Hidden heirlooms: Keeping family secrets across generations

Abstract

This article explores how wider national narratives facilitate families’ choices about what information to keep secret over time. I argue that attention to the ways family secrets operate reveals how social and moral codes are both sustained and challenged on an intimate scale. The article also makes an argument for using life writing and literature to explore the often-illusive contours of family secrets. To illustrate, I examine Lynette Russell’s memoir A Little Bird Told Me: Family Secrets, Necessary Lies and Richard Flanagan’s novel Death of a River Guide. Anchoring the analysis within the transition from colonial to postcolonial societies, these texts lend insight into the collective practices families use to manage secrets and to construct socially sanctioned identities. The discussion foregrounds the enduring impact of colonial policies upon the intimate formation of families, and the role families play in reproducing and challenging these legacies via collective secret-keeping and silences.