sounding albums.

She's got this voice which soars through the octaves, just like her birth mother, that operatic thing, and then came back and then continued on dancing and singing and just getting jobs where she could to survive and then met Marco Shea, who's the youngest of nine people

kids from dolby in queensland and and they um they became boyfriend and girlfriend and eventually married and um but and performed together and performed together still as o'shea and they moved to nashville because mark's first love is country music so um sorry to answer your question we met um i was like it's like one of those films slow motion dad and daughter you know sort of heading towards each other just outside those cafes in bronte when she came out from america

Did you recognise her straight away?

Oh, yeah, because I'd already, you know, looked at the film clips and she looks exactly like Lex, my daughter, and Ellis, because I've got two amazing daughters with Leslie.

Lex, who's 32, the editor with one of the big publishing houses in Sydney.

and Ella who's an artist who's just finishing in London her fine arts masters so there's music and art and literature sort of in the family so it all made and there's a physical similarity as well so I knew what she looked like and what was that first meeting like I mean it can be so much pressure so much expectation it can end up a bit rocky those interactions how was it for you

It was fantastic.

You know, I mean, obviously, I guess we were really nervous.

But then after we relaxed a bit, you know, the story was told.

We didn't get even halfway through it.

You know, you can't tell someone's life story just like that.

And so gradually, I actually just wrote to Jay.

I wrote bits of my story with letters just to fill her in so she could get up to speed and then gradually found out hers.