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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

Artists Marina Abramović ​ ​ Marina Abramović (b. 1946) was born in Belgrade. Because her parents were busy with their careers, she lived with her grandmother for 6 years. “Until then,” she writes, “I hardly even knew who my parents were. They were just two strange people who would visit on Saturdays and bring presents. When I was six, my brother was born, and I was sent back to my parents.” Abramović writes of having a very unhappy childhood with her parents. “I grew up with incredible control, discipline, and violence at home. Everything was extreme.” Drawing and performing were ways for her to survive. Despite the difficulties, Marina Abramović remained at home with her parents until she was 29. Marina Abramović eventually moved to Amsterdam. She had several postings to European academies, has given many performances and become known as the “grandmother of performance art” and in 2007, founded the Marina Abramović Institution, a non-profit foundation for performance art. External Website

Academic Articles The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret Garden Jerry Phillips 1993 The preeminent influence on twentieth-century British society has arguably been the decline of the British Empire. For over three hundred years, the construction and maintenance of the imperial system provoked themes which reverberated at every level of the British polity—that is to say, it set limits, effective cultural parameters, on what it was and what it meant in terms of lived experienced to be British in relation to foreigners from the four corners of the globe...Clearly, the British Empire was not the sole cause of any one of these historical trajectories, but its pervasive influence is detectable in all of them. Thus, the end of empire has had significant consequences on a number of fronts, ranging from the macroeconomic to the micropolitical. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Silent System: Forgotten Australians the Institutionalisation of Women and Children Paul Ashton & Jacqueline Z Wilson (Editors 2014 Silent System: Forgotten Australians and the Institutionalisation of Women and Children (2014) is a scholarly book edited by Paul Ashton & Jacqueline Z Wilson. Silent System was in response to a public history conference convened 26-27 September 2013. It was co-run by the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project & the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. Themes are: Colonial Pasts; Memory & Place; Sites of Injustice; & Creative Responses Contributors include: Shurlee Swain, Nell Musgrove, Tracy Ireland, Lily Hibberd, Bonney Djuric, Jacqueline Z Wilson, Naomi Parry, Dolly MacKinnon & Dee Michell External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance John Boswell 1991 This text looks at the abandonment of children in Western Europe in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book illuminates a vast area of social history and aims to enlighten us on attitudes to childhood, the nature of the family, property and the nature of birth control. External Website

Artists Ralph Fasanella ​ ​ Ralph Fasanella (September 2, 1914 – December 16, 1997) was a self-taught painter whose large, detailed works depicted urban working life and critiqued post-World War II America. Born in the Bronx, New York, Ralph quit school when he was around fourteen and went to work. Behavioural problems after his father abandoned the family in the early 1920s and went back to Italy saw Ralph spending time in a Catholic reform school on three separate occasions before he was fifteen. After a series of working class jobs from the time he gave up school, and considerable union activism, in his 30s Fasanella began to teach himself how to paint and continued for the next 50 years. He exhibited his work, but did not become well known until 1972 when, after painting for 30 years, a story about him suddenly appeared on the cover of a New York magazine. External Website

Academic theses The Fictional Onscreen Depiction of Looked-after Young People: "Finding someone just like me." John Hickman 2016 While there is significant interest in the lives of looked-after young people, little attention has been given to the way these young people are depicted onscreen. The aim of this study is to explore looked-after young people's perceptions of these fictional depictions and the impact these depictions have on them. My research highlights that these young people perceive onscreen fictional depictions to be “unrealistic” and negative. These depictions have significant impact, particularly in terms of “presumed media influence”, on how these young people perceive negative depictions to influence others. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir I was just trying to matter David Jackson 2011 Recipes for Survival: Stories of Hope and Healing by Survivors of the State ‘Care’ System in Australia is a collection of stories by those who have grown up in care in Australia during the 20th century and is therefore contribution to a growing body of literature on the experiences of the Forgotten Australians. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography Eric Idle 2018 Eric Idle reflects on the meaning of his own life in this memoir that takes us on a remarkable journey from his childhood in an austere boarding school through his successful career in comedy, television, theatre and film. Coming of age as a writer and comedian during the Sixties and Seventies, Eric stumbled into the crossroads of the cultural revolution and found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams, all of whom became lifelong friends. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Keeping in step George V Martin 1995 George Martin and his brothers and sisters grew up in a Salvation Army Orphanage. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Daughters of Nazareth Trisha Hughes 2016 For Trisha Gourgaud, life growing up in 1950s Australia was a mix of love for her French father and love tinged with uncertainty for her Irish mother. A blissful time was cut short when one day she was taken by the police to the local children's home, Nazareth House, a home for neglected and abandoned children. This event meant she would never see her mother again and rarely see her father. 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

Actors Keegan-Michael Key ​ ​ Keegan-Michael Key (born March 22, 1971) is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer. He was a adopted as a young boy. Key co-created and co-starred alongside Jordan Peele in Comedy Central's sketch series Key & Peele (2012–2015) and co-starred in USA Network's Playing House (2014–2017). He spent six seasons as a cast member on Mad TV (2004–2009) and has made guest appearances on the U.S. version of Whose Line is it Anyway? on The CW. He also appeared alongside Peele in the first season of the FX series Fargo in 2014, and had a recurring role on Parks and Recreation from 2013 to 2015. He hosted the U.S. version of The Planet's Funniest Animals on Animal Planet from 2005 until 2008, and has hosted Game On! on CBS since 2020. Key has had supporting roles in several films, including Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) and Don't Think Twice (2016). He has provided voice-work for The Lego Movie (2014), Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015), Storks, The Angry Birds Movie (both 2016), The Star (2017), Hotel Transylvania 3 (2018), The Lion King remake, Toy Story 4 (both 2019) and The Prom (film) (2020). Also in 2015, he appeared at the White House Correspondents' Dinner as the Key & Peele character Luther, President Barack Obama's anger translator. Key and Peele produced and starred in the 2016 action-comedy film Keanu. In 2017, Key made his Broadway debut in Steve Martin's Meteor Shower. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Barbara Sumner Barbara Sumner 2020 Tree of Strangers (2020) is a memoir by New Zealand writer and film producer, Barbara Sumner. Sumner was adopted as a 10-day old baby. She begins the search for her family of origin when her eldest child is born and she finally sees someone who physically resembles her. For Sumner, closed adoption is “government level gaslighting” because an adopted person – by dint of a new birth certificate – is (or was before laws changed) legally regarded as born to their adopting parents. External Website

Actors Felicia Pearson ​ ​ Felicia Pearson (born May 18, 1980) is an American actress, rapper and author. Because her parents were in prison, Felicia was raised in a foster family, eventually taking on their surname. She played Felicia "Snoop" Pearson on The Wire and wrote a 2007 memoir, Grace After Midnight, detailing her troubled childhood and time in prison for second-degree murder. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir An Autobiography Anthony Trollope 1883 Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) His autobiography, despite causing him problems with critics after his death for his attitudes to writing, is considered one of the most significant autobiographies of its period. Trollope was poor and bullied at Harrow and Winchester schools with no money & no friends; he fantasised about suicide. At 12 his mother Frances, moved to America with Trollope's three younger siblings. Her husband Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time but Anthony stayed in England throughout. His mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a writer, soon earning a good income. His father's affairs, however, went from bad to worse. And in 1834, he fled to Belgium to avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near Bruges, where they lived entirely on Frances's earnings. Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day. External Website

Artists Leonardo da Vinci ​ ​ Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci[b] (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect. An illegitimate son of Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant girl, he was brought up on the family estate in Anchiano by his paternal grandfather. His father married a sixteen-year old girl, Albiera, with whom Leonardo was close, but who died young. Leonardo was the oldest of 12 siblings and his family never treated his illegitimacy as a stigma. At the age of 14 Leonardo moved to Florence to begin an apprenticeship with Andrea del Verrocchio, an artist who had been a student of Early Renaissance master Donatello. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, A Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home Steve Pemberton 2012 Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives a terrifying existence. Caught in the clutches of a cruel foster family and subjected to constant abuse, Steve finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind stranger. In these books, he discovers new worlds he can only imagine and begins to hope that one day he might have a different life. Armed with just a single clue, Steve embarks on an extraordinary quest for his identity, only to find that nothing is as it appears. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Collective Revenge: Challenging the Individualist Victim-Avenger in Death Proof, Sleepers, and Mystic River Claire Henry 2014 The emergence of a subset of films that shed light on the individualism of the victim-avenger figure central to the genre, and that posit alternative solutions to the individualist transformation or survivor narratives, marks a notable trend in the genre. Rape-revenge films featuring multiple victims and collective responses—including Sleepers (Barry Levinson, 1996), Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003), and Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)—speak to the issue of sexual violence as a systemic problem, while also challenging the meaning of sexual violence as being purely a form of “violence against (individual white young) women.” External Website

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