When Amelia Oberhart discovered a photograph of her mother with a mystery husband and baby while at her mother’s funeral started her own investigation into the family in the picture.
The first three episodes of Secrets We Keep, Brisbane journalist Amelia Oberhardt digs into her mother’s past, discovering she once had a husband and the baby in the photograph, wasn’t who she thought she was.
Unfortunately, this deep dive for answers also revealed more about Australia’s dark history – a history of forced adoptions and religious prejudice.
Moral Danger:
In the most recent episodes of Secrets We Keep, Amelia reaches out to two mothers, Di and Lily, who fell victim to forced adoption at the hands of religious and societal expectations.
“My father was the Catholic. My mother was what we called in those days a non-Catholic,” Di told Amelia.
“And when she was married, she had to sign a form to say that she would raise the children in the Catholic Church.”
It was this Catholic guilt that resulted in her child being taken from her only moments after her surprise labour.
This episode explores how forced adoptions were made possible, the experiences natural mothers went through and how this impacted their lives decades later.
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