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Films/Videos Care Experience & Culture You Tube Channel ​ 2021 Care Experience & Culture video events such as an introduction to the digital archive when it was first launched and susequent book club events. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Other Wife Michael Robotham 2018 2018 There are two Care Experienced characters in The Other Wife. There’s the woman who shows up when Joe O’Loughlin’s father is in hospital, claiming to be his wife. Turns out the respectable doctor, William O’Loughlin, has 2 families: the one Joe is a member of and a secret one with Olivia. Olivia has lived in England since she was 13 (she’s from Romania) and her tennis coach cum guardian raped her repeatedly. Apart from the ruckus around her marriage with the paedophile tennis coach, Olivia’s adult life has been a mostly quiet one. Olivia is in contrast to 23-year-old Micah Beauchamp, who was raised in kinship care, sexually abused by a neighbour for 7 years and then at age 13 set that neighbour’s house on fire (another vigilante!) for which, of course, he was punished by 3 months in detention. The paedophile lost fingers in the fire but there’s no indication he was state sanctioned for the abuse. Micah is out of control but then so is his best mate, Ewan, Olivia’s son from her marriage to the paedophile who was raised by Olivia and the good doctor. The above are suspects in the attempted murder of William O’Loughlin but it took some fine upstanding non-Care Experienced citizens to carry that out. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mansfield Park Jane Austen 1814 Jane Austen's 3rd novel, Mansfield Park (1814), is about a girl growing up in kinship care. Fanny Price is 10 when she is sent to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle. The Bertrams have 4 children, all older than Fanny. Only Fanny's cousin, Edmund, treat her kindly; her other cousins and aunt Norris are mean. Many readers find Fanny Price a difficult character to emphathise one; she's described by as "Jane Austen's least popular heroine." Tara Isabella Burton (2014) points out, however, that in reading Mansfield Park we need to pay attention to social class and how class privilege plays a key role in determining our expectations of what a 'good' heroine should be like. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Last Thing He Told Me Laura Dave 2021 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. As the two work together, they are also resolving their differences. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Emigrants W G Sebald (2) 1992 The Emigrants (1992) by WG Sebald is an award-winning collection of 4 stories involving characters the narrator has been involved with. In the 4th story, the narrator befriends German-Jewish painter Max Ferber. He finds out that Max was 15 years old when his parents had him flown to safety in England in 1939. In England, Max stayed with his Uncle Leo in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and finished his schooling “at a third rate public school at Margate…” Instead of going to New York when Uncle Leo does in 1942, Max finishes school and moves to Manchester, which is where the narrator meets him. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Les Misérables (novel) Victor Costa Hugo et al. 2016 Les Misérablesis a French historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862, and considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. The prevalence of orphans and unusual family structures in Les Misérables is the most obvious indicator that French society and politics in the period described have gone terribly wrong. Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, Marius, Gavroche, Pontmercy, and Gillenormand are all separated from their family or loved ones for economic or political reasons. Marius embodies the disastrous effects of politics on family structure, torn as he is between Gillenormand’s monarchism and Pontmercy’s embrace of Napoléon. Social instability and poverty, meanwhile, make orphans of Cosette, Valjean, Fantine, and Gavroche. With the exception of Gavroche, whose home life is so wretched that he is probably better off on his own, these characters are unhappy and lonely because they are separated from their parents and have no one to turn to when they most need help. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Lamb Bernard MacLaverty 1980 Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb (1980) begins in Home for boys run by christian brothers. One of the youngest brothers, Michael Lamb, is horrified by the place and when he inherits a small amount of money, he leaves, taking with him 12-year-old Owen Kane. Michael and Owen pose as father and son until the money runs out. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Shirley Ronnie Scott 2023 The narrator of Shirley (2023) by Australian writer Ronnie Scott was in informal foster care as a teenager. The unnamed narrator is the daughter of a celebrity in the TV food industry. Celebrity mum fled Australia after she was caught out in an unflattering photograph and teenage daughter was left in the care of mum’s employees collectively named the Gerards. 20 years on and the daughter is buying her own apartment in an inner city Melbourne suburb, mum is selling the family home, and the young woman is wondering about the meaning of life. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Ransom Riggs 2013 A horrific family tragedy sends sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of an old orphanage that was home to children who were more than just peculiar, but possibly dangerous--and who may still be alive. Illustrated with vintage found photographs External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Battle For Christabel Margaret Forster 2004 Rowena wants a baby. What she doesn't want is the baby's father. Yet five years after the birth of Christabel, Rowena is dead, tragically killed in a climbing accident. The battle for Christabel has begun...With signature skill, Margaret Forster reveals the conflicting personal interests that lie behind each character’s claim on the child. Drawn from the perspectives of social workers, grandparents, lovers and foster-mothers, this novel is a remarkable and heartfelt exploration of the complexities of motherhood. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Frankenstein: or the modern Prometheus Mary Shelley 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Charlotte Gordon (Introduction). Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The monster is rejected by his 'father', his maker and now orphaned left to roam the land. His feeling of abandonment compels him to seek revenge against his creator. The monster lives next to a family secretly helping them but when he reveals himself to them they are horrified. He gives up hope of ever being accepted by humans. After killing Victor's brother, he sees a likeness of Caroline Victor's mother. The Creature demands that Victor create a female companion like himself. He argues that as a living being, he has a right to happiness. The Creature promises that he and his mate will vanish into the South American wilderness, never to reappear, if Victor grants his request. Should Victor refuse, the Creature threatens to kill Victor's remaining friends and loved ones and not stop until he completely ruins him. Elizabeth Lavenza, an orphan, four to five years younger than Victor, whom the Frankensteins adopted and Victor marries is killed by the monster on her wedding night. Victor dies shortly thereafter, telling Walton (the storyteller), in his last words, to seek "happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition." Walton discovers the Creature on his ship, mourning over Victor's body. The Creature tells Walton that Victor's death has not brought him peace; rather, his crimes have made him even more miserable than Victor ever was. The Creature vows to kill himself so that no one else will ever know of his existence and Walton watches as the Creature drifts away on an ice raft, never to be seen again. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Christine Falls Benjamin Black 2006 Benjamin Black is the pen name for Irish writer John Banville. Black's character, Quirke, was in an orphanage until he was removed and adopted by Judge Garret Griffith. He subsequently became a pathologist working at the Holy Family Hospital, Dublin. In the first book of the Quirke series, Christine Falls (2006), Benjamin Black takes up the story of Irish babies being sent to the US for adoption by ‘respectable’ American families. According to The Irish Times (1 February 2021), up to 4,000 Irish children were sent to the US for adoption between the 1940s and 1970s. In the case of Christine Falls, it’s Quirke’s own family which is implicated in this practice External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Fraud Zadie Smith 2023 Zadie Smith's historical novel contains Care Experienced characters, guess this is inevitable given the period in which The Fraud (2023) is set, A key witness in the Tichborne case - central to the story - is Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichborne’s. Andrew Bogle’s father was trafficked to Jamaica as a 9-year-old child we find out in an extended discussion of Bogle’s history. Eliza Touchet, cousin of and housekeeper to novelist William Ainsworth, is key to The Fraud. She finds out that 2 of her dead husband’s grandchildren have grown up in a Barnardo’s home. More famous Care Experienced characters are Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, part of Ainsworth’s (and therefore Eliza Touchet’s) literary circle. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Goodnight Mister Tom (novel) Michelle Magorian 1981 Young Willie Beech is evacuated to the country as Britain stands on the brink of the Second World War. A sad, deprived child, he slowly begins to flourish under the care of old Tom Oakley - but his new-found happiness is shattered by a summons from his mother back in London. Winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Foundling (2022) Ann Leary 2022 It’s 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer—brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age forty, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care. Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all. Inspired by a true story about the author’s grandmother, The Foundling offers a rare look at a shocking chapter of American history. External Website

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Fiction featuring Care Experience The Dictator's Wife Freya Berry 2022 The Dictator’s Wife (2022) by Freya Berry asks the question: “How complicit are the wives of dictators in the crimes of dictators?” Marija Popa is the dictator’s wife. Her husband, Constantin - the ruler for 30 years of a fictional eastern European country, Yannussia - has been murdered and she is now standing trial for multiple crimes. We find out early in the novel that Marija was adopted as a small child into a wealthy Yannussian family. The narrator is Laura Lazarescu, a lawyer from London who is the junior associate in a team of 3 lawyers hired by Marija Popa. Laura’s family fled Yannussia when Laura was 7. Before that, Laura’s mother worked in the factory founded by Marija’s adoptive family and run by Marija when she was First Lady. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Doll Funeral Kate Hamer 2017 My name is Ruby. I live with Barbara and Mick. They're not my real parents, but they tell me what to do, and what to say. I'm supposed to say that the bruises on my arms and the black eye came from falling down the stairs. But there are things I won't say. I won't tell them I'm going to hunt for my real parents. I don't say a word about Shadow, who sits on the stairs, or the Wasp Lady I saw on the way to bed. I did tell Mick that I saw the woman in the buttercup dress, hanging upside down from her seat belt deep in the forest at the back of our house. I told him I saw death crawl out of her. He said he'd give me a medal for lying. I wasn't lying. I'm a hunter for lost souls and I'm going to be with my real family. And I'm not going to let Mick stop me. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte 2014 Jane Eyre, novel by Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer Bell (Brontë’s pseudonym) listed as the editor. Widely considered a classic, it gave new truthfulness to the Victorian novel with its realistic portrayal of the inner life of a woman, noting her struggles with her natural desires and social condition. A gothic novel, it opens with Jane, an orphaned, isolated ten-year-old, living with the Reed family that dislikes her. She is later sent to the austere Lowood Institution, a charity school, where she and the other girls are mistreated; “Lowood,” as the name suggests, is the “low” point in Jane’s young life. In the face of such adversity, however, she gathers strength and confidence. She grows in strength, excels at school, becomes a governess, and falls in love with Edward Rochester. After being deceived by him, Jane goes to Marsh End, where she regains her spirituality and discovers her own strength. By novel's end, Jane is a strong, independent woman. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre still raises relevant questions to readers today.Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Girl Returned Donatella Di Pietrantonio 2020 Without warning or a word of explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother, and deprivation. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self. Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, Translated by Ann Goldstein, translator of the works of Elena Ferrante. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving, pitch-perfect in Ann Goldstein’s English translation. External Website