Speaking Secrets

Speaking Secrets explores voicelessness and the media. It explores personal sexuality secrets and, through a series of interviews what happens when these secrets become public property. Some of the subjects are well known - others not - but each of them has reached out publicly via the media to tell and retell their stories. Each is emblematic of a disenfranchised group. Each represents, or has experienced a different societal taboo, be it rape, race, gender, homosexuality, physical disability, disease, child abuse, sexual reassignment. And in each instance, they were silenced or repressed in some way by entrenched institutional values.

The interview subjects are: Rachael Wallbank (sexually reassigned lawyer who took on Commonwealth and won), Liz Mullinar (former international casting agent), Lyn Austin (first Stolen Generation person to receive victim compensation for sustained abuse), David Cunningham (disabled NSW Greens' Party convenor), Jan Ruff-O'Herne (WW11 survivor from the notorious Japanese Virgin Brothels in Java), Jenny Mendick (breast cancer survivor, gagged by the Australian Breast Cancer community for her stand on prosthesis), Russel Sykes (psychologist son of Dr Roberta Sykes, conceived during the pack rape of his mother), Dorothy McRae-McMahon (second-in-charge of the Uniting Church of Australia when she announced she was gay), and a Melbourne lawyer whose book, When She Was Bad about the systematic sexual abuse she sustained at the hands of her uncle, was published under the pseudonym Arabella Joseph.