Sharyn Killens Sharyn Killens i(A127117 works by) (a.k.a. Sharyn Crystal)
Born: Established: 1948 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

Sharyn Killens is the daughter of an Australian mother and an African American Marine who visited Sydney following World War II. Her mother and family rejected her on account of being a mixed race child, which in turn meant Killens spent much of her childhood with foster families and in children's homes, including the Parramatta Girls' Home and the Hay Institution for Girls. In her memoir, The Inconvenient Child (2010), she gives a full account of the discipline measures used in these two remand centre for 'delinquent' girls.

In her adult life, Killens built a career in singing under the name Sharyn Crystal. Her active participation in nightclub life resulted led to alcohol and substance abuse, and later recovery.

In her memoir, Killens recounts how she reconciled with her mother and eventually traced her father's family in the United States.

Source: Rachel Browne, 'An Innocent Found Guilty for Living', Sun-Herald, 'Extra' (13 September 2009): 7

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Inconvenient Child : An Abandoned Australian Child Struggles to Survive and Find Her African American Father St Leonards : Miracle Publishing , 2009 Z1624338 2009 single work autobiography

'An unacceptable liaison, a secret birth, a mother's silence and her black child's journey to discover the truth. The story begins in 1948, Sydney, Australia. Pretty, blonde Grace discovers she is pregnant to a visiting black American serviceman. The White Australia Policy is in place and society's judgment matters; so what will Grace do with this baby.

This is the extraordinary true story of Sharyn Killens - the inconvenient child.

The baby Sharyn, is rescued from squalid foster care by a visiting African American champion boxer and taken to live in a 'party house' in Sydney's red light district of Kings Cross. But her absent, elegant mother then abandons Sharyn in a convent-orphanage at age five, where she suffers abuse at the hands of a demented nun.

By fifteen, discrimination within her family, resentment and clashes over her father's undisclosed identity see the troubled runaway teenager arrested in the streets of Kings Cross. She has committed no crime but she is sentenced to the notorious juvenile detention centers of Parramatta and Hay, during the 1960s. Sharyn Killens' solace is her love of music but can she realize her dream to become a singer if, by twenty-four, she is caught up in the Kings Cross lifestyle?

Determined to find her father, Sharyn sets out in search of her roots, a quest taking her across the world and eventually to America's Deep South. But will she find the loving family and belonging she has yearned for all her life?' (Publisher's blurb)
2011 winner SWW Book Awards — Non Fiction
VIEW ALL AWARDS
Last amended 18 Nov 2013 08:34:14
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X