Jeff Stone had always known he was adopted. His parents, Gary and Ellen, had taken him in when he was just 11 days old and once he was old enough to understand, they’d made no secret of it, believing it was important he knew as much as they did.
Despite the warmth and love Jeff received from his adoptive family, he not surprisingly always had a curiosity regarding his biological family.
Last Christmas he received a letter from Wattle Place in Sydney – part of Relationships Australia – and all of a sudden things changed.
Mr Stone didn’t know it at the time, but his biological mother had passed the information of his existence to his brother Danny Cook who almost immediately began searching for the brother he never knew he had.
“Christmas 2021 I got a letter from an agency in Sydney,” Jeff told the Barrier Truth.
“They didn’t tell me what it was about, they just asked me a few questions and once I’d ticked all the boxes, they told me ‘You’ve got a brother looking for you’. It was one hell of a shock after 53 years.”
First, the estranged brothers communicated via the agency, then they progressed to phone conversations, and they finally met face-to-face for the first time when Jeff’s long lost brother travelled from Brisbane to Broken Hill.
Mr Cook was a state ward until he was 21. After spending some time living with an aunt and uncle when he got out of there, Danny moved in with his mum to Canberra. He lived with her for four years until moving to Brisbane.
In Brisbane Mr Cook got married and struck out on his own. On day he received the news his mum was in her final moments.
“I got a call at work saying, ‘your Mum is really crook’ and at first, I didn’t believe it,” Mr Cook says.
Once he had processed what was happening, he took a flight to Sydney, and it was in his mother’s final moments she told him he had a brother.
“I got on to Wattle Place that mum led me to beforehand, spoke to my case officer and about eight or nine months later I got a phone call saying, ‘we’ve found your brother’ and it all went from there.”
Mr Cook was quick to pay tribute to the role Camille from Wattle Place played in the brother’s unlikely reunion.
“If it wasn’t for Camille, I’d have still now been hitting me head against a brick wall.”
The brothers, Danny 56, and Jeff 53, already feel a tight bond. Both spoke to us of the uncanny parallels they discovered about each other once they exchanged life stories.
“It blew my mind when we spoke. A lot of things that I had gone through at similar times in my life, Danny had been going through too. It was so uncanny,” Mr Stone said.
Mr. Stone’s parents were ecstatic for their son when he found out he had a brother.
“I was so excited for him to have a brother, because beforehand he had two sisters,” Mrs Stone said.
His adoptive father Gary echoed those sentiments. “I was just so pleased for him.”
A small miracle happened right here in Broken Hill as the two brothers reunited.
We wish Jeff and Danny all the best as they move forward to the next stage of their lives as brothers in arms.
