Films/Videos The Scamp 1957 The Scamp (1957) features unofficial foster care. Teacher Stephen (Richard Attenborough) takes in Tod (Colin Petersen) while his abusive father goes to the US. Stephen & Tod bond over music. A year later the father returns...In 1957 Colin Petersen was voted one of the biggest stars at the British box office. He also appeared in Smiley (1956) and A Cry from the Streets (1958) - his mum took him back to Australia to focus on his education. He was the original drummer. in the Bee Gees! You can see his drumming skill in this film. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Seven Sisters Alex Wheatle 2003 Inspired by personal experience, the Seven Sisters explores the lives of children in care. Glenroy, Bullett, Curvis and Carlton – the best of friends, as tight as blood brothers. They all live in Pinewood Oaks, a home for orphans and children in care, besides the great forest named after the legend of the Seven Sisters. At the home they are looked after by ‘Uncles’ and ‘Aunts’, go to the local school and try to live like normal children. But, of course, they’re not. The four friends decide to run away from the horror of their everyday lives in a children's home in the English countryside. They head for the woods, their sense of freedom surprises them, and for the first time they feel the exhilaration of adolescence. Yet the forest slowly asserts its own power and what happens there will affect the four boys' lives forever. External Website

Children's Fiction The Ghosts and Jamal Bridget Blankley 2018 The Ghosts and Jamal is an intriguing story, touching on religion, terrorism and Nigeria s internal conflicts, following a young orphan who is negotiating an unforgiving society. Waking up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, 13-year-old Jamal tries to piece together what has happened whilst simultaneously trying to evade capture by the attackers. It soon becomes clear that he has been living in a separate outhouse from his family on account of the bad spirits or rather his epilepsy that plagues him. As he wanders around his family s compound, he comes across red canisters leaking yellow gas, which he works out were the weapon that killed his family. With his family dead, he begins to search for his grandfather who he hardly knows; when his grandfather turns him away Jamal keeps walking. On the way he meets prejudice, exploitation and friendship, before finally discovering that it is people, not ghosts, that have killed his family, and they have plans to keep on killing. Young Adult fiction. External Website

Authors B The Coral Island ➝ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ➝ Madeline ➝ Paddington ➝ A Little Princess ➝ Peter Pan in Kensington Garden ➝ The Finding ➝ Peter and Lotta's Christmas ➝ My Forever Family: from fostering to adoption ➝ Tarzan of the Apes ➝ Cinderella ➝ The Outside Child ➝ The Ghosts and Jamal ➝ An Angel for May ➝ Back to Top

Authors E The Gathering ➝ Beulah ➝ James ➝ The Round House ➝ Girl, Woman, Other ➝ The Trees ➝ Crooked Heart ➝ Glyph ➝ The Orphan Collector ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd 2002 The Secret Life of Bees (2002) by Sue Monk Kidd was a major success on publication, with 2.5 years on the NY Times Best Seller list & 8 million copies sold internationally. Influenced by her experiences with racism as child, in The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd tells the story of a 14-year-old white girl who leaves her abusive father, T. Ray Owens, a churchgoing peach farmer, and heads off from her hometown of Sylvan, South Carolina in search of information about her mother in the town of Tiburon, also in South Carolina. With Lily Owens is African American woman Rosaleen who has been working for her father and was recently badly beaten by local white men because she wanted to claim her right to vote. When her father finally locates his daughter, she refuses to go back home, preferring to stay with August Boatwright, a Black woman who was at one point a carer for Lily’s mother and is now a successful businesswoman. External Website

Actors Charlotte Ayanna Charlotte Ayanna (born Charlotte Lopez; September 25, 1976) is a Puerto Rican American actress and former Miss Teen USA. Ayanna was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but moved to Vermont at an early age. She had a troubled childhood, spending sixteen years in foster homes after her mother, Emma, was judged to be mentally unfit to look after her children. In 1994, at age 17, she was adopted into a foster home. She has since become a spokeswoman for foster children. External Website

Television Shows The Last Thing He Told Me (TV series) 2023 The Last Thing He Told Me is an American mystery television series (on Apple) based on the popular novel by the same name by Laura Dave. Hannah Hall (Jennifer Garner) is the protagonist of The Last Thing He Told Me. She was raised in the kinship care of her grandfather and, like him, is a wood turner. When Hannah’s husband, Owen Michaels (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), goes missing, Hannah is left with the responsibility for her 16-year-old step-daughter, Bailey (Angourie Rice). The two go looking for Owen and uncover the truth about Bailey’s mother’s death. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Little One Peter Papathanasiou 2019 Peter Papathanasiou is the son of migrants and grandson of refugees. His parents emigrated from Greece to Australia in 1956 but were unable to have children, a huge sorrow - and shame - for them among Australia's Greek community and their own family. Finally, in 1973, Peter's uncle and aunt in Greece offered to have a baby and give it to his parents to raise as their own in Australia. Peter was that baby, born in 1974 and given up by his biological parents so that a childless sister could become a mother. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Love Child Sue Elliot 2012 This is an updated edition of this moving memoir of one woman's search for her birth mother, with a fascinating history of adoption in the UK weaved throughout External Website

Authors J Whatever Next: On Adult Adoptees Identities ➝ Back to Top

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