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Television Shows Payback 2023 Payback (2023) is a crime thriller set in Edinburgh. When Lexie Noble’s (Morven Christie) husband is murdered, she gets caught up in an organised crime money-laundering scheme. Lexie becomes a prime suspect for her husband’s murder when the police realise she was convicted of a crime at the age of 15 and locked up in secure care for a time. Lexie insists she did not commit either crime, not the crime she was convicted of nor the current one. External Website

Writers Mannix Flynn Irish playwright, novelist and politician, Mannix Flynn (b. 1957), was in St Joseph's Industrial School run by the now notorious Christian Brothers in Letterfrack, County Galway, Ireland for 18 months from the age of 11. He was also in the Marlborough House Detention Centre and sent to Mountjoy Prison for 5 years at the age of 15. In his 1983 semi-autobiographical novel, Nothing to Say, Flynn writes about James O'Neill who is from a family of 14 living in a small apartment in Dublin, ends up in court and is sent to St Joseph's. At St Joseph's the boy is verbally, physically and sexually assaulted. Flynn's 2003 play, James X, also tells this story. In 2011, the play was directed by Gabriel Byrne for a production at 45 Bleecker Theater in New York. Flynn founded Farcry Productions in 2004 which explores largely taboo topics such as child sexual abuse. External Website

Children's Fiction We Are Wolves Katrina Nannestad 2021 We Are Wolves (2021) by Australian children's writer, Katrina Nannestad, is the extraordinary story of 3 children left to fend for themselves at the end of WWII. The story begins in October 1944 in East Prussia. The children's father has been constricted but soon the Russian army breaks through the German lines and the rest of the family - 11 year old Liesl, 7 year old Otto, and toddler Mia plus their mother and grandparents abandon the farm. It's not long before the children are on their own and having a range of 'adventures' including meeting up with other orphaned German children known as "wolf children". External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro 2013 Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances. Moving between inter-war London and Shanghai, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Tattycoram Audrey Thomas 2010 Caricatured by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit as the cantankerous maid of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, "Tattycoram" tells her own life story in this metafiction and taking readers into the distant fictional world of Charles Dickens's England, where, in an unusual twist, Dickens interacts with his own characters. Harriet Coram gains a poignant personal history. Abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital and cared for by a kindly foster mother until the age of five, the young Hattie attracts the attention of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, who hires her as the family housemaid. In the Dickens household, Charles's sister Miss Georgina takes an instant dislike to Hattie's pretty looks and trains her caged raven to tease her with the mocking nickname of Tattycoram. Although Hattie escapes from Dickens and his family to care for her dying foster mother in the country, she is later swept back under the famous author's sphere of observation as a teacher in his newly founded school for released female convicts. There she befriends Elizabeth Avis, who also appears as another minor character from Little Dorrit. In typical Dickensian fashion, Hattie meets not one, but two, long-lost brothers and falls in love with the one who conveniently turns out not to be her "real" brother. But first, she must confront her benefactor about his shameless misrepresentation of her and Elizabeth's characters in his latest novel. External Website

Television Shows The Good Witch's Family 2020 The Good Witch's Family is a 2011 Canadian/American family film and Hallmark Channel original movie written by G. Ross Parker and directed by Craig Pryce The film stars Catherine Bell as Cassandra "Cassie" Nightingale whose parents died when she was a child and who grows up in the US foster care system. Cassie became accustomed to travelling and moving as she was passed through foster homes. She ran away and continued travelling the world and learning about many different cultures, all the while honing her special gifts. Cassie is psychic and uses her intuition (and at times, a little magic) for good reasons. Life is going well for Cassie as she settles into marriage with Middleton Police Chief Jake Russell and as stepmom to Brandon and Lori. But evil soon blows into town in the form of Cassie's long-lost cousin Abigail, who whips up wickedness like a tornado. The once peaceful Russell family bickers night and day; Jake is fired after an argument with the Mayor over a bridge expansion; and Martha, the Mayor's wife, and town busybody walks out on her long marriage. As the town divides further over neighborhood expansion, Cassie is drafted to run for Mayor. Within her once-happy marriage, her family is unraveling, and Abigail's diabolical "double, double, toil and trouble" is the apex of Cassie's misery. What's a good witch to do? External Website

Non Fiction The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Geogia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption Barbara Bisantz Raymond 2008 The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (2008) tells the story of a woman now famous for child trafficking. Georgia Tann (1891-1951) ran an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. From 1924, she is estimated to have stolen more than 5000 children from mostly poor single mothers and sold them to wealthy people, 80% of whom were in New York and California. In September 1950, then Texas Governor Gordon Browning commenced an investigation into Tann’s agency, which was closed that year. Tann died 3 days before the state brought charges against her agency. External Website

Activists Social justice and recognition for children in care Lemn Sissay 1967- Lemn Sissay was one of the first people to link orphan literary heroes with young heroes in the care system. He is a British poet and activist whose work is deeply rooted in his own experiences growing up in the UK care system. Through poetry, public speaking, and writing, he sheds light on the mistreatment of children in care and advocates for systemic reform. His activism includes legal action, public awareness campaigns, and founding the Christmas Dinners, a nationwide initiative for young care leavers. Sissay uses his platform to promote justice, empathy, and support for marginalized youth, making him a powerful voice for change in social care and beyond. External Website

Films/Videos A Family Affair 2015 Tom’ s father, Rob, and his older brother, Rene, were suddenly and inexplicably put into an orphanage when Rob was about 3 years of age. Just as suddenly, 2 years later they were removed and returned to live with their single mother, Marianne Hertz, a well-known model in the Netherlands at the time. In the documentary, Tom recalls how traumatic it was for him to be dumped into the orphanage. His mother visited regularly, and these times he loved; when he was with her all seemed well with the world. But each time she left, he felt abandoned all over again. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Left unsaid: a triumph of sibling love over parental neglect & institutional care Margo O'Byrne 2009 The journal of Margo O'Bynre from life in an orphanage in Queensland to community development work in Western Australia. External Website

Academic Articles As a former foster kid, I'm giving Tracy Beaker a second chance Sophia Alexandra Hall 2021 Sophia Alexandra Hall went into foster care as a teenager and was cared for by her local authority until leaving at 18 to attend the University of Oxford. Here she writes about the new Tracy Beaker TV series, 'My Mum Tracy Beaker'. The original series is often cited as inadvertently paving the way for negative stereotypes and labels to be attached to children in care. Hall explains: "Tracy Beaker and I have a complicated relationship. When I told my friends growing up that I was in foster care, I’d often be compared to the fictional character. At first, I didn’t understand the comparison. Tracy was a pre-teen living in a children’s home, while I was living in a foster placement and revising for secondary school exams. But it was easier to shrug off my care experience as ‘like Tracy Beaker’ than to explain the complexities of the system to my peers." External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Scent of my Mother's Kiss Melene Fawdry 2015 Originally published in 2007 as The Little Mongrel - free to a good home, The Scent of my Mother’s Kiss includes a new chapter on Rock Lynn House, a Salvation Army Maternity Home in West Launceston that operated between 1900 and 1960. This book has been written from the perspective of an adoptee, tracing her formative years from the blank slate of birth to the verge of adulthood and the relentless search for the key that would erase the debilitating fugue of not knowing. The child who is placed with adoptive parents soon after birth is denied the experience of the biological sequence that begins in the womb, the merging of the physiological with the psychological that forms the post-partum bond. The resultant collision between the needs of the adoptive parent and adoptee has the capacity to magnify the pain for each and shatter the illusion irrevocably. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Cultural, autobiographical and absent memories of orphanhood Delyth Edwards 2017 This book offers an empirically informed understanding of how cultural, autobiographical and absent memories of orphanhood interact and interconnect or come into being in the re-telling of a life story and construction of an identity. The volume investigates how care experienced identities are embedded within personal, social and cultural practices of remembering. The book stems from research carried out into the life (hi)stories of twelve undervalued ‘historical witnesses’ (Roberts, 2002) of orphanhood: women who grew up in Nazareth House children’s home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Several themes are covered, including histories of care in Northern Ireland, narratives and memories, sociologies of home, and self and identity. The result is an impressive text that works to introduce readers to the complexity of memory for care experienced people and what this means for their life story and identity. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Second Life Dermot Bolger 2010 Following a car crash, for several seconds, Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead. He experiences the overwhelmingly powerful sensation of being drawn towards a blissful afterworld, to find his progress blocked by the haunting face of a man he only partially recognises. He plummets back to life into a world which, for him, has profoundly changed. The pieces of his life seem not to fit anymore as he struggles, deeply traumatized, to adjust to this gift of a second life. Yet this is not the first time that he has been given a second life. At the age of six weeks he was taken from his mother, when as a young girl in rural Ireland, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Beginning the quest for his own identity, and struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his natural mother, while continuing to search for the face that has haunted him since the crash. This leads him on a strange and absorbing journey through his various pasts, into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions. External Website

Sport Hubert Opperman Hubert Opperman Hubert Ferdinand (Oppy) Opperman (1904-1996) was an award winning cyclist. Oppy was born in Victoria, Australia into a working class family. When his father joined the Australian Imperial Force in WW1, Oppy was sent Melbourne to live with his paternal grandmother. Oppy had been riding a bike since he was 8 and in 1921 he took up racing with the Malvern Cycling Club. He won the prestigious Launceston to Hobart race in 1922 and quickly became a respected sportsman. In 1924, he was the youngest to win the annual Australasian National Road Cycle Championship. In 1931, Oppy raced in the Tour de France (finished 12th). Later that year he won the Paris-Brest-Paris race, breaking all records. For most of the 1930s, Oppy set a number of solo cycle records. He joined the RAAF in 1940 and served until 1945. Oppy became a federal politician for the Victorian seat of Corio in 1949. He was knighted in 1968, became the Higher Commissioner to Malta in 1967, and retired in 1972. External Website

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Autobiography/Memoir A Lonely Little Girl Goes to University Pam Petrilli 2015 Pam Petrilli was in foster care as a child. In this chapter she talks of going to university as a mature age student, encouraged by her daughter. External Website

Actors Pierce Brosnan (actor) Pierce Brosnahan (Brosnan) was born on 16 May 1953. His father abandoned the family when Brosnan was an infant. When he was four years old, his mother moved to London to work as a nurse. From that point on, he was largely brought up by his maternal grandparents, Philip and Kathleen Smith. After their deaths, he lived with an aunt and then an uncle, but was subsequently sent to live in a boarding house run by a woman named Eileen. The young Pierce Brosnan began his working life as a trainee commercial artist, until a colleague invited him to join his theatre club. From there he joined with others to form the Oval House Theater Company, working during the day in a range of jobs to support himself. After two years Pierce decided to study acting at the Drama Centre of London and worked on stage at the West End. He moved to Los Angeles in 1982 with his first wife, Australian Cassandra Harris. Soon after he was cast as Special Agent Ben Pearson in the American police procedural, Remington Steele, which aired first in 1982 and continued production until 1987. Brosnan began in the role of James Bond in 1994 and made 4 films in that role. External Website

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

Academic theses Orphans and Class Anxiety in Nineteenth-century English Novels Junghan Choi 2008 The abandoned, the alienated, the ignored-orphans can be considered an emerging force for disruption within the domestic sphere, but this study underscores the potential social flexibility and mobility encouraged by the disturbing yet enlightening representation of orphans in nineteenth-century English novels. External Website