Look History in the Eye, Melbourne
Sep 28, 2026 · 41 min · 11 segments
**What can almost 1,000 inquest records tell us about dark history we should know more about?** In the latest episode of *Look History in the Eye* podcast, Public Record Office Victoria speaks with…
They couldn't just ring an ambulance when something went wrong because then they would go to jail.
They would bury them in Sherbrooke Forest, and these are just the places that I know about.
Do you know what, what grieves me now and was driving us then is that these are families where children had no mother, where husbands had lost their wife, where parents had lost their daughters.
These women's lives were so meaningful and so many of them were mothers, and they died and their children were motherless, and it didn't have to be like that, and it doesn't have to be like that, and it must never be like that again.
The inquests I'm interested in today are those women who died from 1968 to 1973 during the final and very public fight for abortion rights.
It was mostly fought by Bertram Weiner and Joe Weiner, along with the Abortion Law Reform Association via the media and through the courts in an attempt to stop women dying in secret.
We're going to hear her version of that very interesting stage in women's history.
We're going to hear about the police cover-up, the corruption, the black market abortion industry, and the women who helped motivate her and Bertram to keep fighting so that this chapter in Australian history will never be repeated again.
For some people, this episode may be triggering, and the inquest files I'm going to be talking about are about people whose families may still be affected today.
They couldn't just ring an ambulance when something went wrong because then they would go to jail.
They would bury them in Sherbrooke Forest, and these are just the places that I know about.
Do you know what, what grieves me now and was driving us then is that these are families where children had no mother, where husbands had lost their wife, where parents had lost their daughters.
These women's lives were so meaningful and so many of them were mothers, and they died and their children were motherless, and it didn't have to be like that, and it doesn't have to be like that, and it must never be like that again.
The inquests I'm interested in today are those women who died from 1968 to 1973 during the final and very public fight for abortion rights.
It was mostly fought by Bertram Weiner and Joe Weiner, along with the Abortion Law Reform Association via the media and through the courts in an attempt to stop women dying in secret.
We're going to hear her version of that very interesting stage in women's history.
We're going to hear about the police cover-up, the corruption, the black market abortion industry, and the women who helped motivate her and Bertram to keep fighting so that this chapter in Australian history will never be repeated again.
For some people, this episode may be triggering, and the inquest files I'm going to be talking about are about people whose families may still be affected today.
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