Russo-Rossi, Ms M.

The Hon. F. PANGALLO (15:31): This is a poignant Mother's Day story. It spans 60 years of a heartbroken mother's relentless search for the whereabouts of her baby son. What Maria Russo-Rossi uncovered is shocking: unlawful, unethical and disturbing practices which had occurred in the funeral industry. Hers is a story of bizarre and macabre twists and turns which began at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital on 5 May 1964 when newly arrived Italian migrant Maria and her now late husband, Rino, welcomed their first child, a boy. Sadly, he only lived eight hours.

Unable to speak a word of English in their adopted homeland, the grieving couple left it to the hospital to make the necessary arrangements. There was no funeral. Elliott funeral directors collected baby Rossi. A death certificate shows the unnamed baby was buried on 12 May 1964 at Hindmarsh Cemetery.

Here is where this tragic saga takes its first strange turn. In 1993, after 29 years of trying to forget the trauma of losing her firstborn, Maria went looking for his burial place at Hindmarsh Cemetery. Despite the official government document confirming the burial took place, there was no record of baby Rossi.

Believing neither she nor the baby's soul could ever find peace until his remains were found, Maria started her detective work. She began at The QEH, collecting the names of 35 babies who had died there between March and August 1964 and where they were supposedly buried in Adelaide's various cemeteries. To her horror, she found only one accurate record, so where were the others, including baby Rossi?

Hospital and cemetery workers told Maria it was a common yet illegal practice for stillborn and young children to be buried with adults in the same grave to slash costs. Unsure where her baby was, Maria and her husband erected a small monument at Hindmarsh. That was not the end of it. Maria was still desperate to find out where her infant son was buried.

Again, she scoured cemetery records to match burials of adults by Elliott funeral directors on 12 May 1964, and found one. So Maria wrote to the Attorney-General in March 2014 seeking an exhumation of that grave. It was only granted by the current Attorney-General in December last year. But there was to be more disappointment. No signs of a baby's remains in that grave were found. The wasted exercise cost Maria just over $10,000.

Soon after, Maria's daughter, Anna Maria, scanned West Terrace Cemetery records and stumbled upon the name Rossi buried in a mass children's grave—not in May 1964 but three years later in 1967, that is if he is even there. Maria then learned that many other children who had died in different years, and from different areas, were also placed in the mass grave that year. So where was baby Rossi and those 34 other children she knew about for those missing years? Their fate still haunts Maria.

I recently quizzed a highly respected veteran funeral director who started working in the industry in the 1960s and asked if he could shed any light on the mystery. He revealed alarming and scandalous practices: babies and children whose families could not afford or did not have formal funerals for other reasons were kept for years in cold storage after disposal costs had already been paid to undertakers, or their bodies were used for medical research before being disposed in incinerators or landfill without family consent.

Who knows how many children were involved in this macabre practice? Hundreds, even thousands, without mothers, fathers and families ever knowing the truth to this very day. The funeral director also told me unscrupulous gravediggers, to save on grave places used for pauper burials, would place open caskets on top of three others buried in the same grave then cover the cadavers with lime so they could quickly break down. Apparently there is a whole line of these graves at Hindmarsh Cemetery and most likely elsewhere.

As for Maria Russo-Rossi, she and Rino led a productive life in Adelaide, going on to have eight children. Rino passed away in 2020 aged 83. Maria's emotional journey for closure does have a bittersweet ending. This Saturday, there will be a ceremony, with a priest in attendance, at West Terrace Cemetery's mass burial site for children to mark what would have been the 60^th birthday of her unnamed newborn son. Considering all that has happened, I will be asking the government to reimburse Maria's costs for the exhumation.