Blogs/Web Pages/Articles How damaging are stories of damage? Kenny Murray 2020 Kenny Murray writes about the negative representations of Care Experienced People. External Website

Authors Z Benjamin Zephaniah (Poet) ➝ Back to Top

Academic Books & Book Chapters Who Cares?: Young People in Care Speak Out Raissa Page, G A Clark (editors 1977 Written by a group of young people in care, this publications provided a platform from which they could speak freely about their hopes, aspirations, contentions, criticisms and fears. As well as detailing their experiences of public care, it highlighted those aspects of the system that needed addressing to ensure that it meets the social, emotional and educational needs of all children and young people. External Website

Authors R My mum has bipolar. My dad was a recovering alcoholic.' - Leeds City Council chief exec Tom Riordan on why we need to open up about mental illness ➝ Belgium found guilty of crimes against humanity in colonial Congo ➝ Katherine Rundell's top 10 orphans ➝ Like Jane Eyre, I’ve been seen as unconventional and abnormal. I’m autistic – is she too? ➝ Tasmania's connection to author Joseph Conrad remembered on anniversary of his death ➝ ‘I cried, I cried. I had no one’: the brutal child kidnappings that shamed Belgian Congo ➝ Chilean mother reunites with her twin daughters for the first time in 45 years ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Cascades Female Factory Australian Government 2022 The Cascades Female Factory in South Hobart operated between 1828 & 1856 as a “correction facility”. The first female convicts arrived from England on the Harmony in January 1829. Within 12 months there were almost 200 women & children incarcerated there. After women weaned their babies (between 6 & 9 months), the babies would be left in the nursery with another convict woman who had the care of multiple children. The mother would then be punished for the ‘crime’ of having gotten pregnant by being sent back to work with other “Crime Class” women. At the age of 3, the children would be sent from the Cascades to the Queen’s Orphan Asylum in New Town. The Cascades Female Factory was well known for the high rate of infant mortality. Between 1830 & 1838, for example, 26% of the infants born there died After the female factory closed in 1856, it continued as a prison between 1856 until 1877. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/national/cascade-female-factory External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Mistress's Daughter AM Homes 2007 In 2007, American writer A. M. Homes published her memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter’, which explored her experience of being adopted, of being “found” by her biological family, and of the histories of both her families. Homes was 31 when she was reunited with her birth parents, having been raised in Maryland by a couple who had recently lost a son because of kidney failure. “To be adopted is to be adapted” she writes. “To be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain function, there will always be scar tissue.” External Website

Television Shows The Institute 2025 The Institute (2025) is an American horror series based on the eponymous novel by Stephen King. Ms Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) runs a secretive place called The Institute where children are experimented on before disappearing, ostensibly going back home. Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman) is a 14-year-old who is abducted from his home and wakes up in The Institute. Told he has special abilities (& he is clever), Luke finds out that his parents were murdered on the night he was kidnapped and about why children are being held there and where they disappear to. While Luke is working out what’s going on inside The Institute, Tim (Ben Barnes) is a cop who has wandered into town & taken on a job he is over-qualified for, that of Night Knocker. The Night Knocker prowls the local streets at night making sure all is well. The Institute has been running for about 70 years & there are stories over the years of children mysteriously disappearing, stories that Tim finds out about. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Ginny Moon Benjamin Ludwig 2017 Ginny is fourteen years old and has autism. She likes the colour red, making lists and knowing exactly what time it is. She doesn’t like hugs, surprises or people telling lies. After years in foster care, she has finally found her forever family. She has a new house, new parents and even a new name. But Ginny also has a Big Secret Plan of Escape. Every day she wakes up at nine o’clock and eats nine grapes for breakfast. Because when she was nine years old something terrible happened. Something only Ginny knows. And she’s the only one who can put it right… External Website

Radio & Podcast Madam CJ Walker You're Dead to Me (Madam CJ Walker) 2024 In this episode of You’re Dead to Me https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/madam-c-j-walker/id1479973402?i=1000643787226 Greg Jenner discusses Madam CJ Walker’s life—from being orphaned early, to growing up in kinship care, to disastrous marriages and finally to becoming a haircare entrepreneur—with Professor Noliwe Rooks and comedian Athena Kugblenu. External Website

Television Shows Unforgotten 2021 Unforgotten is an English crime drama series which first aired in 2015 and which starred Nicola Walker for the first 4 series. Series 4 of the British crime drama series, Unforgotten, has a former foster kid put in a brief appearance. Jerome Walsh is the son of the murdered man in the series, Matthew Walsh, and he was in and out of foster care, but in employment at the time of his father's murder being investigated. One of the suspects in the show, Fiona, has a criminal past and she has been posing as a former foster kid so she doesn't have to talk about her family of origin with her own family. In Series 5, there is a complicated story involving intergenerational trauma for 4 generations of a family at one end of the social spectrum, while at the other end there is immense privilege, including non-accountability for committing crimes. Included in the causes of intergenerational trauma are rape, racism, kinship care, abuse at the hands of a cult leader, foster care and homelessness. Several members of the family have criminal records. External Website

Poets Joy Williams (poet) Joy Williams Joy Williams (1942 - 2006) was an Aboriginal Australian author of poetry. A Wiradjuri woman, Joy Williams was born Eileen Williams to Doretta Williams. She was removed from her Aboriginal family at the Erambie Mission at Cowra in New South Wales when she was a tiny baby and taken to Bomaderry Home near Nowra, around 335km south-east of Cowra. At the age of six, Joy was transferred to Lutanda Children’s Home in Wentworth Falls, 228km north of Nowra. After the founder of Lutanda—Florence Dalwood—died in 1949, Lutanda (and Joy Williams) was relocated to an orphanage 90km east of Nowra to suburban Boundary Road, Pennant Hills. During the 1970s Joy Williams enrolled at Wollongong University to do a Bachelor of Arts where she became interested in Black Literature. She also become involved in the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody and in other Aboriginal community groups. Joy Williams’ poetry appears in over 65 publications. External Website

Authors I Ice-T ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows You 2018 You is a TV series starring Penn Badgley, Victoria Pedretti, and Ambyr Childers. A dangerously charming, intensely obsessive young man goes to extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of those he is transfixed by. The story follows Joe Goldberg, a bookstore manager who was in the foster care system as a child. A Mr Mooney took care of Joe, showing him how to run his bookstore, but he was also abusive of the boy, abuse which included looking him a glass cage as punishment. External Website

Writers Paula Fox Award-winning American writer, Paula Fox (1923-2017), was in an orphanage, kinship care, and foster care during her childhood. Paula Fox was born in Manhattan to screenwriters, Elsie De Sola and Paul Hervey Fox. Because the couple didn’t want their child, baby Paula was immediately put into a foundling hospital. Unhappy about this, Paula’s maternal grandmother collected the child but by the time she was 5 months of age, Paula had been given to a Congregational minister, the Reverend Elwood Amos Corning in Blamville, New York, with whom she lived for several years. When that didn’t work out, Paula was passed around into a variety of kinship and foster care arrangements. At 20, Paula Fox repeated her parent’s behaviour and gave up a baby for adoption. That daughter is Linda Carroll who became a writer, psychologist and mother of singer Courtney Love; Paula and Linda finally met when Paula was in her 70s. Paula Fox worked a variety of jobs in her early adult years. She left San Francisco for Europe after WWII. On her return to the United States, Fox married, raised 2 sons and worked as a teacher. She took up writing, but success was hard won and her first book wasn’t published until she was in her 40s. Fox won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978 in recognition of her many children’s books. She had previously won the Newbery Medal in 1974 for her novel, The Slave Dancer (1974) In 1991, by which time all of Paula Fox’s novels were out of print, novelist Jonathan Franzen read Desperate Characters (1970), wrote an essay about it and eventually Norton republished all Fox’s novels between 1999 and 2002. This meant that when Paula Fox published her memoir Borrowed Finery in 2001, it attracted more attention than it might have otherwise. Paula Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame in 2011. External Website

Films/Videos Uncle Jack Charles 2021 Beloved Australian actor Jack Charles, a member of the Stolen Generation, finally finds out who his father was on this episode of Who Do You Think You Are. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Love that Remains Susan Francis 2020 After twenty years spent searching for her biological parents, 52-year-old adoptee, Susan Hull, unexpectedly meets the great love of her life - a goldminer named Wayne Francis. Two years later, they throw in their jobs, marry and sell everything they own, embarking on an incredible adventure, to start a new life in Granada, where they learn Spanish and enjoy their adventure. Until a shocking series of events alters everything. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Hobbit J R R Tolkien 2013 The Hobbit is the unforgettable story of Bilbo, a peace-loving hobbit, who embarks on a strange and magical adventure. A timeless classic. Frodo Baggins was born in the Shire on 22nd September 1368 (SR). He shares his birthday – though not date of birth – with his 'uncle' Bilbo Baggins (Master of Bag End in Hobbiton). He was orphaned at the age of 12, when his parents, Drogo and Primula Baggins, drowned in a boating accident on the Brandywine. Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services – as a burglar – on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Thrown Away Child Louise Allen 2017 Thrown Away Child is a memoir covering Louise Allen’s abusive childhood in a foster home, how she survived - using her love of art as a sanctuary - and how she hopes to right old wrongs now by fostering children herself and campaigning for the improvement of foster care services. External Website

Authors Q Queen's Orphan Asylum ➝ Back to Top

Writers Nancy Reagan Nancy Reagan (1921-2016) was born Anne Frances Robbins in Queens, NYC. She was sent to live with relatives in Maryland after her parents separated. Nancy returned to live with her mother 7 years later after her mother remarried. Nancy was legally adopted by her stepfather in 1935. She began her working life as an actor, not retiring until 1962. Nancy then joined her husband, Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail when he announced his candidacy for Governor of California in 1966, and later for Presidency. She was First Lady during Ronald Reagan's presidency from 1981 to 1989. Nancy Reagan published her first book in 1982. To Love a Child was her book about the Foster Grandparents program which she began sponsoring when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. She also wrote her memoirs and an autobiography, and I Love You, Ronnie (2002), a reflection of her long marriage to Ronald. External Website