Birth of daughter forces Brisbane mum to confront painful secret

It was during her mother's funeral that Amelia Oberhardt saw a photo she hadn't seen before.

Her mother was standing with a man who wasn't her dad, holding a baby Amelia didn't recognise.

Trying to find out the identity of that baby would help the journalist heal what had been a difficult relationship with her mother, and through her mother's friends Amelia would become connected to women harbouring some very painful secrets.

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One of these women is Di Sheean. Di agreed to talk to Amelia for her podcast The Secrets We Keep. This would be the first time Di would speak publicly about her past.

Di fell pregnant as a teenager, had the baby, and was told it had died. She did her best to move on with her life, until five years ago when she received an email. It read: "I think you might be my mother."

When Di read that email, she felt "joy" and instant "displacement." In an instant she knew she'd been lied to. Her son had lived, and had been given away to another family.

Di would eventually connect with her son. He told her he'd been raised in a loving family and was married with children. He wanted to know where his daughter's curly hair came from.

Those curls came from Di; her granddaughter was a spitting image of her.

The photo that sparked a journey for Brisbane journalist

When Amelia Oberhardt first saw that photo of her mother holding a baby, she thought her mother had given a child up for adoption during her first marriage.

Her mother, Cecelia, would go on to marry Amelia's father, Mark, and have more children.

Ceceila lived a troubled life, as Amelia explains in the podcast. She would later die from the effects of alcoholism when her daughter was just 24.

Amelia has since been tormented by thought of her mother, their fractured relationship.

She and her husband have three children, and she is a devoted mother, loving her children in a way her mother never could love her.

Their first two children are boys – Billy, nine, and Tommy, four. When their daughter Harper arrived two years ago, Amelia knew it was time to find answers.

"It wasn't until I had Harper in 2021 that I realised I had to reconcile with the mum I didn't want to be over the mum I wanted to be," she explains.

"I've been in psychotherapy, all the therapies, and I already had an understanding of what had happened and the foresight that it was not my fault, but I never had an understanding of who my mum was.

"I desperately wanted to know if something had contributed to her early death and if so, what was it?"

She would track down that man in the photo with her mother and the baby – her mother's first husband, Michael.

He revealed the baby was in fact a relative, laying Amelia's fears to rest.

But during her conversations with her mother's friends, she was connected with women like Di who, in the '60s, were victims of forced adoptions.

'Impossible choice' thousands of women were forced into

Amelia discovered there were at least 250,000 forced adoptions in Australia from the '60s through to '80s.

"It was an impossible choice these young women had," Amelia explains.

"The whole system was built on an ideology that you make choices for other women and you never discuss them.

"The women legally had 28 days to revoke their decision, but were never told this. Nobody thought about the ramifications."

Fast-forward to today and DNA testing means anyone can discover their ancestry and, more importantly, find their birth families, as Di's son had done.

Di is just one of the women Amelia interviews for her podcast series and their pain is acute. Also included is Lily Arthur, who features in episode four and is leading the charge for a Royal Commission.

Amelia explains Senate inquiries into forced adoption has "landed nowhere or come back with recommendations that are not actioned."

Some of these recommendations include free counselling for victims and their families and for people to be issued with more accurate birth certificates including their real birth parents.

"The wishes vary from person to person," she says.

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Amelia would also like to see more funding going to the forced adoption hotlines set up in various states and territories so those effected can access immediate help and support.

Amelia would discover her mother had fallen pregnant as a teenager, however she miscarried shortly before the wedding. They went through with it anyway. Cecelia never told her about any of this.

"I think it was a mixed bag of things, coming from a devote Irish Catholic home with those values and the pressure of behaving in a certain way and the shame she would have felt being pregnant at 16 and having to go to her parents and tell them."

She believes her mother felt forced to go through with the wedding.

"These women had no access to abortions or contraception, they either had to get married or give the baby away."

Her mother and Michael would divorce after two years during at time when divorce was frowned upon.

Amelia says she wishes her mother had been able to unburden herself and she thinks these secrets contributed to her death.

"I think she was holding onto these secrets her whole life and drinking to push them down," Amelia speculates.

"I regret that we were never able to have a conversation, that she could have relieved her burden a little bit.

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"Regret is the worst emotion," she continues. "I will never know how she felt towards me because she'd always been unable to express it."

It's not like Amelia was completely devoid of love – anything but. She has an amazing father and a loving extended family, but has still be haunted by her mother's life and death.

It has taken incredible strength for Amelia to break the cycle that can be triggered by events like this, marrying a man she calls her "very best friend" and becoming the mother she had always wanted, and husband Grant is behind her 100 per cent

"Up until recently I felt like this was something my mother had done to me," she confesses. "But now I see it through a different lens."

Listen to the latest episode of Secrets We Keep on your favourite podcast app. Contact the Forced Adoption Support Service on 1800 21 03 13.