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Fiction featuring Care Experience Celestial Bodies Jokha Alharthi 2019 Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Celestial Bodies tell of Oman's evolution through the prism of one family's losses and loves. One of the characters, Salima, was in kinship care as a child. She lived with her uncle until she was 13, with her mother visiting occasionally. Salima returned to live with her mother at 13 but was promptly married off by her uncle. External Website

Poets Vicki Roach Vicki Roach Aboriginal Australian activist and writer, Vicki Roach (b. 1958), was in an institution and in foster care as a child.Vicki Roach is a Yiun woman and a member of the Stolen Generations. She was taken from her mother—also a member of the Stolen Generations who had been in the notorious Parramatta Girls Home—when she was two years of age. Vicki’s mother had requested the state care for her child while she went into an unmarried mother’s home and had another child. What was supposed to be a temporary arrangement ended up with Vicki being made a ward of the (NSW) state and placed into a white foster home in the western Sydney suburb of Carramar. Education has been a significant force in Vicki Roach’s life. She left school at 13, but took on a Bachelor degree with the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University during one stint in prison. From there she went on to do a Masters through Swinburne University, and in 2009 was onto a PhD. Vicki Roach has been publishing poetry and essays since 2000. External Website

Television Shows Bordertown 2016 In this Finnish crime drama, one of the featured characters, Katia, founds out as a teenager that she was adopted. Her mother says she 'saved' her as a baby while, as a police officer, involved in a drug raid. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Yellow Papers Dominque Wilson 2014 The Yellow Papers (2014) is a novel by Australian writer Dominique Wilson which is bookended by the stories of care experienced characters. At age 7 Chen Mu is sent from China to the US to study. 9 years later, Chen Mu, now a keen botanist, makes his way - accidentally - to Australia.r 20 years. The story concludes with Huang Ho, who lives for a while with his grandmother in Hong Kong before she sends him to university in Adelaide, South Australia. Being a keen follower of Mao Zedong (1893-1976), he is anxious to get back to China. In between are the stories of other Australian and Chinese nationals who become friends across a vast historical sweep of time. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother, John Lennon Julia Baird 2008 Julia Baird, sister of John Lennon writes that until now, the true story of John Lennon's childhood has never been told. Julia has herself been on a personal journey that has made it possible only now to reveal the full extent of the pain and difficulties - as well as the happier times - living inside John Lennon's family brought. Julia reveals the various strong, self-willed and selfish women who surrounded John as he grew up. John was removed from his mother at the age of 5 to live with his Aunt Mimi, and here Julia shows for the first time the cruelty of this decision - to both mother and son, she sheds a new light on his upbringing with Mimi which is often at dramatic odds with the accepted tale. John's frequent visits to his mother and sisters gave him the liveliness, freedom and love he sought and allowed him to develop his musical talents. The tragic death of their mother, knocked down outside Aunt Mimi's house by a speeding car when John was 17, meant that life for him and his sisters would never be the same again. Poignant, raw and beautifully written, Imagine This casts John Lennon's life in a new light and reveals the source of his emotional fragility and musical genius. It is also one family's extraordinary story of how it dealt with fame and tragedy beyond all imagining. External Website

Films/Videos Into The Fire: The Lost Daughter 2024 Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter (2024) is an American documentary (in two parts). In 1974, 16-year-old Cathy Terkanian gives up her baby daughter for adoption. The child was 9 months old. 35 years later, Cathy finds out that her daughter – then named Aundria Bowman - had gone missing in 1989. Cathy becomes involved in the search for her missing daughter, beginning with setting up a Facebook page. She found out who the adoptive parents were and became convinced the adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, had killed her daughter. On May 15, 2020, Dennis Bowman pleads guilty to the murder of dismemberment of Aundria Bown. External Website

Television Shows Manifest 2018 In Series 1, Episode 15 (with a brief follow-up in Episode 16) of the Manifest (2018) drama series on Netflix, robber and murderer James Griffin is revealed to have been in foster care. He'd been moved between 4 homes, committed his first offense at the age of 15, and was in prison at the age of 19. The story-line adds nothing except to perpetuate stereotypes of kids in foster care. External Website

Writers Kerry Hudson 1980- Kerry Hudson (born 1980, Aberdeen) is a British writer. She spent a short amount of time in care when she was nearly 3 years old. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. In 'Lowborn', Hudson questions What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist she revisits her childhood (including foster care) and some of the country's most deprived towns. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Flying Troutmans Miriam Toews 2008 The Flying Troutmans by Canadian writer, Miriam Toews, is the heartbreaking yet hopeful story of Hattie’s courageous efforts to care for her niece and nephew while their mother, Min, is in a psychiatric ward of the local hospital. It’s 11 year old Thebes who calls her aunt, 28 year old Hattie, in Paris and begs her to return to Canada to help (as she often has in the past). Hattie is well aware that the children are at risk of being taken into state care; the hospital social worker has already alluded to that. But she’s also unsure about what part she wants to play in their upbringing. Hattie decides the best thing to do is take Thebes and 15 year old Logan on a road trip to locate their long missing father, Doug Cherkis. . External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Shirley (novel by Ronnie Scott) Ronnie Scott 2023 The narrator of Shirley (2023) by Australian writer Ronnie Scott was in informal foster care as a teenager. The unnamed narrator is the daughter of a celebrity in the TV food industry. Celebrity mum fled Australia after she was caught out in an unflattering photograph and teenage daughter was left in the care of mum’s employees collectively named the Gerards. 20 years on and the daughter is buying her own apartment in an inner city Melbourne suburb, mum is selling the family home, and the young woman is wondering about the meaning of life. External Website

Writers Bernard Smith (art historian) 1916-2011 Bernard William Smith (1916 – 2011) was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country's most important thinkers. Bennie, as Smith was known when he was little, was born in 1916 in Balmain, NSW, to Rose Ann Tierney, a 26 year old unmarried, recent migrant to Australia from poverty stricken Ireland. Rose Ann organised for Tottie Keen, a foster carer in Burwood, to look after her son so she could work. After Rose Ann went to Queensland in search of better pay and contact with her brothers, ‘Mum Keen’ organised for Bennie to become a ward of the state. Inspiring teachers at Enmore High—a high school which existed for only two years for boys trying to improve their job prospects during the Great Depression—and access to the Sydney Municipal Lending Library enabled Bennie to receive a 2 year scholarship to Sydney Teacher’s College where he took Art as his speciality. Smith taught in a small country school, and then attended the University of Sydney in 1946 at the age of 29. He’d already published his first book, Place, Taste, and Tradition in 1945. In 1948 Smith was granted a British Council scholarship to study at the University of London. Publications from that work led to his first academic appointment at the university of Melbourne in 1956, and he completed his PhD at Australian National University in 1952. External Website

Television Shows My Parents Are Aliens 2021 My Parents Are Aliens is a British children's television sitcom that was produced for eight series by Yorkshire Television and aired on ITV from 8 November 1999 to 18 December 2006. The series follows the day to day lives of three orphaned children who are adopted by aliens that have trouble adjusting to the local culture. External Website

Television Shows The Dumping Ground 2013 The Dumping Ground (also informally referred to as TDG) is a British children's television drama series that focuses on the lives and experiences of young people who live in a care home with their care workers in care, broadcast on CBBC since 4 January 2013. The series is a continuation of Tracy Beaker Returns and the first series, consisting of thirteen, thirty-minute episodes, was commissioned in early 2012. A External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir Pauline Black 2012 Born in 1953 to Anglo-Jewish and Nigerian parents, Pauline Black was adopted by a white working-class family in Romford. Feeling out of place, she sought an escape from her small-town upbringing and found her true calling in music. As the lead singer of the platinum-selling band The Selecter, Pauline Black became the Queen of British Ska. The only woman in a male-dominated movement, she toured alongside The Specials, Madness, and Dexy’s Midnight Runners at the height of their fame—often witnessing their wildest moments firsthand. From childhood to stardom, from music to acting and broadcasting, and from adoption to the search for her birth parents, Black by Design is a compelling and insightful journey through identity, race, family, and the power of music. External Website

Performing Arts Blues singer Bessie Smith Bessie Smith (1894 – 1937) was an American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. By the time she was nine, Bessie was an orphan. Cared for by an older sister, Bessie and her brother busked on the streets of Chattangooga to survive. By 1913 Bessie was performing her own act and she became known as the "Empress of the Blues"; she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists. External Website

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

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles John’s story – one of the first foundlings Janette Bright 2021 Read the story of John, who was a pupil at the Foundling Hospital, England's first dedicated children's charity. In the 18th Century, 25 March 1741, the Foundling Hospital welcomed its first group of children to its temporary location in Hatton Garden. Among the 30 admitted was an infant later known as John Bowles, identified only as child number five at the time. No note or personal item was left with him, so nothing is known about his original name or his mother’s circumstances. Approximately one month old, he wore a brown cloak and a piece of cloth marked with the initials ‘I’ and ‘A’—the only clues that would have been used to identify him if his mother had ever returned to claim him. External Website

Writers Richard Wright 1908-1960 Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908 – 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Richard's father abandoned his family when Richard was young and his mother, Ella, struggled to support her sons, particularly when she was sick. At one point Ella put her two boys into an orphanage. The adult Richard wasn't sure how long they were there for but he was clear he hated it. A few years later, 35 year old Ella had a stroke and her folks arranged for the boys to live with relatives. Richard was sent to his Uncle Clark and Aunty Jody. Again he hated being separated from his mother and insisted he be sent back to live with her (Ella was by then being cared for by her mother). After a series of working class jobs, Richard Wright went on to become a professional writer. In 1940 he became the first African American to publish a best selling book, Native Son. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. External Website

Television Shows Bodkin 2024 Bodkin (2024) is an Irish black comedy thriller series. An American podcaster (Will Forte) travels to Bodkin, a small Irish town, to explore a cold case – 3 people disappeared 25 years ago. Joining him is London-based but Irish-born Dove Maloney (Siobhan Cullen), an investigative journalist who – at the age of 12 – was left by her mother in a convent and raised by nuns. An adoptee also features in the story; he is convinced he was adopted from Romania. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Letters to Gil Malik Al Nasir 2021 Letters to Gil tells the story of Gil Scott-Heron (who had been in kinship care as a child) mentoring a young Malik Al Nasir (or Mark T. Watson as he was known then). Malik Al Nasir was born to a Welsh mother and Guyanese father and taken into care when he was 9 after his father was paralysed. He later sued the government for the way he was treated when in care. An accidental meeting between Gil Scott-Hron and Malik Al Nasir contributed significantly to Malik's becoming a performance poet and social commentator. External Website