'Why didn't we know?': Wendy and Pamela's decades-long search for their secret brother

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The two Sydney sisters were looking through their late father's papers when they uncovered his hidden life. It made them see him very differently.

"My first reaction was surprise, and then shock, and then you start asking all the questions. Why didn't we know?" Pamela says."We realised of course that he was 27 years older than us. [At that time] he would have been about 79, but still, possibly alive," Wendy says.World War I broke out four years after Harry Frank was born. A year later, in 1915, their then 26-year-old father enlisted and left Australia.he had little to do with Flora or his then nine-year-old son.

Pamela put a call-out in a newspaper in 1989. Eventually she was contacted by one of Flora Cohen's relatives. The man told her that Harry came to live with their family in Bondi when he was about 15. The dates matched."He was convinced that Harry was a homosexual," Pamela says.He went to jackaroo in Narrabri for a year but, after growing tired of it, he left.

He seemed to find it hard to pick up more work after that. At the time, Australia was in the throes of the Great Depression. Things were tough and Harry, who had clearly spent his inheritance, was charged with petty stealing offences.Harry's next misstep feels particularly unjust, Kate says.the then 21-year-old was arrested in Sydney and charged with indecent assault on a male person.

 

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It's quite sad that he unalived himself with no loved ones and never could have imagined that he had sisters out there that cared about him enough to spend 21 years searching for him

Is this in the Anglo or Irish or Welsh or Scottish or European heritage community of White Australians since 1901?

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