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Blogs/Web Pages/Articles I’ve Been In A Bad Mood Chris Chmielewski 2016 Chris Chmielewski is the Creator, Owner and Editor of Foster Focus Magazine, America's only monthly foster care magazine. He spent five years in foster care and was expelled from high school just before graduation when he aged out of foster care. In this article Chmielewski talks about being annoyed with the Superhero title: Orphan Fight, that features Batman and Robin. External Website

Academic Articles From Hagiography to Personal Pain: Stories of Australian foster care from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Dee Michell 2017 Stories - fictional, biographical, and autobiographical - are one way in which we can imagine what it has been like to experience foster care in Australia. In this paper Dee Michell looks at the trends in stories told about foster care from the nineteenth century, across the twentieth, and into the early twenty-first century. While exploring these trends, Michell makes some observations about the shift from fictional accounts where foster parents and foster children were heroic characters to often searing tales of hurt and trauma inflicted on children in foster care by violent women and men. External Website

Films/Videos Found 2021 Found (2021) Found follows 3 girls adopted as babies from China. The girls live in different American states but have found out they're cousins. Because of the 1 child person in China from 1980 to 2015, many babies were abandoned so that parents could avoid penalities. Numerous babies ended up in orphanages, with around 120,000 adopted by people outside of China. External Website

Radio & Podcast Matthew Henson: Courageous Discoverer Despite Racism Matthew Henson Matthew Henson was orphaned as a boy, but went on to become the first man to set foot on the north pole - in all likelihood - due to his intelligence and survival skills. External Website

Writers Jill Roe 1940-2017 Jillian Isobel Roe, (10 November 1940 – 12 January 2017) was an Australian historian and academic, who wrote a definitive biography of the Australian writer Miles Franklin. Jill Roe was the youngest daughter of nurse Edna Ivy Roe and farmer John Roe. She was born at Tumby Bay, a coastal town on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, a more than 6 hour drive from Adelaide. Jill was only 14 months old when her mother died of tuberculosis in 1942. Edna’s illness was prolonged and at the beginning of it, late 1941, baby Jill was taken to stay with her maternal grandmother, Grandma Heath, and was there for four years. Jill went to regional schools until, in 1955 at the age of 14, she was sent to Adelaide to finish her high school education at Adelaide Girls’ High. She then went on to study for a Bachelor of Arts at Adelaide University and a Master of Arts at the Australian National University. After a period teaching in London, Jill Roe returned to Australia and took up a position at the new Macquarie University where she worked for 6 years and became Professor and Head of the History Department. External Website

Writers Rosie Waterland Rosie Waterland is a writer based in Sydney. She was born in 1986 and her parents struggled with addictions. Rosie's mother often left her three girls on their own, until eventually welfare authorities stepped in and put them into foster care. After the girls were returned to their mother twelve months later, their mother decided she did not want them living with her. Rosie went into kinship care and boarding school and then went on to university. After struggling with PTSD for a while and wondering what to do with her life, she submitted a piece of writing for Mamamia, an Australian website for women. From there, Rosie Waterland has gone on to become a successful writer and comedian. She published The Anti Cool Girl (2015) to critical acclaim and her second book, Every Lie I’ve Ever Told (2017) was a national bestseller. She has written for television and performed live at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (2016). Her national tour in 2017 was sold out. External Website

Television Shows The Changeling (TV horror series) 2023 The Changeling (2023) is an American horror series (Appl) adapted from a novel by Victor LaValle. According to Mike Hale in The New York Times: “A changeling is what a fairy or demon or troll leaves behind when it kidnaps a human baby…”The Changeling” on Apple TV+ is about what happens when a mother comes to believe, perhaps correctly, that the tiny thing she is caring for is no longer her baby.” The mother, Emma “Emmy” Valentine (Clark Backo), is an orphan who grew up in kinship care. External Website

Actors Cary Grant Cary Grant (1904-1986) was born Archibald Alexander Leach in Bristol, UK. An English/American actor and classic, sophisticated, gentleman. His father, Elias James Leach a Tailor's Presser and his mother, Elsie Maria Leach a seamtress suffered with clinical depression. His older brother died just before his first birthday (before Cary was born) and his mother never recovered from the loss. His father had Elsie committed when Cary was 9, to an institution and told Cary that she was dead. He would be 31 before he learned she was still alive. Cary lived with his grandmother when his father remarried. He won a scholarship to a grammar school remembered for mischief and never doing his homework. In the evenings he would spend time backstage in Bristol Theatres. Age 14, he was expelled from school joined the Bob Pender Troupe of comedians and acrobats. The Local Authority wanted to know why he didn't live with his father in Southampton and consequently an agreement was made that he would train with Pender which involved touring including the U.S. At 16, Leach made the United States his home during the company’s American tour of 1920, and for the next several years he honed his performing skills. For the next 12 years he became part of the Vaudeville scene as well as performing in theatre. He got his first break into cinema in 1932 in his debut film, This is the Night. This was the beginning of his suave, charming roles as a playboy. Soon after this he became a leading Holywood actor often playing roguish characters with comedy undertones. Nominated twice for an Academy Award, in 1970 honored with Academy Honorary Award, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981. In 1999, the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest film stars of all time named him the second greatest male star of the Golden Age of Hollywood. External Website

Television Shows Blindspot 2015 The American television series, Blindspot, features an orphan character. In the first episode, a tattooed women with no memory of who she is is left in a bag in Times Square, New York City. She's 'taken in' by the FBI who work out that the tattoos are clues to crimes. Over time, it turns out that 'Jane Doe' was born Alice Kruger in South Africa. Trained to be a child soldier, she was adopted (along with her brother) by Ellen 'Shepherd' Briggs the head of a terrorist group called Sandstorm. Briggs renamed the children Remi and Roman, a connection to the ancient story of Romulus and Remus. Aside from the main story (and Jane being forced to adopt out her own daughter), in Season 2 Ep 18 there's an investigation into a foster home where new drugs are being tested on foster children. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia Just Like a Family? Musgrove, Nell; Michell Deidre (Dee) 2018 Authors: Musgrove, Nell, Michell, Deidre. This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a century. The book confronts foster care’s difficult past—death and abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public apathy towards these issues—but it also acknowledges the resilience of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but which often resonate with foster care globally. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Orphans of Empire. The fate of London's foundlings Helen Berry 2019 Orphans of Empire tells the story of what happened to the thousands of children who were raised at the London Foundling Hospital, established by Thomas Coram in 1739 and which became the most famous charity in Georgian England. Through extensive archival research, Helen Berry tells previously untold stories of what happened to former foundlings, and of the work they were engaged in during the Industrial Revolution. Included are extracts from George King's autobiography, the only surviving first-hand account written by an 18th century Foundling Hospital child. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir While the Locust Slept Peter Razor 2002 Native American writer and electronic technician, Peter Razor (b. circa 1938) was in an orphanage during his childhood. Peter Razor was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His mother, Mary, who suffered from depression, was sent to an asylum along with her hydrocephalic son, Leonard. Relatives collected Peter’s other brother, Arnold, but Peter was with his father who abandoned him. Peter was only 10 months old when he was made a ward of the state. He was “committed to the State Public School at Owatonna” 7 months later. External Website

Radio & Podcast Uncle Jack Charles: not true blue, true blak Jack Charles 2019 Uncle Jack was forcibly removed from his mother as a baby and denied his Aboriginality. A one-off trip to Fitzroy connected him with a family he didn’t know about, and promptly landed him in jail. He talks about this and more. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Beyond the Orphanage Years Ryszard Szablicki 2009 In 2007, Ryszard Szablicki published his account of living in various Catholic institutions. Beyond the Orphanage Years picks up the story from when he was returned home to live with his parents when he was 10. Much confusion followed as Ryszard had to adjust to life outside of institutions and try to fit into a family where he felt less important than the cat. External Website

Films/Videos Enola Holmes 2020 16 year old Enola Holmes is left in the kinship care of her oldest brother, Mycroft, when her mother disappears. Enola travels to London in search of her mother, resisting attempts by Mycroft to have her sent to a finishing school. At the conclusion to the film, Enola decides to follow in the footsteps of her famous brother, Sherlock, and become a detective. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Wicked Jilly Cooper 2006 One of the main characters in Wicked is Paris Alvaston who is in care. Paris has spent 13 years in care, enduring frequent moves between foster placements and children’s homes. He suffers horrific abuse at the hands of male visitors in the children's home. Paris loves reading. Books become his escape from misery, offering solace, intellectual engagement, and hope. But he's also part of a feared pupil group, the “Wolf Pack,” At Bagley Hall, a chaotic yet elite school, headmaster Hengist Brett-Taylor schemes to merge with failing Larkminster Comprehensive. Financial motives clash with forbidden attraction, wary parents, rebellious staff, and students ready for mayhem. A new head believes in Paris' potential and nurtures his love for literature. 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

Television Shows Mystery Road: Origin 2022 Mystery Road: Origin is the 3rd series in the popular Australian crime series. Series 3 is directed by Dylan River and is a prequel to first 2 Mystery Road series with Mark Coles Smith playing a young version of Jay Swan (played by Care Experienced actor Aaron Pederson in the 1st 2 series). It's not clear, but it seems that the 16-year-old boy whose Jack, was orphaned at the age of 12. He then ran away from the mission where he'd been living and was independent from then on. At the end of the series, a little girl is in the kinship care of her aunt because her parents have been imprisoned. It's not clear, but it seems that the 16 year old boy who was murdered 8 years previously may also have been in foster or kinship care. External Website

Television Shows Sanditon 2019 Sanditon, a British historical drama based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, is a salient reminder that the age of adulthood has varied over time. In Sanditon, there are 2 'wards' or young women under the guardianship of older people. Clara Brereton (Lily Sacofsky) is declared by Lady Denham (Anne Reid) to be her ward in the opening episode. There is much more discussion about Sidney Parker (Theo James) being the legal guardian for 19-year-old Georgiana Lambe. During the Regency Era, the period in which Sanditon is set, the 'age of majority' was 21. It reduced to 18 in 1970 in England. External Website

Television Shows Until I Kill You 2024 Until I Kill You (2024) is a British true crime series based on Delia Balmer’s book, Living With A Serial Killer (2017). Set in London during the 1990s, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin) is a nurse who has a live-in relationship with a violent man, John Sweeney (Shaun Evans). In Episode 3, Delia has recovered – physically – from an assault by Sweeney. One day she meets a kind, gentle man called David (Kevin Doyle) who was an adoptee. In Episode 4, David supports Delia as she gives evidence in court against Sweeney. The couple subsequently split up and we don’t see David again. External Website