Originally published in 2007 as The Little Mongrel - free to a good home, The Scent of my Mother’s Kiss includes a new chapter on Rock Lynn House, a Salvation Army Maternity Home in West Launceston that operated between 1900 and 1960. This book has been written from the perspective of an adoptee, tracing her formative years from the blank slate of birth to the verge of adulthood and the relentless search for the key that would erase the debilitating fugue of not knowing. The child who is placed with adoptive parents soon after birth is denied the experience of the biological sequence that begins in the womb, the merging of the physiological with the psychological that forms the post-partum bond. The resultant collision between the needs of the adoptive parent and adoptee has the capacity to magnify the pain for each and shatter the illusion irrevocably.