Casey Donovan's "eye-opening" family discovery
When Casey Donovan was invited to be a part of the SBS ancestry series Who Do You Think You Are, she did not expect to learn some surprising facts about herself.
The singer-songwriter said appearing on the show’s tenth season was a cathartic experience that answered the questions she had growing up around her identity.
“The experience was eye-opening for me,” the 31-year-old told 9Honey. “To learn about my family and who I am as a whole was really interesting.”
She said she was especially excited to learn about her mother’s lineage, which she “had no idea” about.
“I guess back in the days our parents were old-school. English parents didn’t really speak about their upbringing.”
The show’s experts found that Donovan’s biological father – who left when she was two years old – is of Aboriginal descent, while the ancestors of her mother could be traced back to the English convicts.
Donovan was also discovered to be three per cent Swedish.
“I now understand my heavy love for flat-packing and IKEA,” Donovan told SBS Life.
“I was just expecting Indigenous and English – but Swedish was a surprise.”
The series saw the musician reconnect to her paternal Indigenous roots in Gumbaynggirr country on the mid-North Coast of NSW, where her great-great-grandmother Florence Randall was credited with helping to keep the Aboriginal group language alive.
“All the women in my family are very strong, so that was very interesting,” Donovan said.
“When you come from a broken family and you grow up with all these questions that rarely get answered... after not knowing who I was and struggling with my identity, to do the show and have these answers given to me, it really was a weight taken off my shoulders,” she shared.
“At the end I was in tears because it was such a beautiful thing. All the doubts I had about who I am, am I good enough, all of those thoughts went away because of the questions that were answered.”