Autobiography/Memoir The King Of The Barbareens Janet Hitchman 1971 A memoir of Janet Hitchman's time as a child in England's social welfare system. She went from foster care to residential care back to foster care, finally ending up in a Barnado Home outside Norwich. External Website

Films/Videos The Girl in the Spider's Web (film) 2018 The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018) is an action thriller which is based on the eponymous novel by David Lagercrantz, who using characters - including Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy)- developed by Stieg Larsson. The film has a young Lisbeth leaving the family home to get away from her predatory father. As an adult, Salander is a vigilante hacker who becomes entangled with 'the Spiders', a criminal organisation formed by the sister Lisbeth left behind. External Website

Authors J Oi: Snowball Meets Some Very Toxic People ➝ Orphan Sisters ➝ Being Lara: A Novel ➝ Borrowed Body ➝ The Attic Child ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles The Meaning of Maggie in Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif' Catherine Sustana et al. 2019 In Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif" the girls of the orphanage revile the character of Maggie, the one person more marginalized than they are. External Website

Radio & Podcast Stripped of my spirituality Heart and Soul 2023 Thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed from their families and sent to Catholic boarding schools from the 1800s through to the 1970s. While in the boarding schools, the children were expected to assimilate into mainstream white culture, including not being allowed to speak their language and having to become Christian. In this podcast, 4 women tell their stories of removal, abuse within boarding schools, and their healing journey, including reclaiming their traditional spiritual beliefs and practices. External Website

Films/Videos Clan Library 2021 CLAN was founded in July 2000 by two Sydney Care Leavers, Joanna Penglase, and Leonie Sheedy. Leonie was a state ward in Victoria, who grew up in a Catholic Children’s Home. Joanna grew up in NSW, in a non-government Children’s Home that was run as a business under licence from the Child Welfare Department (now DoCS). Their childhoods spanned the decades, after WW2, the late 1940s, 50s and 60s. They met when Joanna was researching her PHD thesis, based on her experience growing up in a Home and the stories of 90 other people who grew up in care in NSW. Joanna put out over 150 ads in local newspapers to reach out to other care leavers. Leonie and Joanna met up when Joanna’s thesis was finished and so they decided to start a support and advocacy group for people like us – Care Leavers of Australia Network, or CLAN. The library in Geelong holds over 600 books External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Pillars of the House Charlotte Yonge 1873 When Mrs Underwood dies, her 13 children are left orphaned and must rely on each other for survival. The eldest, Felix, and his sister Wilmet become the family’s “pillars,” determined to keep their siblings together in their struggling household in Bexley. Despite their genteel background, they live in modest, lower‑middle-class conditions, working, sacrificing, and caring for one another. The novel also addresses disability through the character of the artist Geraldine Underwood, whose leg is amputated after an illness and who becomes an artist. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Goldfinch Donna Tartt 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate. External Website

Authors B Why Richard Kingsmill is is My God ➝ In My Own Time: Almost an Autobiography ➝ Girl with dove: a life built by books ➝ Borstal Boy ➝ Not Forgotten ➝ An Accident of Birth ➝ Lion: A Long Way Home ➝ Choice or Constraint in Everyday Life ➝ Little Big Man ➝ Better Off in a Home ➝ Foster Kid ➝ No Boys Play Here: A story of Shakespear & My Family's Missing Men ➝ Rosa's Child: One Woman's Search for Her Past ➝ Aboriginal women by degrees : their stories of the journey towards academic achievement ➝ Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir ➝ Sunday's Child? - a Memoir ➝ Racial Folly ➝ Through the Eyes of a Foster Child: My Childhood in Over 30 New Zealand Homes ➝ Childhood: A Memoir ➝ Only: A singular memoir ➝ The Green Lady: A Spirit, A Story, A Place ➝ Daffodils - Audiobook ➝ The Necessity of Poverty ➝ A Memoir of Robert Blincoe ➝ Your Honour Can I Tell You My Story? ➝ Not without You ➝ The Child She Bare ➝ Big Boys Don't Cry ➝ Back to Top

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles The people making a difference: the woman who created a community for fellow adult adoptees The Guardian 2022 In 2013 when Claire Moruzzi began thinking about here experiences as an adoptee, she found there was little in the way of helpful resources. In response, Moruzzi set up a website, How to be Adopted, which acts as both a community for adoptees and a place where tips and other information is shared. External Website

Films/Videos For Love 2021 For Love, directed by Matt Smiley, is a documentary which tells stories from across Canada about the (often devastating) effects of the Canadian child welfare system on Indigenous communities and families. The film, narrated by Shania Twain, makes connections between Canada's current system of caring for children and the historic residential school system. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Street urchins, sociopaths and degenerates: orphans of late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction William David Floyd 2014 From the notable emergence of orphan figures in late eighteenth-century literature, through early- and middle-period Victorian fiction and, as this book argues, well into the fin de siècle, this potent literary type is remarkable for its consistent recurrence and its metamorphosis as a register of cultural conditions. The striking ubiquity of orphans in the literature of these periods encourages inquiry into their metaphoric implications and the manner in which they function as barometers of burgeoning social concerns. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centres particularly on the form as an early- to middle-century convention, primarily found in social and domestic works; in effect, the non-traditional, aberrant, at times Gothic orphan of the fin de siècle has been largely overlooked, if not denied outright. This oversight has given rise to the need for a study of this potent cultural figure as it pertains to preoccupations characteristic of more recent instances. This book examines the noticeable difference between orphans of genre fiction of the fin de siècle and their predecessors in works including first-wave Gothic and the majority of Victorian fiction, and the variance of their symbolic references and cultural implications. External Website

Television Shows Little Bird 2023 Little Bird (2023) is a Canadian television series exploring the “Sixties Scoop”. The Sixties Scoop was a time between the late 1950s to the 1980s in which the Canadian child welfare system removed large numbers of First Nations children from their families and placed them in non-Indigenous foster homes, institutions, and residential schools. Many of the children were also adopted. Little Bird tells the impact of the Sixties Scoop on one family. The series stars Darla Contois as Esther Rosenblum who, as Bezhig Little Bird, was removed from her family and adopted into a Jewish family. Now in her 20s and near the end of her law degree, she searches out the family from whom she was displaced as a 5 year old. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Calico Bush Rachel Field 1998 In 1743, thirteen-year-old Marguerite Ledoux travels to Maine as the indentured servant of a family that regards her as the lowest in the society. As the story proceeds, it becames clear that Maggie is a heroine, not just enduring difficult living conditions but also saving members of the family when there is danger. External Website

Writers Oliver Sacks 1933-2015 Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933 – 2015) was a neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author. When war broke out in September 1939, Oliver and his older brother, Michael, were evacuated to the village of Braefield where their day school was reconstituted as a makeshift boarding school. The headmaster became violent, and his parents rarely visited. After his return to London, Oliver was well-nurtured in the sciences at home, becoming an amateur chemist at the encouragement of his Uncle Dave. However, he studied medicine—in line with his parents’ expectations—at Queen’s College, Oxford University, receiving his medical degree in 1958. Sachs left for the United States during the 1960s and spent most of his career working there, beginning with consulting work at Beth Abraham Hospital in New York in 1965. Oliver Sachs’ first published book was Awakenings (1973). The book tells the stories of people who had encephalitis lethargica from a 1920s epidemic and was made into a film in 1990 staring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, published in 1985, established an international audience for Sacks. The 24 essays in the book explore case histories where patients have particular neurological conditions, such as visual agnosia, or the inability to recognise even familiar faces. . External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Kids Were Marched Everywhere. This was a Concentration Camp' RolingStone 2023 Care Experienced Writer, Brandi Moran, published this important article in Rolling Stone on April 23 this year. In the article, she writes about the US government’s institution of a “program of state-sponsored abductions and forced assimilation of Native American children” from 1819 until 1969. Hundreds of thousands of Native American children - some as young as 3 - were stolen from the families. Some were taken thousands of kilometres from their homes and many never made it back. A Congressional Truth Commission bill was introduced in Congress in September 2021 and the hope is it will be passed soon. The purpose of the Commission will be to “thoroughly investigate the losses that occurred through this violent genocide.” External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles National Aged and Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians National Aged and Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians The National Aged & Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians launched their website in April 2023. Forgotten Australians, coined in 2004, refers to an estimated 500,000 Australians who were separated from their families between the 1940s until the late 1980s and who grew up in orphanages, children’s homes and foster care. The website was set up “as a resource hub for Forgotten Australians, Care Leavers and persons interested in learning about the experiences of individuals, who as children experienced institutional or out of home ‘care’, as they age, with an emphasis on appropriate and quality aged and community care.” External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Borderline Sandie Jessamine 2021 In 1974, 15 year old Sandie was locked up in the notorious Parramatta Girls Home in NSW, renamed as the Kamballa institution. She escaped from Kamballa and 40 years later revisits her time there and explores the cruelty of juvenile incarceration. External Website

Television Shows Grey's Anatomy 2005 Grey’s Anatomy (2005-ongoing) is an American medical drama series set at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital, later named the Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. The series follows the life of Meredith Grey ( Ellen Pompeo). One of the fellow physicians she works alongside is Alex Karev (Justin Chambers). Alex Karev was in foster care as a child for 5 years, during which time he lived with 17 different foster families. Introduced in Grey’s Anatomy as a surgical intern, Alex later specialises as a paediatric surgeon. Alex Karev’s final appearance on Grey’s Anatomy was in season 16. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton 1999 The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-Tsix, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders--the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has led a peripetatic childhood in kinship care, foster care and boarding school. External Website