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Writers Rob Watts Rob Watts is an Australian sociologist. He was in state care as a small child until he was adopted by his foster parents. Rob Watts went on to become an academic, with degrees from La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne. He is the co-author of many books which examine Australian social life. External Website

Radio & Podcast ‎Daddy-Less Issues Podcast on Apple Podcasts Chanel Ali Rollo et al. What is it like to live without a dad? How about without a dad AND a mom? Does a lack of parent's stunt or accelerate an artist's growth? How did they learn to tie thier shoes? Orphan comedians, Amber Rollo & Chanel Ali, have a guest on each week to talk about it and laugh at some supremely dark stuff. External Website

Films/Videos James and the Giant Peach 1996 James and the Giant Peach is a movie starring Paul Terry, Joanna Lumley, and Pete Postlethwaite. An orphan who lives with his two cruel aunts befriends anthropomorphic bugs who live inside a giant peach, and they embark on a journey... External Website

Sport Rale Rasic Rale Rasic Bosnian born Australian soccer player and coach, Rale Rasic* (b. 1935), grew up in an orphanage. Rale Rasic was the second of 4 children born to Stanislava and Ivan Rasic in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Rale knows little about his parents and has no memories. The children were separated, the 2 girls going to different orphanages and his brother, Dragoslav, who was born in 1944, was adopted. Rale and the other children were evacuated from the orphanage during WWII and sent to Centralni Lazaret orphanage in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia Rale stayed in the orphanage until he was 17. He grew up playing soccer, and was drafted into a professional team at the age of 13. In 1953, Rale Rasik was selected “along with fellow orphan, Mihajlo Djuricin” for the national under-18 team, and again in 1954. He was then invited to join the senior team for the province of Vojvodina. At the age of 26, Rale Rasik made the decision to move to Australia, but was not in Melbourne long before he was called home to complete national service. While in the army he completed his university degree in education. Rale returned to Australia in 1966 and 4 years later took up a position as coach of the national soccer team, the Socceroos. He is fondly remembered as the first coach to take the team to the World Cup in 1974 and owns a considerable collection of memorabilia from the event. After the World Cup, Rale Rasic continued coaching soccer (but not the Socceroos) and went on to become a television presenter during 2006 World Cup, was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1989, and was awarded an Order of Australia medal for services to sport in 2004. External Website

Artists Melissa Gilbert Melissa Ellen Gilbert (born May 8, 1964) is an American actress, television director, producer, politician and former president of the Screen Actors Guild. Melissa Gilbert was given up for adoption as soon as she was born, and adopted by actors Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert. Gilbert began her career as a child actress in the late 1960s, appearing in numerous commercials and guest starring roles on television. From 1974 to 1984, she starred as Laura Ingalls Wilder, the second oldest daughter of Charles Ingalls (played by Michael Landon) on the NBC series Little House on the Prairie. During the run of Little House, In 2009, her autobiography Prairie Tale: A Memoir, was released. In 2014, she wrote a short story for children, called Daisy and Josephine as well as My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food from My Little House to Yours. External Website

Writers Edgar Allan Poe (writer) 1809-1849 Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. His early life was shaped by foster care and instability. Orphaned at two, he was taken in by John Allan, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who never formally adopted him but gave him the name "Edgar Allan Poe." Allan alternated between spoiling and harshly disciplining Poe, creating a turbulent environment. In 1815, the family moved to the United Kingdom, where Poe attended various schools in Scotland and London before returning to Richmond. These early experiences of loss, privilege, and transatlantic education deeply influenced his later life and works. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. External Website

Behind the Scenes Heather Waters South Australian based Heather Waters, creator of You Should Be Grateful & The Lost Souls, was adopted not long after her birth. Heather says she was “raised an only child in a single parent family. Ironic given that is exactly the reason I was adopted – so that I wasn’t raised that way”. Heather began film making in 2012 with The Lost Souls, which won several awards. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Three Blind Mice Agatha Christie 1952 Three Blind Mice and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1950. Three Blind Mice took at its heart the true story of the horrific abuse of two young orphan boys, one of whom really was murdered by foster parents who were supposed to protect and look after them whilst World War Two was raging throughout Europe: ‘Terence O'Neill and his brother, Dennis, were taken to a foster home in 1945 on the Shropshire, England farm of Reginald and Esther Gough. The two suffered from beating and neglect, and later that year, Dennis died at the age of 12 from injuries he had sustained.' External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Place to Call Home David Ambroz 2022 A memoir about growing up homeless in New York for eleven years followed by time in foster care. When David and his siblings should be in elementary school, they are instead walking the streets seeking shelter while their mother is battling mental illness. They rest in train stations, 24-hour diners, anywhere that’s warm and dry; they bathe in public restrooms and steal food to quell their hunger. When David is placed in foster care, at first it feels like salvation but soon proves to be just as unsafe. He’s moved from home to home and, in all but one placement, he’s abused. David finds hope and opportunities in libraries, schools, and the occasional kind-hearted adult. Through hard work and unwavering resolve, he is able to get a scholarship to Vassar College, his first significant step out of poverty. He later graduates from UCLA Law with a vision of using his degree to change the laws that affect children in poverty. External Website

Television Shows The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 2021 The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is an American sitcom television series created by Andy and Susan Borowitz that originally aired on NBC from September 10, 1990, to May 20, 1996. The series stars Will Smith as a fictionalized version of himself, a street-smart teenager born and raised in West Philadelphia who is in kinship care, sent to move in with his wealthy uncle and aunt in their Bel-Air mansion after getting into a fight at the local playground in his neighborhood. However, his lifestyle often clashes with that of his upper-class relatives. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ran for 148 episodes over six seasons. A reunion special/retrospective reuniting the original cast debuted on HBO Max on November 18, 2020, one day ahead of schedule. A more dramatic reboot based on the fan film Bel-Air is in active development, with a two-season order for Peacock. External Website

Academic Articles ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’, Delyth Edwards & Rosie Canning 2023 The article explores how care-experienced people navigate the emotions tied to inheritance. Inheritance is often a way of making or unmaking family bonds, yet for care-experienced people it frequently provokes exclusion, loss, and anger, as seen in social media responses. The authors argue that inheritance acts as a source of feeling for this group, who, though marginalized in conventional inheritance practices, use their emotions to reimagine and create alternative forms of inheritance. Drawing on Ahmed’s notion of “what emotions do,” the article shows how care-experienced people transform feelings of being othered into new ways of forging inheritance. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey Restless 2021 Margaret Omolola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE (born 1 June 1951) is a British actress, author, Crossbench peer, and Chancellor of the University of Nottingham. Spent tme in foster care and children's homes as a child. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Orphans Making It in the World Noel Murray 2021 Whether they’re shipwrecked adventurers or heirs protecting their fortune, the young heroes of these children’s stories use their wits and bravery to survive on their own. External Website

Writers Dorothy Wordsworth 1771-1855 Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (1771 – 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings. Dorothy was sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax. According to Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, as she laying dying, Ann had begged her 33 year old cousin to take in Dorothy. Dorothy was happy in her new home and became part of a large extended family. Elizabeth Threlkeld was already caring for her older sister’s 5 children and she took over her brother-in-law’s haberdasher’s business when he died. Across the road was little Jane Pollard, the same age as Dorothy, and the two girls became lifelong friends. Dorothy was sent to boarding school just out of Halifax at the age of nine. She was only there for 3 years. Her father died intestate with only a small personal estate at the end of 1783 and to save money, the children’s guardians—paternal uncle Richard Wordsworth and maternal uncle Christopher Cookson—withdrew Dorothy from the school. Dorothy’s uncle William Cookson took the girl under his wing while home from Cambridge and continued with her education. In 1788 when William married another Dorothy, Dorothy Cowper, she moved in with the couple at the Forncett St Peter rectory, a parish in Norfolk. Dorothy lived happily with her uncle and his wife for 6 years. She helped in the household and with the children, but also began imagining how she would set up house with her brothers, especially William. It wasn’t until 1795, by which time Dorothy was in her early 20s, before she and William began living together, first at Racedown Lodge in Dorset and later in Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the Lake District from 1799 to 1808. External Website

Sport Josh Jenkins Josh Jenkins Australian Rules Football star, Josh Jenkins (b. 1989), was in foster care from the age of two. When Josh was two years old, he and his baby sister, Jenna, were placed with Edith and George Casey. The couple had already raised six children of their own and lived on a hobby farm in Swan Hill, Victoria. When Josh was four and a half, the couple became permanent carers for the siblings, now including a younger brother, Jordan. Josh had a very positive experience in care. Edith, who Josh calls ‘Grandma’, is one of his biggest supporters and he attributes his successful football career to the stability, nurture and encouragement of his foster mother. External Website

Radio & Podcast Simon Woolley Desert Island Discs (Simon Woolley) 2023 Simon Woolley (b. 1961) became the first Black Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge. Simon Woolley was born to a Windrush generation nurse who sent him to an orphanage when he was two years old. From the orphanage he was foster by Phillis and Dan Fox, who later adopted Simon. Simon Woolley began his working life as an academic before moving into advertising. He then decided to go university. He later became involved with British politics and served as a Commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Simon Woolley became Baron Woolley of Woodford on 14 October 2019. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Black Boy Richard Wright 2008 Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred and a stint in an orphanage and in kinship care. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo." External Website

Non Fiction The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, the Bestselling True Crime Book Hallie Rubenhold 2019 In The Five, Hallie Rubenhold reclaims the humanity of Jack the Ripper’s victims, and from a care perspective, the story of Kate Eddowes highlights the deep impact of poverty, loss, and inadequate social support. Orphaned as a child, Kate was placed in kinship care with her aunt and uncle—an informal yet vital safety net in the absence of state support—demonstrating how extended family often took on caregiving roles in times of crisis. As an adult, Kate faced significant hardship, and due to poverty and unstable living conditions, some of her children were placed in the workhouse, a stark example of how the 19th-century welfare system often punished rather than supported struggling families. External Website

Radio & Podcast Frederick Douglas You're Dead to Me (3) A discussion about the 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who was born enslaved but who escaped to New York and became a preacher and writer. External Website

Radio & Podcast Trans-national adoption and "blending in" The Philosopher's Zone 2022 In 1953, at the end of the Korean War, an adoption program was launched by the South Korean government to care for orphans, most of whom went to white families in the States and in Europe. Since then, an estimated 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted into Western countries. The situation for many of these Korean adoptees is the aradox of feeling like they both belong and yet can't blend in with their adoptive country & culture. External Website