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Academic Books & Book Chapters Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? Gonda Van Steen 2019 More than 3000 Greek children were adopted by Americans after the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) during a 13-year period from 1950. In Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), classical scholar and linguist, Gonda Van Steen, examines the circumstances precipitating these adoptions (the first large scale transnational adoption movement). She draws on a range of fields (including cultural anthropology and Greek history) to argue that anticommunism after the Greek Civil War was a significant factor in these adoptions. Gonda Van Steen uses as a case study the story of Elias Argyriadis who was executed in Athens in 1952. In 1955 authorities arranged for the adoption of his 2 daughters to an American family (the mother had died). In 2013, a son of one of the adopted girls approached Gonda Van Steen for help in finding out about his mother’s past, and thus began Van Steen’s research journey. The book also includes the testimonies of other adopted people from Greece to America and doesn’t shy away from exploring the trauma they experienced and the way they have later come together as a support network. External Website

Actors Eartha Kitt Eartha Kitt (born Eartha Mae Keith; January 17, 1927 – December 25, 2008) was an American singer, actress, dancer, voice actress, comedienne, activist, author, and songwriter known for her highly distinctive singing style and her 1953 recordings of "C'est si bon" and the Christmas novelty song "Santa Baby", both of which reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world". Earth Kitt was rejected by her mother as a small girl and sent to live first in foster care and then with an aunt. Kitt began her career in 1942 and appeared in the 1945 original Broadway theatre production of the musical Carib Song. In the early 1950s, she had six US Top 30 hits, including "Uska Dara" and "I Want to Be Evil". She starred as Catwoman in the third and final season of the television series Batman in 1967. In 1968, her career in the U.S. deteriorated after she made anti-Vietnam War statements at a White House luncheon. Ten years later, she made a successful return to Broadway in the 1978 original production of the musical Timbuktu! Kitt wrote three autobiographies.Kitt found a new generation of fans through her roles in the Disney films The Emperor's New Groove (2000), in which she voiced the villainous Yzma. External Website

Films/Videos An Angel for May 2002 Young Tom, who is unhappy at home because of his parents' separation, travels fifty years to the past after discovering a time machine. He meets May, a little orphan who has been traumatised. Now that he knows his friends' fate and his own, he will try to reorder the events and change their history. 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

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Baby stolen during Argentina's military rule found after 48 years BBC 2025 The Grandmothers of Plaza De Mayo is a human rights organisation founded in 1977 to locate children who were stolen during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina. In this BBC article, Vanessa Buschschluter talks about the 140th baby the Grandmothers of Plaza De Mayo have located. The man, whose name has not been given but instead who is referred to as “Grandchild 140”, was born while his mother, a political activist, was being held in detention. Graciela Romero and the man’s father, Raul Metz – also a political activist - were apparently both tortured while in detention before they were ‘disappeared’. The couple’s daughter, Adriana, who was 1, was raised in kinship care. Both the Romero & Metz families looked for Graciela & Raul and their son for decades. A recent DNA test confirmed Grandchild 140 as Adriana’s brother. External Website

Radio & Podcast The Bed Under the Stairs Lemn Sissay 2016 Lemn Sissay talking about his experience in foster care and comparing his life to that of fictional character Harry Potter. External Website

Academic theses What’s the story? Sociological explorations of the life course narratives of adults with care experience Catriona Hugman 2018 This thesis extends understandings of people who experienced care by making use of sociological approaches and concepts. This approach highlights how previous research and cultural representations of young people in care produce individualised understandings and psychological explanations of difference. This is compounded by a lack of research on care leavers over the age of 25 and the omission of the voices of people with care experience within what little research there is. These absences may contribute to the depiction of the deficit, ascribed identity of being a child in care. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman 2017 Smart, warm, uplifting, the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes the only way to survive is to open her heart. Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. That, combined with her unusual appearance (scarred cheek, tendency to wear the same clothes year in, year out), means that Eleanor has become a creature of habit (to say the least) and a bit of a loner. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. A mystery surrounds her past and the reader learns that she spent time in care. Everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kind of friends who rescue each other from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond's big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. External Website

Films/Videos The Strays 2023 The Strays (2023, Netflix), is a British thriller starring Ashley Madekwe as an upper class woman, Neve, whose life looks ‘perfect’. Neve works as the deputy head of a privileged private school where the majority of students are white. Although everyone knows Neve is Black, Neve’s family and the wider community are all surprised when 2 Black teenagers (Jorden Myrie and Bukky Bakray) arrive to claim Neve as their mother. Understandably distressed that their mother abandoned them in the past and is in the process of rejecting them again, the teenagers become disruptive, and unfortunately – because it perpetuates stereotypes – violent. External Website

Radio & Podcast Jennifer Down and Jonathan Franzen relive the 1970s The Book Show 2022 A fascinating conversation with Jennifer Down author of Bodies of Light, which was shortlisted for Australia's Stella Prize in 2022. Bodies of Light is the story of Maggie Sullivan who grows up in the Victoria's state care system in the 1970s and 1980s. As an adult she 'reinvents' herself and becomes Josephine, and ThHolly by the end of the story. Jennifer talks about how she knew more about the state care system than many people as both her parents were social workers, with her mother working in the child protection system. The second part of the conversation with Jonathan Franzen is worth listening to as well, particularly since it was his endorsement which gave life to US writer and Care Experience Person, Paula Fox's career https://drdee-drdeethinkingoutloud.blogspot.com/2021/08/paula-foxs-nomadic-childhood.html External Website

Films/Videos Careful, He Might Hear You 1983 Careful, He Might Hear You is a 1983 Australian drama film. It is based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Australian- American author Sumner Locke Elliott. Two sisters are locked in a custody battle over their young nephew, PS, who has been raised by his aunt Lila and her husband George since his mother died soon after his birth. When Lila's richer sister Vanessa returns from overseas, she seeks custody of PS, citing the opportunities she can give him. External Website

Writers Maxim Gorky 1868-1936 Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868 – 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was in kinship care, brought up by his grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs. Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. External Website

Children's Fiction Jamberoo Road Eleanor Roberts Spence et al. 1969 Five years ago, in 1825, Missabella and her ten orphans—the “Switherby Pilgrims”—had voyaged from England to New South Wales, in primitive Australia. Missabella, now, is determined to provide for the future of her orphans according to each one’s character. Not an easy task, with such a varied, ragtag, yet lovable set of personalities and backgrounds as they represent. Selina will train in Sydney to be a milliner; Paul may become a midshipman; Francis loves to farm. But what will satisfy clever, independent Cassie, who has ambitions to be a writer? The “Jamberoo Road” leads her inland, to the discomforts and enticements of being governess in a wealthy colonial family. Cassie’s story, interwoven with that of all the other orphans’ and their former farmhand Eben’s, is both an account of personal growth and a vivid journey into early-day Australia. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Fortunate Son ~ A 20th Century Romance: Based on the Life & Times of Frederick Hunter Wilkinson 1890-1969 David Scott Wilkinson 2025 Frederick Hunter Wilkinson, orphaned in infancy and raised by Barnardo’s in England, was sent to Canada at age nine as one of the British Home Children—a program born during the Industrial Revolution to address poverty through child emigration. Apprenticed as a blacksmith, Fred later served in World War I with the 13th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. After the war, he settled in Uxbridge, Ontario, where he ran a blacksmith shop, married Vera Frances Cook, and raised seven children through decades of social and economic upheaval. Though many Home Children faced hardship and stigma, others like Fred found opportunity and made lasting contributions to Canada’s development; today, they form a vital part of the country’s heritage, with about 10% of Canadians descended from them. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Echoes Evie Wyld 2024 The Echoes (2024) by British-Australian writer, Evie Wyld, includes references to the Stolen Generation. Hannah is an Australian living in London and estranged from her family. She and her sister, Rachel, grew up in Western Australia close to where a ‘reform school’ for Aboriginal Australian children once existed. The novel reflects changing attitudes to Aboriginal children stolen from their parents and often renamed. Hannah’s mother, for example, wants to believe the couple running the school were well-intentioned. The elderly son of that couple knows that many of the children died and were buried without markers. External Website

Television Shows Dexter: Original Sin 2024 Dexter: Original Sin (2024) is a prequel to the Dexter (2006-2013) series. The series has vigilante killer Dexter Morgan thinking back to 1991 with Patrick Gibson as Dexter and Christian Slater as his adoptive father and homicide detective at the Miami-Metro Police Department. Dexter Morgan was a 20 year old graduate from the University of Miami in 1991 and begins work as a paid intern at the local police department. The series reaffirms what fans would already know, that it was his adoptive father who helps Dexter channel is “Dark Passenger”. External Website

Television Shows Birdsong 2012 The 2012 British television drama, Birdsong, tells the story of Stephen Wraysford during WW1. Stepehn Wraysford was orphaned by the age of 4, but we don't know his living arrangements after that. Stephen Wraysford's war experiences are interspersed with flashbacks to his affair with Isabelle Azaire, a young married woman he met and fell in love with before the war. The book is based on Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel of the same name and stars Eddie Redmayne. External Website

Films/Videos The Mission The Mission (2023) is a documentary presented by award-winning Australian journalist, Marc Fennell. 2 episodes in the 3-part series tell the story of “one of the largest art heists in Australian history, the theft of 26 masterpieces from a Western Australian monastery”, New Norcia Mission. The 3rd episode tells the story of a different crime, the cruel treatment of Aboriginal Australian children at the ‘orphanages’ there. Not only were the children forcibly removed from their parents – thus are members of the Stolen Generation – but the Royal Commission into Institution Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017) found that the Benedictine Community of New Norcia was one of the worst offenders when it came to catholic priests sexually abusing children. The Mission also hears from survivors who were physically, verbally, and emotionally abused there too. External Website

Artists Maria Amidu Maria Amidu is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in glass and ceramics and exhibited nationally and internationally as maker before pursuing a more social practice. From the age of six, Maria grew up in the UK care system after her mother died and her father returned to Nigeria. As a socially engaged artist, Maria has a commitment in her work to hidden stories, to people who have been unremembered. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir University Lectures and Lesson in Life Stacey Page 2015 After her mother had a serious accident, her family decided to care for Stacey who was "rotated" between them until she was 15. From age 15, Stacey worked in hairdressing salons. Encouraged by a client, she attended university as a mature age student and has now completed a degree in psychology. External Website