Fiction by Care Experienced authors Kim Rudyard Kipling 1901 Rudyard Kipling's classic tale of an Irish orphan living in British India in the late 1800's. He becomes the disciple of a Tibetan monk while learning espionage from the British secret service. Kipling's prose paints a vivid picture of the variations of India. External Website

Fiction Featuring Care Experience Murder on North Terrace Lainie Anderson 2025 Australian writer Lainie Anderson published her first novel about Kate Cocks, The Death of Dora Black, in 2024. Kate Cocks (1875 – 1954) was in kinship care as a child and Lainie Anderson includes that part of her background in her novel as she is imagining Cocks on the beat solving a crime as South Australia’s first woman police officer. In her 2025 novel, Murder on North Terrace, it’s 6 months later & Anderson has 27-year-old Constable Ethel Bromley – Kate Cocks’ junior – included in the investigation of the murder in the Art Gallery of Philip Lyons, “a board governor and the honorary curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia” (p. 27). We find out in this 2nd novel that the financially privileged Ethel Bromley had been in informal foster care as child when her mother was unwell. There are also a character Kate Cocks had been involved with when she was a welfare officer. Maurice Mundy is furious with Kate Cocks because of the way he was treated in the reformatory she’d had him committed to. External Website

Authors F A Fortunate Life (Theatre adaptation) ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Gaskin 1983 Drama based on the case history of a Liverpool boy, Graham Gaskin, who spent most of his youth in care. It doesn't deal with his later life or his work which led to our rights to access our child care files. Director: Alan J.W. Bell Writer Stephen Wakelam Stars: Paul McGann as Graham External Website

Academic Articles Popular perceptions of disrupted childhoods Kirsty Capes 2017 We need new stories about what happens to looked-after children. For decades, public policy-making has fundamentally failed looked-after children within the care of local governments across the UK. The care system very rarelyA common trope of children’s fiction is the representation of child protagonists as victims of some form of disrupted parenting. Disproportionately, child protagonists across the children’s canon are orphans; in foster care or other kinds of institutional care such as boarding schools; living with inadequate, neglectful or otherwise insufficient parents; or raised by relatives. Research shows that ‘problem children’ – those who are victims of disrupted parenting – are more susceptible to what is frequently termed as ‘poor outcomes’ in adulthood. These can range from addiction issues to criminal behaviour and time in prison, to mental health problems including depression. Children’s fiction informs and amplifies this narrative of ‘problem children’ being destined for failure in later life, through its representations of children in care, orphans and so on. This slippage between public consciousness and popular culture creates a cultural hegemony whereby children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are conditioned from a young age – through children’s fiction and other mediums – to believe that they are abject or extraneous to societal structures. Drawing on 20th and 21st century children’s fiction, from Francis Hodgson Burnett to J K Rowling, Roald Dahl to Lemony Snicket, C S Lewis to Jacqueline Wilson, this paper will demonstrate how children’s fiction serves to ‘other’ child readers from disrupted parenting situations. Using contemporary Marxist-feminist literary theory and socio-political contexts, the paper will also demonstrate the undeniable correlation between working-class narratives and representations of disrupted care in children’s fiction. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp The Dictionary of Lost Words (Play) Verity Laughton 2023 The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Australian writer Pip Williams was a best seller in Australia, a New York Times best seller, & the first Australian novel to be selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. It has also won multiple awards including the NSW Premier’s Literary Award A stage adaption of the book by South Australian playwright Verity Laughton premiered in Adelaide, South Australia on 22 September 2023. It has also had a season at the Sydney Opera House in March 2025 & again in Adelaide during April 2024. The play – following the novel - features an orphan character, Lizzy Lester, whose job it is to care for Esme Nicoll, lexicographer Harry Nicholl’s daughter who collects words used by women that others find offensive. The play concludes with Esme Nicoll’s daughter – who was taken to South Australia by her adoptive parents – giving a lecture at the University of South Australia. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles The Wild Wist The Monthly 2025 In this The Monthly article (5 May 2025), Australian writer Martin McKenzie-Murry reviews the final film featuring Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits (1961). McKenzie-Murry references Monroe’s difficult childhood https://www.careexperienceandculture.com/master/marilyn-monroe-(actor) but insists she was “never a great actor”. “She was either too anxious or too numb, and there was a reason her lines were taped inside props – such as drawers – during the shooting of Some Like It Hot.” McKenzie-Murry goes on to argue that it should be possible to both acknowledge her suffering and appreciate her achievements without “exaggerating” her talent. https://www.themonthly.com.au/martin-mckenzie-murray/2025/05/06/wild-wist External Website

Films/Videos Five Little Pigs 2003 In Five Little Pigs (2003), Lucy Crale asks Hercule Poirot to reopen a 14-year-old murder case, seeking the truth behind her mother’s conviction and execution for allegedly poisoning her artist father. External Website

Radio & Podcast One Another (Podcast) Read This (Gail Jones 2024 In this podcast, Gail Jones talks about her interest in Joseph Conrad and how she came to writing her fictional biography of him in One Another. In the discussion, Gail Jones considers the life-long impact on Conrad of his mother’s death when he was 7 and his father’s death 4 years later. External Website

Television Shows Unforgiven 2009 Unforgiven is a three-part British television drama series, written by Sally Wainwright and which follows Ruth Slater (Suranne Jones), a woman found guilty of murdering two police officers when she was a teenager. Upon release from prison, Ruth is determined to find her sister, who was adopted shortly after the incident. The series is set in the village of Boothtown, Halifax, Yorkshire in England. A film based on the series and starring Sandra Bullock as Ruth Slater was released in 2021. External Website

Children's Fiction When Marnie was There Joan G Robinson 1967 When Marnie Was There is a novel by British author Joan G. Robinson, first published in 1967 by Collins. The story follows Anna, in foster care, a young girl who temporarily moves to Norfolk to heal after becoming ill. There she meets a mysterious and headstrong girl named Marnie who lives in a house overlooking the marshes External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Orphans of the Living: Growing Up in Care in Twentieth-Century Australia Joanna Penglase 2012 In August 2004, Parliamentary senators wept as they presented Forgotten Australians, the report from the Senate Inquiry into the treatment of children in care. Half a million children grew up in care in twentieth-century Australia, and most often these children lived with daily brutal physical and emotional abuse in the sterile environment of an institution. Drawing on interviews, submissions to the Senate Inquiry, and her own experience, Joanna Penglase describes, for the first time, the experience from the perspective of the survivors. With tenderness, compassion and intellect, Penglase begins to unravel the seemingly inexplicable: how and why did this happen. She looks not only at the profound personal costs to these children, but the huge social and economic costs of these past policies. External Website

Films/Videos Orphans (1998) 1998 Orphans is a 1998 Scottish black comedy film written and directed by Peter Mullan and starring Douglas Henshall, Gary Lewis and Rosemarie Stevenson. On a grey day in Glasgow, Scotland, three brothers and their disabled sister meet to arrange their mother, Mrs Flynn's, funeral. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Crow Lake Mary Lawson 2002 Crow Lake (2002) by Canadian Mary Lawson tells the story of a family of 4 siblings after the death of their parents. Luke, the oldest of the 4, gives up a plan to become a teacher so he can stay at home and care for his youngest siblings, while the 2nd oldest, Matt, gets to finish school. The narrator is Kate, 7 when her parents died and now a successful academic. She thinks she's outgrown her siblings but ... External Website

Films/Videos Christmas Comes But Once A Year 1936 Christmas Comes But Once a Year (1936) featuring Professor Grampy (without Betty Boop). The cartoon begins in an orphanage, where the orphans are all asleep in the dormitory, waiting for Christmas morning. The orphans are given broken toys for Christmas. They burst into tears over having no other Christmas presents. which is seen by Professor Grampy. The thoughtful inventor comes up with an idea to replace the toys with better ones. While the orphans are still crying in the dormitory, Grampy dresses up as Santa Claus and surprises the orphans by ringing the bell and shouting, "Merry Christmas, everybody!" The orphans instantly stop crying, brighten and excitedly rush out to play with their new toys. External Website

Behind the Scenes Michael Bay Michael Bay is an American film producer and director. He was born in 1965 in Los Angeles. He was raised by his adoptive parents Harriet, a bookstore owner/child psychiatrist, and Jim, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Michael Bay is well known for making big budget films such as Armageddon (1998) and the Transformers series from 2007. External Website

Television Shows We Hunt Together 2021 We Hunt Together is a British drama series created by Gaby Hull. The series stars Babou Ceesay, Eve Myles, Hermione Corfield and Dipo Ola. In Season 1, the stories of a boy soldier and a young woman who was in boarding school and juvenile detention are told. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir That's Not My Child Frank Golding 2024 That’s Not My Child: Five Generations on the Welfare Treadmill (2024) is Frank Golding’s exploration of his family’s involvement with various child ‘protection’ systems. From the publisher’s description: “There is more to Frances Sinnett’s secret pain than the loss of her children — including the author — to an orphanage. Battalions of sorrows begin when her grandfather at 11 years old is imprisoned on a hulk in 1865. Then comes Gallipoli and the Somme. Her father’s war does not stop when the guns fall silent. The family is ripped apart by trauma, alcoholism, violence and betrayal at home. State intervention makes matters worse. Meticulous research by historian Golding finds more than 30 Sinnett children in institutions over five generations. Has the cycle been broken at last?” External Website

Television Shows Greyzone 2018 Thriller, centring around the kidnap of a drone expert and the planning of a terrorist attached. The Swedish-Syrian terrorist in the series was in kinship care as a child External Website

Authors S Omar Sakr (poet) ➝ Stevie Smith ➝ Pat Schneider ➝ Jonathan Swift ➝ Lemn Sissay (poet) ➝ Back to Top