We all have a past, but are we obliged to open up about our former lives? Watch Discovering a Hidden Past on Tuesday, April 4 from 8:30pm on SBS or
Before she left Alice Springs and we lost our closeness, mum had given me a beautiful bunch of native flowers for my birthday. Months after she left, the flowers still sit drying in a vase on my dining table. I can’t bring myself to throw them out because they keep a little bit of her with me.
The first time mum gave me a bunch of flowers, I was six. It was just after my father had told me he wasn’t the boss at Cottee’s Cordial as I previously thought, but was serving life in jail for murder.
My father had freed himself of this monumental secret in one of our weekly phone calls, without letting my grandparents or mum know what he was about to do.
In his announcement, any calm in my world imploded and mum’s mind shook with fear. The secret she’d been carefully guarding for years was now resting in the hands of a child and we all know how terrible children can be at keeping secrets.
Mum immediately inducted me into a world of strict rules to protect ‘the secret’. No one could ever know my father was a murderer. This was a secret I would have to take to my grave — a big ask for a six year old.
"People are cruel," mum said. "They won’t understand that you can still be a good person, even if your father has killed people. People will think you are the same."
It wasn’t fair, she acknowledged, but it is just the way people are. Our lives and any future happiness depended entirely on this ugly truth being kept hidden.
On the first school day after I found out I was a murderer’s daughter, I ran down the steps from the classroom to see mum standing in the playground. I was delighted; she was rarely in the playground to meet me. With one arm, she scooped me up on her hip, and then she swung her other arm around to show me what was behind her back. A beautiful bright bunch of flowers.
“Wow mumma, they’re so pretty!”
“They are for you! Pretty flowers, for a pretty little girl!” she replied.
I felt so grown up. The flowers seemed huge in my little hands and my eyes filled with tears. Mum thought I was special. Special enough to spend money we didn’t have on flowers for me.
It’s just you and me against the world.
On the long, hot walk home, we stopped and sat on a brick wall to rest.
“You didn’t say anything to anyone at school did you, Ren?”
I shook my head, “No mumma, I promise.”
“Good, I knew I could trust you. That’s why I got you these flowers. Always remember Rennie, no matter what, it’s just you and me against the world.”
I smiled up at her. I liked it when she said this, because it meant her friends and boyfriends and anyone else was unimportant to her compared to me.
That desire to be close to her is perhaps why now, as a 32-year-old mother of three, living thousands of kilometres away from her, I can’t bring myself to throw out those brittle birthday flowers.
They remain a symbol of our solidarity.
If I throw them out, it might mean it will never be us against the world again, even though, truthfully, it hasn’t been that way for a long time.
‘I couldn’t change what happened but I had a choice’
The longer a secret is kept, the more shame it attracts, and the more we come to believe that if that truth is ever revealed, we simply will not survive it.
Mum lived in fear of the truth being exposed and that fear had also seeped into me.
I watched mum move through her life, experiencing one relationship after another before remarrying and having my (untainted) sisters. She finally appeared happy but her despair was never far from the surface.
Over the years, I found out more about my dad through visits to see him in maximum-security jails, through my grandparents, and through mum’s drunken confessions.
But I always wanted more than the cobbled-together tidbits; I wanted the truth.
I went to the state library and trawled the newspaper archives to learn about where I came from. I found headlines about sex crimes, multiple stabbings and robberies. A judge had proclaimed my father to be nothing but a “brutal and cold-blooded murderer”.
I believed then and there that mum was right. I had my father’s blood in me forever and no one could ever know my truth. I was always going to have to lie.
Renee says her mother lived in fear of the truth about her father being exposed, and that fear also seeped into her. Source: Supplied
I felt tired of both our lives.
To mum, it was as if the past was also the present. As I wiped the snot and tears from her face, I realised I was looking at my future self. If I didn’t change things, I’d be miserable for the rest of my life too, wallowing in a life I didn’t want to be in.
Was I really going to be another woman in my family owned by the past?
I knew I couldn’t change my blood or what had happened to me, but I still had a choice. I didn’t have to give up on having a good life.
I decided to finish my degree, get a good job and make peace with the truth. I would work to find my own path, and I wanted mum to come too.
But she could never overcome her fear of the truth coming out.
It had become glaringly apparent that it wasn’t sharing our secrets that was going to destroy our lives, it was keeping them festering inside us.
Hear more from Renee and others who’ve uncovered a loved one’s buried past on .
