David Lomas on his own family mystery, New Zealand adoption laws and the new season of David Lomas Investigates

The new season of David Lomas Investigates premieres on Wednesday, August 2 on ThreeNow. Photo / ThreeNow

Every family has its secrets. If anyone knows this to be true, it’s David Lomas.

For 16 years the investigative journalist and TV presenter has worked tirelessly to uncover the mysteries of New Zealand families, connecting children to their birth parents and reuniting whānau in emotional television moments.

And though Lomas has spent his life finding people for others in his series Missing Pieces, Lost and Found and most recently, David Lomas Investigates, he tells the Herald on Sunday he’s stumbled upon his own family mysteries too.

“My mother had a sister who, for various reasons within the family, disappeared. And nobody knew where she was.”

Then, without intending to, as a young journalist covering what was at the time New Zealand’s deadliest mass murder, Lomas found her.

“Incredibly, when the Aramoana Massacre happened I was down in Port Chalmers, walking around, perhaps trying to find people who had seen or knew anything about what happened out there that day. And I walked into one pub and a woman walked up to me and says, ‘Are you David Lomas?’

“And I said, ‘Yes.’

“And she said, ‘Well, I’m your aunt.’

“It was the first I knew of her. There are always family mysteries, and every family has them.”

Lomas also shares there was a child unknown to his family for “quite some time”.

“There’s my older brother, who’s also a journalist. He had a child up in Fiji which the family didn’t know about for quite some time and my mother discovered this and demanded to know who he was, where he was, how to contact him.

“And she just took him in, absolutely embraced him. And he’s been part of the family ever since.”

David Lomas discovered his estranged aunt when he was on an assignment covering the Aramoana Massacre. Photo / ThreeNow

Lomas, perhaps more than anyone, appreciates stories of similar ilk are “relatively common”.

“I’m constantly stopped by people who have a family mystery; you know, a mystery brother they don’t know about.”

Many of the mysteries Lomas solves have stemmed from the unfortunate combination of society’s traditional views on children born out of wedlock and New Zealand’s antiquated adoption laws.

“There was a boom with adoptions in the 60s and 70s and probably 50s and a staggering number of babies were adopted. A lot of them were raised never knowing they were adopted. They’d only find out later in life and their parents have passed.”

He recalls the story of a woman named Ness who had been searching for her father for decades.

“She went through the legal channels. She even went to the court to try and get it. Nobody would tell her the information.

“And we finally cracked it for her and found that her father had died. He’d had another child who had been adopted. He’d found his father and was totally embraced by him and had this wonderful relationship with his dad.

“Ness was denied that because of a law which is just so outdated.”

While New Zealand’s adoption laws are up for reform, Lomas believes his work has helped shift the attitudes of Kiwis toward disconnected families and illegitimate children too.

“I don’t want to take too much credit, but I think attitudes in New Zealand have changed. So many people have seen what we’ve done, that disconnected families are not uncommon, and that there is a lot of willingness to accept and forgive. The programme really has highlighted that.”

He believes his work has helped reduce the fear people have around reaching out to someone who could be their biological parent or child.

“People used to think, I’m too scared to contact someone I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll be accepted. What our programmes have done - Missing Pieces, Lost and Found and David Lomas Investigates - they’ve all sort of shown that there is great kindness and acceptance of people and their mysteries.”

As Lomas says in his series, “there are two truths in everything”.

Often, he says, the narrative between a mother and father over a child can be at odds.

“The mother is telling what she thinks is true, but from the father’s point of view it’s a totally different story. He thought he could never come back. And so, there is forgiveness and a lot of hope and love from those things.”

From all the encounters Lomas has facilitated with people, what he has come to ultimately realise is that “most people are good at heart”.

He recalls the story of a 45-year-old Mongrel Mob member who’d had a tough upbringing, fallen into gangs and spent time in prison.

He came to Lomas “trying to find his dad”, who turned out to be a church minister in his early 80s. “A magic chap,” who, during filming, would turn to the camera and start “basically talking to this son that he had never met and saying, ‘You know my son, I accept you.’ And sort of giving his blessing.”

Lomas remembers playing the footage back to the son.

Lomas believes his work has helped shift the attitudes of Kiwis toward disconnected families and illegitimate children too. Photo / ThreeNow

“He’s this gang member who’s done all this prison time, there’s this great big tear running from his eye.

“He became a changed man,” says Lomas, noting that the man returned from Australia to be with his father “and it changed him, finding his family”.

“We’ve done stories with people all around the world and there is no difference. Family is key. I think there are about 30-odd countries now that I’ve probably filmed in and done stories. Everywhere in the world, it touches,” says Lomas, whose latest series sees him travel to India, Thailand and the Solomons “where I end up in an open boat across the seas and trying to get to a little remote village”.

“They’re just incredible stories and so wonderful and [I’m] lucky to do them.”

Part of what makes the stories incredible is how impossible they seem at the outset. But Lomas reveals “the key to everything we do is finding an absolute truth.

“So, if someone comes to us and says, ‘I want to find my father’, for instance, we need to know who that person is, how you spell his name, when he was born. An absolute truth. So you know what you’re looking for.”

However, he says, “sometimes with the stories we do now, we can’t quite get those absolute truths because people know absolutely nothing”.

One such story is the soon-to-air case where a woman was left at an orphanage in India with no name attached, and adopted by a family who settled in New Zealand.

It reminded Lomas of the film with a similar story, Lion.

Lomas' search for a woman's mother takes him to India in season three of David Lomas Investigates. Photo / ThreeNow

“Her mother just left her there. You can’t get an absolute truth on that. But the other thing is we talk to people. It’s not all about sitting on a computer and looking at records. If you talk to people, everyone just remembers a little snippet and that builds the base we have to get started.”

And in the first episode of David Lomas Investigates, season three, Lomas facilitates the woman’s return to India to find her mother, revealing along the way the impact of both having to give up a child and being a child adopted out with no record of their biological parent. It’s an affecting watch full of anticipation, remorse and heartwarming redemption.

Asked how the stories he’s uncovered have affected him, Lomas says for the most part, he’s “the good fairy”.

“One of my cameramen used to talk about me coming to town, sprinkling [fairy dust]. They’d joke about that. Basically, what I do most of the time is tell people wonderful things. Of course, I have emotion all the time, you can’t help but have it when you see the things we do. There’s emotion there but it’s always sort of happy emotion, so it’s great.”

• Season three of David Lomas Investigates premieres on Wednesday, August 2 on ThreeNow.

Rebecca Haszard is a senior lifestyle and entertainment writer, co-host of the Herald’s parenting podcast One Day You’ll Thank Me and the former editor of Girlfriend magazine.