For nearly half a century, Australia was engaged in a shameful and shocking practice that would tear babies from the arms of their mothers, sometimes before they ever even laid eyes on their precious little faces.

For decades, women who found themselves pregnant without a husband to protect them in this country would be subject to a society that shunned them for their immoral behavior, who rejected them for not being a good girl, who believed that their babies were better off being raised by a married couple.

Some were arrested, forced into labor homes until their due dates.

Some were coerced into signing papers they thought were to discharge them, only to later find out it was for an adoption.

Some just did as they were told, knowing they had little power in a system where the doctors, nur vers, social workers, and religious authorities held all the cards.

When those taken babies eventually grew up, they would find out that they weren't given up, but essentially stolen, and for many of these mothers and children, it would create fractures that have never healed, and the fight for recognition and justice continues.

For journalists, Amelia Oberhart, seeing a strange picture of her late mother at her wake, posing with a man she didn't know, a baby in her arms.

She wondered if her own family was a victim of this systemic violence against single women that happened to countless others spanning the decades from the nineteen forties to the nineteen eighties.

Could that little one in the photo be a long lost sibling?

Was her own mum one of those victimized by the attitudes of the times.

I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a Mumma Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them.

For those who remember then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's apology in Parliament in twenty thirteen, it may have been the first time you'd heard about the process of forced adoptions, a practice that occurred in maternity hospitals across the country from the nineteen forties through to the nineteen eighties here in Australia.

No collection of words alone can undo all this damage or make hold the lives of families fractured by forced adoption.

But by saying sorry, we can correct the historical record.

We can declare that these mothers did nothing wrong.

This is not the apology to the star all in Generations by then PM Kevin Rudd in two thousand and eight.

Although there are many similarities in these two shocking practices, they are the same but are also very different.

In forced adoptions, young women from many different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, from the poorest to the wealthy, found themselves in similar situations, sometimes without anyone to support them, finding that the men who had impregnated them were either not wanting to take responsibility or were locked out of the process due to them not being officially married.

Sometimes these young women kicked out of their homes by parents too ashamed to admit their daughter had had sex outside of marriage.

The hospitals would organize for a married couple who were looking to adopt to take a baby born of an unwed woman, but while some willingly gave their children up for adoption, many did not.

The ways in which these women were lied to, coerced, threatened, and shamed have left many of them broken and angry, and the children, who are the innocent byproduct of a time are themselves confused and looking for answers that remain hidden behind walls of documented secrecy.

Amelia Oberhart has been documenting the journey of her discoveries about her mother's life before she was born in her podcast Secrets We Keep Shame, Lies and Family.

I'm Amelia Oberhart.

I'm a journalist from Brisbane.

The photo of my mom made me realize I never really knew her at all.

I've spent over a decade trying to find answers and some sort of closure over my mom's early death.

In that process, I found out much more about the time she was living through.

And in the process of unveiling her own story, found the buried stories of women whose numbers will shock you, she joins us.

Now, so, Amelia, let's go back to the beginning of where this story started for you.

Because you're at your mum's wake it's more than a decade ago now, and your friend has quite generously helped you put together a slideshow of photos from your mum's collection, and this picture pops up of a teenage version of your mother standing next or another young man holding a baby.

She's wearing a wedding ring.

You look at this and you say to your friend, who the hell is this man?

And who is this baby?

Now, obviously through the journey of your podcast you have figured that story out, But at that time, and in that moment, in the moments immediately after, where did your mind take you?

What stories were you telling yourself as to what was happening in this photo?

Because your mum is holding this little baby like it's her own.

It looked like a family portrait.

And when I turned to my best friend asked, and she said, that's your mum and your dad and you as a baby.

And I looked at her and she says, to me, now the look on my face when I said, that's not my dad and that's not me, and we both sort of it that moment turned around and stared into the eyes of all the family and friends.

Jaws were on the floor, and everyone was quite rattled by the photo, and I could tell straight away it wasn't meant to be in there.

We continue to watch the slide show, but in that moment, they knew I was going to start asking.

I could see those wheels turning around me.

I saw a few of my mum's friends approach family members, and I could see that it was already being discussed.

What's the story we're going to tell her obviously that whole album was never meant to make it to daylight, And it was actually up the back of the cupboard.

In her bedroom.

We were all up at the Sunshine Coast because that's where she'd passed away, and my friend had come back from New York and had gone to her home and was getting photos together and she spotted this random photo of them.

That's where the photos or were.

So the fact that out of all the thousands of photos in her bedroom, this one made it into the slideshow, It's like she wanted it to be there.

So what story did you tell yourself before you started to find out the real details of where that photo originated in the story behind it?

I think because we'd done the death certificate the day before, and they had asked the question of you know, normal things, first name, last name, date of birth, and then they said how many marriages, and me and my brother said one, and the family said two.

And then he said age at first marriage and they said sixteen.

Because I had never ever ever heard that she'd ever been married before, and let alone as a teenager.

I had already sort of sparked something.

Something was already going plus grief, plus organizing a funeral, plus not sleeping, all those sort of things.

Then when that photo came up, my immediate thought was, this is the first husband and that is their baby.

The fact then that that photo came back the next day, timestamped nineteen seventy three, making seventeen, I couldn't fathom the coincidence of her being married at that age, of it never coming to light, and of this photo being timestamped holding a newborn baby exactly at the age she would have had it.

I mean, I think I originally thought that baby is a family member.

She's had that baby, and then it's been rearranged into the family somehow.

That was my first thought.

So obviously your first questions go to your mum's family to figure out what's going on here.

In your mind, you're wondering, if you have a long lost sibling, what stories do they start to tell you about this photo.

Her family are a very Catholic, extremely private family for those reasons.

I don't even know if they would know.

There's a lot of siblings and huge gaps in age.

There was a mixture of answers.

Some people in the very close family circle told me she had a baby and it died at one and then the other story was that there was never a baby, and then there was a story that she had a miscarriage.

So there was a.

Very strange dynamic happening.

But also at the same time, I was just constantly being told to stop asking questions, let it go, stop asking questions.

You're crazy, you know, there's nothing to it.

Move on with your life.

And I kept getting mixed answers from her close friends that were saying similar things that she had had a baby in it had died, or you know, that they just didn't see her for a period of two years of her life.

She essentially went missing and no one had seen or heard from her.

Someone else said she'd been pulled out of school halfway through the year and no one knew where she went.

So there was just so many mixed messages coming from everywhere, and no one would give me a straight answer.

And I think, as a benefit to all the women that ended up on this podcast, it's lucky that no one gave me a straight answer.

But it all could have been solved very easily if this whole idea of donas, don't tell and we don't talk about anything, throw everything under a rug and stamp on it.

If that hadn't existed, maybe she'd still be alive.

And also maybe I would have had my answer twelve years ago.

When did you start to entertain the idea that your mom might have been one of the many, many Australian women who were caught up in a process known as forced adoption.

It's what we call it now.

Back then it was a very different story.

When did you start to entertain the idea that she might have been caught up in that.

Over the years, as I started to ask a lot of questions, I also was met often with people that had these stories where they'd say, that's quite likely, you know, because my cousin ended up being my sister, or you know that my mom's mom was actually her sister and it was her grandmother that brought her up.

I started to recognize very quickly every single person I hypothesized my mom's outcome with had a story or knew someone with a story, and I started to think, this could have happened to my mom.

The Catholic there's these informal adoptions taking place left, right and center.

There's rearrangements in families happening all over the place.

It is extremely likely that she was pregnant obviously forced to get married, and then that they couldn't handle it, or they were too young, or something's happened and they've had to give away the baby.

I mean, that's what I had thought, well up until we started the podcast.

What insight did you get during this time where you're investigating into your mum's early life and the influences that religious institutions had on her and the decisions that she would have had to have made during her younger years.

My mom passed away from alcoholism, and anyone that's no one ll loved someone with an addiction knows the varying ways relationships breakdown, and also the desperation you feel in wanting to understand why, why did this take a grip?

Why are you no longer here?

I think in seeking out her earlier life, I started to understand her because the last part of her life, in which normally people have those conversations, she was quite far gone.

But I started to see her as this bright, vivacious young girl who was very popular and very smart and found herself in an impossible situation where she discovered she was pregnant, and that had come from some close friends of hers that Tommy, they were with her when she found out.

She was obviously then taken to the family home and then locked away from everyone for a while while decisions were made and things were arranged for the wedding.

Is what I've been told, And I mean putting myself in a position of being sixteen and pregnant, how terrified.

Having come also from a devout Catholic home in which morals standing and the Bible and the Church is your overrarching everyday sense of morality is coming from the Church and your parents feeding you that every day.

So to have committed the sin of sex outside of marriage, committed a sin where you're now unwed and pregnant and you're sixteen or seventeen.

When I hear about it, I can feel the shame she would have felt.

That's not how society works now.

But then the shame that they likened being unwed and pregnant too was you were better off being a murderer, and that sort of comprehension that that's the way that social standings looked at you.

It's so hard to get your head around.

So many years pass and you're still asking questions, but your mum actually gives you the tools to unlock the mystery because she has left the name of the man that she married in documents for you to trace.

Tell me about finding the man in the photo.

I obviously had a copy of the death certificate, and on the death certificate it read Michael Davies.

I mean, Michael Davies couldn't be a more common name in Queensland, and that was assuming he still lived in Queensland.

So, you know, as I had children of my own, I really would go on these tangents of desperately trying to find him because I think I was trying to rectify with myself the mom I didn't want to be, and in order to be the mom I wanted to be, I needed to heal this wound or understand her.

So every time I had a child, I would start googling.

And that was over nine years.

I've had kids, not nine of them, just three and nine years.

So over the nine years, you know, i'd Google him and LinkedIn, and as technology evolved in more things like Instagram came about or LinkedIn, I guess as an example of something that I didn't have when I started, I still couldn't find him.

We ended up going down to the state archives, and there I trolled through every divorce because it was all public record through the Supreme Court until nineteen seventy six, found a Davy's divorce.

Out of every single file in there, the Davies divorce that had their same initials was the only file that was missing by a clerical error, they told me anyway, So that was a dead end.

Then I ended up trolling the electoral role.

I had an idea that that the photo that we found was taken on the balcony of their home.

A family member had told me, oh, this is where they lived at Irana Hills, and so I knew they'd lived at Irana Hills.

I knew I had a name, and I found them on the electoral role.

I traced them on the electoral role for a while.

Then you know, he falls off in nineteen eighty two or something.

He must have moved somewhere else.

So yeah, I'd gone through all these process I'd gone to burst ess and marriages.

I'd gone to the church in which they got married, and that's where I got the marriage certificate.

Once I had the marriage certificate.

I had way more details, and then obviously pitched the podcast, got it up and running, and they found him within like an hour.

So I was like, Nys.

I've been knowing this for twelve years, so it just goes to show, you know, good producers make everything.

So yeah, they found him, and then we contacted him and I flew to Cans and met with him.

So you head up to Cans to see the man in the picture.

Were you nervous to now, after all this time, find out exactly what had happened with your mom?

Back then, I was like sick to my stomach, and you know, equal parts wanted to run away and can the whole thing and be like, I don't want to do this anymore.

And equal parts knew I was either going there to find a long lost sibling or I was going there to find closure, and either way, I knew I had to go and I had to piece together the puzzle in its entirety for my own benefit, for my children's benefit, and for my future because it had just played with me for so long.

So I was sick to my stomach with anxiety and definitely wanted to run away, but sort of just tried to chune out as much as I could till I got there, And when I got there, I just rambled.

I got the answers.

It was the best thing I ever did, for sure.

All Right, tell us what happened to your mum?

Who is the baby in the picture, and what did the man in the picture explain to you had actually happened?

Putting together all of those rumors that you'd been told from various family members.

So varying degrees of it were true, she'd sort of run away from home.

They'd found themselves pregnant.

She was well, he says, sixteen, but just turned seventeen.

She finds herself pregnant.

Quite far along, they go and tell both their sets of parents, who were devout Catholics on both sides, and they decided that they would get married.

She was locked away for a period of time, and then his mother and my grandmother called him to tell him she'd had a late miscarriage and was in hospital.

And he says he doesn't really know any of the details.

It was all being handled by the mums.

I mean retrospectively.

I think he's remembered some more details around it.

But yes, she had a miscarriage and ended up in hospital for a considerable amount of time, and then they were still forced to go ahead with the marriage.

I think he's a beautiful man and a divine human, but I think that she would have thought that now she'd lost the baby, the marriage would not have to go ahead, But because of the shame and the Catholics and all of that, it was made to go ahead.

And I think that that did inevitably create some problems in her life.

We'll touch on that again a little bit later, but through all of this you start to uncover stories of women who had found themselves in a very similar situation to your mum back in the sixties and seventies, very young, either still a teenager or in the early twenties.

They're not married back then, as you mentioned, very shameful from a societal perspective.

But some of these women have different endings to your mum's story in that they did give birth to a little baby.

And one of the first women that you spoke to about this die revealed to you details of a story that could potentially be told thousands and thousands and thousands of times by Australian women during those decades.

What did I tell you?

I told me that she'd found herself in Sydney and pregnant.

She was training to be a veteran surgeon and was working for a Catholic doctor.

She didn't tell anyone she was pregnant and didn't really know what was going to happen because women back then were so uneducated in sexual education and birth, so they really had no idea what was coming for her.

And then she went into labor.

The Catholic doctor takes her to the hospital and it's there she thinks he made them aware of her situation, which was that she was single or unwared.

So this guy was her boss at that stage.

Yep.

She then gives birth on a sterile, stainless steel bench.

The baby's ripped away from her.

She's left bleeding and lying on a steel bench alone, shivering.

And you know when she talks in the podcast about how cold she was, she physically started shivering while she was telling me.

That's how visceral the response was to even voicing what had happened.

She genuinely started shaking.

And then someone comes in at some point and says, your baby's died.

You can go home.

Sign these discharge papers, go on with your life, and so she tried to go on with her life.

She told not a soul, not one single person in the world.

The father of that.

Baby was in Canada.

She just didn't see a reason.

What was the point.

She'd lost the baby tragically and she had to move on.

And forty years later, she's sitting with her son on a couch having their nightly cup of tea, and she gets an email, and that email's title is I Think you could be my mother.

And in that email, a man goes on to describe details of his birth at the time where it was.

She said, her entire body just went into a state of shock.

And at the bottom is a photo.

He says, this is a photo of my granddaughter.

I've always wanted to know where she got her hair.

And I sits down and looks across at a picture of herself at four and looks at this little girl and they could have been twins.

And I mean that story it was haunting and terribly, terribly sad and not uncommon.

And since Die's story, we've heard from hundreds of women that were told their babies had died or were disabled or needed to go to orphanages for whatever reason, only to find out that wasn't the case.

So these discharge papers that Die was signing to allow her to leave hospital, were they actually discharged papers?

No, they were adoption papers.

Has she ever tried to look back into her situation and find out how that could have happened?

I think they all, in their own ways go about trying to find peace with the situation.

It's very hard because the government, religious organizations, doctors and hospitals and medical professionals all working in tandem, and it's very hard to pin what happened, what went wrong, who's our tru fault was it?

And a lot of files went missing in floods or extenuating circumstances.

They were handwritten files.

There was often clerical errors where birth dates were recorded wrong so that they would never be able to trace each other.

In Die's case, on the adoption papers of her son, she was able to see them.

He knew he had been adopted, and the papers gave some minimal detail about Die Smart wears glasses or something and is unwed, and they were the details and Die not even Diane, you know, just that was all he had when he turned eighteen to find out where he was from, and she had nothing.

How does he then find out that she is his mother?

If that's all the detail that he has to go on.

He went through ancestry dot Com.

His wife had tried to get him to do it over a period of time, and yes, he agreed to do it.

He was matched to his father in Canada's brother, and he says, there was a woman that worked here.

She broke in horses on our property and her name was Die, and she wanted to be a veterinary surgeon.

So he comes back to Australia and he googles Die veterinary surgeon and thousands of Die veterinary surgeons come up.

But right in the middle is a picture of Die who has this amazing curly hair.

And he knew then that's my mum because his daughter had that exact hair.

What's it like for Dye to reunite with a son that she never even thought had a life.

It must be incredibly difficult to reorientate your entire life's history to understand that this person has been alive and in the world this whole time.

I think it's impossible for me to ever be able to articulate how dye must feel because I've never been in that position.

What she describes is just complete disorientation, joy, sorrow, pain, anger, but elation.

Oh my god, you know, I get another shot.

This person's alive, I have another son, I have grandchildren, you know.

But all of that process, she just says, it's sometimes too hard to actually process.

And you know, she's going through all the right avenues in terms of that's why she told her story and being able to talk freely about it and lift the shame and lift that I guess head fuck that it is.

And she's, yeah, desperately trying to get it all together.

But you know, he was very receptive to her meeting her.

They are still in each other's lives.

A lot of the stories don't end as well as dies.

A lot of the stories people romanticize what a reunion will be.

They romanticize what their mum will look like and whether they have the same traits.

You know, is my daughter out there with my hair?

But the reality is you're trying to undo forty years of being told you were abandoned or rejected, or that somebody else chose you, and regardless of the language around how you were chosen.

It's all abandonment, you know.

At some point there is this feeling of, well, someone didn't want me because someone else chose me, you know, and I think that finding out actually you weren't abandoned.

I desperately wanted you.

I was screaming for you.

They wouldn't let me see you or hold you.

They drugged me, they took you away and told me you died or whatever.

The circumstance, which is two hundred and fifty thousand women's stories, that child has spent its entire life not knowing that was the circumstance.

No one was told, well, your mum was drugged and forced to sign some papers and then I took you home.

They were always told you were chosen by us because we loved you.

And that's not to say those adoptive parents knew the circumstance.

Often they didn't know and had no idea that's what the mother had been through.

They thought they were doing the right thing by adopting an unwanted child, or an abandoned child, or a child that its parents couldn't care for them, when in reality that mother desperately wanted to keep their child.

And these adoptive parents are thinking they're doing the right thing.

They've got a baby now and everyone's happy.

But they've told this child you were chosen, and then that child lives with that narrative for forty years, and it's the wrong narrative, you know, and that's almost impossible to undo.

Someone whose story didn't end in that positive way like Dyas did was a woman you spoke to called Lily, and her situation is just so shocking that a young girl, teenage girl who is pregnant is arrested and put into a home because she's.

Pregnant, charged with moral danger, which is the most archaic notion that this could happen in the late nineteen sixties, you know, it seems like something that would take place in the eighteen hundreds.

But she was charged with moral danger.

She was living with her partner in a de facto relationship, and they both were willing to keep the child.

The child was wanted, and they were planning to get married.

Because she was sixteen and eleven months, which was over the age of consent, which also they tried to charge you with.

They needed parental permission, and her parents were living in Sydney, so they had planned to go down and get the papers signed, get married, and keep their baby, but instead, in the middle of the night, she was arrested, taken to the children's court, charged with moral danger, and essentially locked up in a Magdalen laundry for the duration of her pregnancy, in which their letters were read.

No visitors allowed.

That partner of her showed up twice to try and marry her, and they wouldn't let him in.

She also had no idea of what was going to happen during the birth and didn't know she wasn't going to be allowed to keep her child.

I think the trauma that Lily endured.

She was drugged, she was coerced, she was bullied.

They said, you know, you can't see a son or your partner until you sign these papers.

I think the duress they put her under and what they did to her mentally was horrendous, physically was horrendous.

And then the outcome of her story is eventually after Clara Clara's again where they misspelled his name and miss Dewey's birthday, she finally finds him and he just wants nothing to do with her because he's been told his whole life.

She didn't want him, and that is a terrible, terrible tragedy because she has just never recovered.

You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.

I'm speaking with journalist Amelia Oberheart about Australia's dark history of forced adoptions that only ended in the nineteen eighties.

Amelia, can we touch a little bit on the institutions that were involved in these processes, So where Lily was sent, for example, the Magdalen Laundry, but there was also networks of hospitals and other places that would take these young women in and essentially hide them away until they've had their baby.

What were these institutions like in what roles were they playing in all of this?

So, without going into a huge amount of detail, there was always a single women's payment in this country until after World War II men came back.

They had venereal diseases, that's what some say, and tuberculosis had riddled the country and it made for a huge spike in infertility.

So you have no IVF and no options if you are to find yourself in a position where you're a young, married, good couple that cannot have children, and also the pressure on a woman who is in a marriage and young and can't have a child.

It's shameful too.

It's a double edged sword.

I think that certain institutions saw an opportunity they would create a social stigma around being an unwed mother, which had not been the stigma between nineteen twenty nineteen forty.

That was fine because one had killed so many of our men.

There wasn't an issue.

It was okay to have your child.

So social and religious notions start sweeping through that you're this disgraceful person if you are unweaded and pregnant, and that creates a fear because there is no abortion unless you were going to access some neighborhood dangerous you know, we spoke to some people that had learned to do abortions by giving them to themselves.

You know, this was a very very dangerous option, and very desperate women access them, some with lifelong ramifications.

But unless you were going to do that, or you found a doctor that would which was very particularly in regional and rural communities, impossible you were to have the child.

You were often sent into state or to other rural cities where you would be put into institutions.

There was religious ones.

They were the Magdalen laundries.

They were hugely run through Ireland and Scotland, which have the worst forced adoption history of any Western civilization.

You know the stories that come out of Scotland and Ireland, and where the Magdalen lawn originated from is essentially free labor.

You're pregnant, you may defold sheets for twenty hours a day for no pay.

They feed you and morally correct you.

You're taking a hospital, you put into the unwed mother's zone, so you would fill out paperwork that would say you be minus was one of them.

So unwed mother baby minus is adopting.

You can't keep it.

Classes you get to keep it and you put into a different section of the hospital.

Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney was one of the most notorious baby farming hospitals in the country.

Sixty thousand babies were said to have been taken from there, and it was there that they believe a lot of cahoops I guess, with obstetricians that had clientele that couldn't give birth, couldn't have children or found themselves unable to, and then obviously unwed mothers that didn't know that their babies were going to be taken, and then the Magdalen Laundry would take you back till your stomach went down and you could return as a normal person into society.

And then you'd be discharged and you were told go on with your life.

No one will ever know this happen.

You've disgraced yourself, but now you can come good.

You can right your wrongs, go into society, find a nice man, and go on, and you'll have other children.

And a lot of them didn't.

A lot of them never went on to have any more children, and a lot of them obviously went on to be completely scarred physically and mentally for the rest of their lives.

And then a lot of them obviously didn't bank on genetic testing where they came and found them.

But those institutions and those numbers do not include rearrangements or informal adoptions.

They were usually religiously run where father Tom would identify a Waywood girl who'd gotten pregnant and Mary and Tom down here are desperately trying to have a baby, so they would give her baby to Mary and Tom and say, well, essentially she never existed to begin with, and they'll just write a birth certificate straight into Mary and Tom's name, and they were called informal adoptions.

And there's no way of knowing the number of those because they're not recorded.

But those religious organizations also had homes awayward girls or unwed mother homes, you know, Saint Anthony's or Saint Ursula's, and they'd send you there and you'd be with nuns and priests for the duration of your pregnancy.

They'd take your baby and you'd be released when you were able to go back into society.

And those places have yet often closed and often never paid for what happened, never taken any responsibility for what occurred under their roof.

You do actually speak to some of the children who are on the opposite end of this story.

How do they understand themselves and their own stories when they do realize what their mums, their biological mothers, have gone through.

And does this leave a lasting impact on their lives too?

Absolutely.

I mean, we spoke with quite a few adoptees over the process.

The forced adoption era, or the era of adoption that went into the late seventies early eighties, It was very different practice to the adoptees of the next generation because they were open adoptions.

Often letters were given, most sets of parents were involved, So you know, there is a very big line in the sand there between the practices that took place in the forced adoption era.

I think every adoptee has, you know, they're like fingerprints.

Everyone has their own story or their own reactions.

But most of the children born into that forced adoption era have a real issue with identity.

They desperately just want to know why and how and who they are, and it's often very difficult for them when the mother has blanked out, or the mother has had their own family, or small things like that that hugely impact their ability to connect.

When they've dreamt their whole life of finding this person, and that person either chose rightfully which was their choice to give up their baby, or had blocked it out or had never told anyone.

That's the big theme is that they had never told their current husband, never told their current children.

It was a part of their history they thought would never come back.

And then that creates this whole again, a narrative that is really painful for those adoptee kids, particularly late discovery adoptees who because of genetic testing find out and to quantify they've been lied to for fifty years is very hard for them too.

A lot of people are going to see an alignment here between forced adoptions and the Stolen Generations, and I know that you do touch on this in the podcast as well, but how did these two things actually differ?

Because they are so similar and yet so different.

The Stolen Generations was one of my most heart wrenching episodes and the one I am probably the most nervous about in terms of being able to give it justice.

I mean, the Stolen Generations is a podcast in itself.

It's to try and cover that in a twenty four minute episode is almost impossible.

That I did feel it would be a terrible thing for us not to give it the attention and some light.

The difference is the laws of assimilation and the practices of assimilation, and the way that they went about removal of children was different.

However, there is a crossover between the babies that were born in the Stolen Generations and forced adoption, So mostly those children were taken under law of assimilation, which I mean the laws changed a lot over two hundred and fifty years, but generally they believed horrifically that taking children from their community and families they would better assimilate into white society, which is just something I can't really comprehend it and it was a heartbreaking period going into the research into this.

But the forced adoption was the belief that a mother couldn't care for their child if they were single or unwed or in a position not of you.

Know, statures.

So some of those stolen generation mothers lost their children through assimilation, but then they would go to the hospital to have a baby and they would take them under forced adoption.

So that's where the crossover does occur.

But they are different issues and they're treated differently.

But Leoni, who we speak to, is stolen generations and forced adoption and she was sent to Wales with a nurse.

I mean, her story is incredible and incredibly sad.

Again, Julia Gillard apologized to all the victims of forced adoptions in twenty thirteen, and I guess a lot of the people who were there that day and who felt a sense of relief that finally they'd been recognized and that people knew that what had happened to them was wrong.

But has there been any significant change in this area since then, because I understanding you've touched on this many times about the poor record keeping and the way that these closed adoptions were set up, making it incredibly difficult for anyone to trace their own history.

Has anything changed since that apology.

There's a big thing about the apology that certainly could be a coincidence or it's more sinister than that.

Where the day the apology took place, eight thousand people packed the hall.

A lot of those women desperately wanted media coverage so that their children could understand, you know, maybe recognize them.

Maybe them being on the TV would make someone know that they weren't abandoned, that it wasn't by a choice, they were adopted.

This was a big moment for them and they had waited a long time, some of them forty years for this day.

And then that afternoon Simon Crean called the Labor Leadership's Bill, in which he wanted the removal of all Labor leadership positions and Kevin Rudd to be in and so all the media race from there up to Parliament House, and that night on the news when all these women go home and wait for their moment, it's just all about the Leadership's bill.

I mean, they say that one outlet covered that story, you know, but it was hugely overtaken by a political circus, and I think that created some resentment.

And then out of the Senate inquiry of twenty one recommendations, very few of them have been actioned.

I mean, Victoria said they were going to do a redress scheme and that is yet to be actioned.

That was twelve months ago.

They promised that there is a sense with the mothers that they believe they're waiting for them to die because they're getting so old, and the compensation once you admit fault, you know, you're looking at two hundred and fifty thousand women that we know of, and so I think that they believe that there is some sort of dragging it out, kicking the can down the road.

Also, once the Senate inquiry was done and the twenty one recommendations were made, they were essentially pushed back onto a state by state issue, and then the states had to hold their own inquiries.

You know, Queensland still yet to hold one, like WA's in the process of doing one now.

But really it seems to them they're just pulling it out and dragging it out.

That was, you know, ten years ago, and we're still ten years down the track and nothing's happened.

So a lot of them are very passionate out of royal commission and getting things done, and for their children who are now sort of picking up that fight for their mothers.

In the process of the episodes of your podcasts going live, I imagine this is probably a woken some very old deep scars for women who experience this in decades past.

What's the feedback been like for you from people reaching out and telling maybe their stories for the very first time.

We've received hundreds of emails.

I've received a lot of private messages across like Instagram or LinkedIn.

I was going under my married name, and somehow people have an amazing ability to find you, and so you know, I was getting quite inundated, which was amazing, and I was so appreciative, particularly of so much positive feedback.

I really, I guess when you put yourself out in the world and you're so vulnerable to other people's opinions and critics, and I was really humbled by how well received it was and has been so far.

So I had started to direct people to an email account, so we could pull everything into one central space, obviously, in the hopes that all these people's stories can be heard, because they all deserved a platform.

I get a lot of emails from daughters of mothers that have experienced this, saying I now understand my mum, or listening to this, I can understand how hard my mum's life has been, like I thank you for taking that burden off her, or I'm getting ready to try and talk to my mom about this.

And every time I hit under the covers at night and it was like, I don't want to do this, and I started to panic.

I always came back to this one notion that if it changed the outcome of one family or one conversation, if it lifted that burden for one person, it was job done.

So every email that comes it gives me this heart warming it's doing what it was meant to and that's an amazing thing.

Just to finish, Amelia, after going through this process of understanding all these women and stories and hearing the pain and the heartbreak not just from these women but from their children and their extended families, how do you now feel about your own mum because your relationship with her was not great towards the end, and addiction played a big part in that.

But how do you feel about your mom now after going through this journey with all these women and understanding them better.

I mean, I had spent twelve years in quite a bit of pain and a lot of lack of understanding and resentment, and I felt after I met Michael, all of that resentment it melted away.

I started to really see her as a person again.

I started to see the pain that she was really in and to look at it, I mean, retrospect is twenty twenty, and I started to look back on things and situations and her downfall with this compassion and empathy.

I had never been able to look at it like that before.

I now have my own daughter, and when I was pregnant, knowing it was a girl, and during the period of her infancy, I would just cry so much for my mum because I desperately have always sorry, I got an emotional you know, I desperately wanted that relationship.

You know, I'd always wanted that relationship with her, and now I had a chance to have that with my daughter.

And now I've reconciled with my mum.

Who's not here to have that conversation with.

But I feel very much at peace, and for that, I'll always be thankful for the podcast.

Thank you to Amelia for joining us today.

Her podcast Secrets We Keep is LinkedIn our show notes if you'd like to take a listen.

True Crime Conversations is Amma Mere podcast hosted and produced by me Claire Murphy, with assistant production by Tarlie Blackman.

Our audio design is by Scott Stronik, and our executive producer is Giam Moylin.

Thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back next week with another true crime conversation.

True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was recorded on