Amelia Oberhardt, podcast host, 37: Q&A
Amelia Oberhardt spent 12 years trying to find out the identities of two people after spotting a strange photo at her mother’s wake. The results were astonishing.
Your hit podcast Secrets We Keep: Shame, Lies & Family was inspired by your own family story. Tell us about the moment you discovered the secret your mother had kept from you her whole life. Mum died of alcoholism in 2011. At her wake, a photo I’d never seen before appeared in a slideshow. It showed her as a teenager cradling a baby and standing next to a young man, his arm around her. She had a wedding ring on. I was floored. It looked like a family portrait but the man wasn’t my dad and the baby wasn’t me. I spent the next 12 years trying to find out who they were, in an attempt to better understand who Mum really was.
Your podcast opens a Pandora’s Box on reproductive rights for women in 1970s Australia. What shocked you most about this era? The sheer scale of forced adoption – as well as how streamlined the process was. Governments, doctors, religious institutions and social workers enabled a system that allowed forced adoption to thrive. We don’t know the true numbers of families impacted. Even today, there are still people desperately trying to find their children or their biological parents. On a personal level, I was shocked to learn Mum had been forced to get married after falling pregnant as a teen. She’d never mentioned anything to me about this chapter in her life.
Not everyone in your family was supportive of you making the podcast... Family dynamics can be challenging but I felt it was important to talk about what happened to Mum and to bring the issues that impacted her life out into the open. Not telling her story would be reinforcing the secrecy and shame that kept women silent and powerless for far too long.
You had a tumultuous relationship with your mother. How has digging into her past changed the way you remember her?Hearing from people who knew Mum before alcoholism took hold gave me great insight and a new empathy for her – how scared she must have been as a teenager, how events in her life shaped her and affected how she related to me. Tracking down and meeting her first husband Michael, the man from the photo, was momentous. I discovered the baby Mum was holding in the photo was actually his niece. Today, I still have moments where I miss my Mum – but really I am missing what I wish we’d had.
Your parents were News Corp journalists in Brisbane: racing writer Mark Oberhardt, and socials editor Cecelia. What made you follow them into journalism? I spent most of my childhood living with my Dad, so I’d follow him around from newspapers and racetracks to radio studios, absorbing it all. And Mum worked in the features and social pages at the Courier-Mail so I would sometimes appear as an unpaid child model – albeit an awkward one with a missing tooth and bowl cut! I later wrote for the Courier-Mail while I was in high school. I felt innately drawn to journalism: I knew no two days would be the same and it would be an interesting, exciting and rewarding career.
Your podcast has given those affected by the forced adoption era a powerful platform on which to share their stories. What do you hope the podcast will achieve? My goal was to shine a light on this harmful period of Australia’s recent history through the personal stories of my Mum and other women. I hope survivors of forced adoption get the Royal Commission they’ve been calling for. But more than anything, I hope it helps to reduce the pain, trauma and stigma carried by women and their families for too long.
Secrets We Keep: Shame, Lies and Family is available wherever you get your podcasts
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