“My baby was stolen from me”

“ I was allowed to see him once before I left,and only throught the necessary window.”

The hot, lazy days of 1967’s ‘summer of love’ were filled with endless possibilities for dreamy teenager Lily McDonald, who was deeply in love and happily immersed in the new pop-rock scene of swinging ’60s Brisbane.

Lily’s favourite memories of those heady summer days were of curling up in bed at the inner-city flat she shared with the handsome young guitarist she planned to marry, while he serenaded her to sleep with the love song he had penned for her.

Tragically, however, on a sultry February night, the summer of love came to a sudden, terrifying halt for the lovebirds when Lily – who was a month shy of her 17th birthday – was woken by two burly policemen and hauled off to jail.

Her “crime” was that she had fallen in love and was six weeks pregnant. The following morning, Lily was frogmarched before a magistrate, charged with being “exposed to moral danger” and remanded in custody to the notorious Magdalene home for wayward girls in Wooloowin. There, she spent a harrowing week locked in an empty dormitory while the authorities made half-hearted attempts to locate her mother, who had recently moved to Sydney with Lily’s stepfather and seven younger siblings.

With her father in jail and her mother’s whereabouts unknown, Lily was made a ward of