Secrets We Keep
Amelia Oberhardt opens the doors to family secrets. Image supplied
Reporter
Journalist, Amelia Oberhardt, thought she knew her mum - until she died. But at her mum’s wake, Oberhardt discovers a photo of her mother as a teenager, wearing a wedding ring, standing beside her apparent husband and cuddling an unknown baby.
Determined to understand what the photograph represented for her family, Oberhardt embarks on a journey that leads to the hidden secrets of 1950-1970s Australia.
What is it like to discover dark family secrets? Image supplied.
In Secrets We Keep: Shame, Lies & Family, the LiSTNR News team delve into a subject that is both extraordinary and surprisingly common – the hidden histories of secret pregnancies, shotgun marriages, forced adoptions, and the challenges faced by young women in impossible situations.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 1971 and 1972, one in every 28 babies born in Australia were adopted* compared to 2020-21 figures which show one in 1145 babies*.
Podcast host, Amelia Oberhardt, says she has been on her own journey to find answers to her family secrets for more than a decade. “In that process, I found out so much more about [when] my mum was coming of age. It wasn’t easy to be a young woman in Australia through the 1960s and 1970s.
“What surprised me during the making of this series, is just how common this story is for so many families and how many are still impacted today,” Oberhardt says.
The series is as much about helping to heal families, as it is about Oberhardt face her own feelings about her mother.
LiSTNR Head of News and Information, Melanie Withnall, describes the series as a deeply personal journey and a companion podcast for anyone seeking to untangle their own family secrets.
“Knowing the extreme sensitivity of the subject matter, the LiSTNR team has taken exceptional care and applied a best practice trauma informed approach to creating the content,” Withnall says.
Secrets We Keep reveals what happens when young women are put in impossible situations, and the aftermath of discovery when the messy knot of secrets are revealed decades later.
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Episode one and two of Secrets We Keep: Shame, Lies & Family is available now on LiSTNR. New episodes of the nine-part series will drop every Tuesday.
