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Autobiography/Memoir The WOTS Family Cheryl Campbell 2009 WOTS stands for Ward of the State. Cheryl was born in 1961, in Mt Isa, Queensland. She first lived with her grandparents, but when she went to live with her mother, her mother's partner was physically and sexually abusive. Running away to escape being raped by the man set Sharon up for becoming a Ward of the State. In many ways being a Ward of the State and living in foster care or in a residential care facility was far preferable to living with her mother and various dubious partners. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames: A Foundling's Story Justine Cowan 2021 Growing up in a wealthy enclave outside San Francisco, Justine Cowan's life seems idyllic. But her mother's unpredictable temper drives Justine from home the moment she is old enough to escape. It is only after her mother dies that she finds herself pulling at the threads of a story half-told - her mother's upbringing in London's Foundling Hospital. Haunted by this secret history, Justine travels across the sea and deep into the past to discover the girl her mother once was. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles The West African children brought up by white foster families in the English countryside Symeon Brown 2019 For many migrant families, private foster arrangements have helped them get temporary child care while they find work and establish roots. Because these arrangements were unregulated, the stories have not been told, a situation now being rectified. External Website

Cartoons Not so broken - The Fostering Network 2017 This short, moving animation, and accompanying book, was launched alongside an exhibition showcasing artistic work produced in a wide range of media by over 100 children and young people in foster care across Northern Ireland. External Website

Actors Noel Tovey Aboriginal Australian actor, dancer, singer, director, choreographer and writer, Noel Tovey (b. 1934), was in a children’s home and foster care as a child. Noel was the 3rd of 5 children born into an impoverished family living in the inner-city suburb of Carlton, Melbourne. His mother, Winifred Ann Tovey, was Aboriginal and his father, Frederick Morton, was of African-Canadian-French-Creole heritage. When Noel was 6, their parents abandoned their children and the Welfare Authorities put them into the Royal Park Depot, and from there Noel was taken in by Arthur Challenger and his mother, who lived in Burren Junction, more than 600km north-west of Sydney. n 1954 Noel danced in Paint Your Wagon, which toured in Adelaide and Sydney. Later, Noel Tovey trained at the national Theatre Ballet School. Then in 1961, he was in London working as the principal dancer for the Sadler’s Wells Company. He also made his debut as a singer and choreographer in London, directing and choreographing numerous productions across Europe. While in London, Noel and his partner set up what became one of the top galleries in London, L’Odeon. Noel didn’t return to Australian until 1990. He set up a performing arts course and continued his work as a director. Little Black Bastard, Noel Tovel’s autobiography, was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. The one man play based on the book was also well received in Australia, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010 and the London Origins Festival in 2011. Noel Tovey has served on the NSW Arts Council, the 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and the AIDS Trust of Australia, amongst others. He set up the Novel Tovey Scholarship Fund to assist those from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, a leading youth arts company. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles On the Missed Crimean Connection between Leo Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale Literary Hub (Tolstoy) 2024 In this Literary Hub article, Melissa Pritchard https://lithub.com/on-the-missed-crimean-connection-between-leo-tolstoy-and-florence-nightingale/ explores the life of Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) along with that of English founder of nursing, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910). According to Pritchard, both Tolstoy and Nightingale were in the Crimea at the same time during 1854. Pritchard writes: “By the time they return home, Tolstoy to his inherited estate…in 1855, and Nightingale to her father’s summer estate…in 1856, each will be on the threshold of incredible fame.” The two “undisputed giants of the nineteenth century” never met each other. External Website

Performing Arts Australian Rock Singer Diana Anaid Australian singer, Diana Anaid (b. 1976), was in orphanages and foster care as a child. Diana Anaid is the performance name of Diana Gosper. Diana's mother died when she was one, and from then she lived a wandering gypsy life with her father, as well as in children's homes and foster. Diana finally settled down in Northern NSW when she was 15, taught herself to play guitar, and has made a living out of singing. External Website

Sport Jamie Baulch Jamie Baulch b.1973 James Stephen Baulch (b.1973) is a retired Welsh sprint athlete and television presenter. He won the 400 metres gold medal at the 1999 World Indoor Championships. As a member of British 4 × 400 metres relay teams, he won a gold medal at the 1997 World Championships, and silver medal at the 1996 Olympic Games. He represented Wales at the Commonwealth Games where he won an individual silver and a bronze medal in the 4 × 400 m relay. Baulch was born in Nottingham, but raised by adoptive parents in Risca, near Newport, Wales. Baulch is mixed race, his biological parents being a white English mother and a black Jamaican father. In 2014 Baulch made a TV documentary for the BBC, Being Jamie Baulch: Looking for My Birth Mum, where he tracked down and was reunited with his birth mother. He then made a follow-up documentary for the BBC, Being Jamie Baulch: The Search for My Birth Dad, in 2016. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Woman in Black (novel) Susan Hill 1983 The Woman in Black (1983) is a gothic horror novel by English writer, Susan Hill (b. 1942). The story is narrated by lawyer Arthur Kipps. When he was a junior solicitor, Arthur Kipps was sent to attend the funeral of Alice Drablow and settle her estate. The estate includes the desolate Eel Marsh House at Crythin Gifford, a small town on the northeast coast of England. While staying at Eel Marsh House, Kipps experiences strange noises – including the screams of a child – and sees the ghostly figure of The Woman in Black. Eventually, Arthur Kipps learns that Alice Drablow and her husband had adopted the son of her sister, an unmarried woman, Jennet Humfrye. The boy died young in an accident and the bereaved Jennet returned to haunt Eel Marsh House as the Woman in Black According to the locals, seeing the Woman in Black signalled the imminent death of a child. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Evidence of V Sheila O'Connor 2019 A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions. American novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. As V struggles to survive within a system only nominally committed to rescue and reform, she endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Bridgeburn Days Lucy Sinclair 1956 The Bridgeburn Days by Lucy Sinclair is a memoir of her childhood and adolescence spent in a children’s home in the North of England during the 1920s and 1930s. The story follows Kitty Barrowell, whose deep sense of being different shapes her experiences—from life in Cottage Number Six, where her sensitivity, stubbornness, and strong sense of justice set her apart from the other girls, to the village school, and later, as she enters adult life and takes up work “in service.” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Other Princess: A Novel of Queen Victoria's Goddaughter Denny S Bryce 2024 Based on the true story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African princess who was raised in Queen Victoria's court after being rescued from enslavement/sacrifice by Captain Forbes at Dahomey. At the age of seven she was presented to the Queen as a "gift." Seen as an exotic trophy, Sarah used her intelligence, linguistic talents, and musical abilities to navigate life in Victorian England. Despite her privileged upbringing, Sarah was haunted by her traumatic past and sought a sense of belonging and safety. Her journey takes her from West Africa to England and back, as she battles racism and oppression while searching for home, family, love, and her identity as a Yoruba princess. Based on the real-life story of Queen Victoria's Black goddaughter, it is a saga of resilience and survival in two vastly different worlds. External Website

Actors Jamie Foxx Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), known professionally as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, comedian, television presenter, and record producer. And adoptee, Foxx became widely known for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the 2004 biographical film Ray, for which he won the Academy Award, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. That same year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the crime film Collateral. Since spring 2017, Foxx has served as the host and executive producer of the Fox game show Beat Shazam. Foxx was given his own television sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show, in which he starred, co-created and produced, airing for five highly rated seasons from 1996 to 2001 on The WB Television Network. Foxx is also a Grammy Award-winning musician. External Website

Films/Videos Foster Care Films - Community Engagement Project 2018 A series of documentary films, currently in production, these films gives a voice to youth in the system. An opportunity for foster youth to share their voice thru storytelling, writing and art An outlet for foster youth to work behind the scenes on a film A social media campaign focused on reframing the discussion about foster care A community engagement project, which connects current/former foster youth to those who have an opportunity to make a difference within the system. External Website

Films/Videos Mr Church 2016 Care Experienced actor, Eddy Murphy (who was in foster care for about 18 months at about age 4 while his mother was sick) stars in the 2016 film, Mr Church. Mr Church is a cook who cares for a single mother who has breast cancer, and her daughter Charlie. There are 2 Care Experienced characters in the film: Poppy who is Charlies best friend is in kinship care with her sister while her parents are in prison, and Eddie Larson who was in juvenile detention after a car accident in which a 4-year-old child was killed. External Website

Behind the Scenes Michael Bay Michael Bay is an American film producer and director. He was born in 1965 in Los Angeles. He was raised by his adoptive parents Harriet, a bookstore owner/child psychiatrist, and Jim, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Michael Bay is well known for making big budget films such as Armageddon (1998) and the Transformers series from 2007. 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

Radio & Podcast My ancestors were both slaves and slave owners Malik Al Nasir 2020 My ancestors were both slaves and slave owners.' "Malik Al Nasir was casually watching a TV documentary when a face jumped out at him – it was a photograph of the black Victorian football star Andrew Watson. He was stunned at the close resemblance between them and he was determined to find out how they were connected. Little did he know that that journey would lead him from Liverpool to Guyana to discover how his family history was inextricably connected with the international slave trade." External Website

Writers Elizabeth Bowen 1899-1973 Elizabeth Bowen, CBE (1899 – 1973) was a British and Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, notable for her fiction about life in wartime London. Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born in Dublin into the Anglo-Irish gentry. Her father, Henry Charles Cole Bowen, was a lawyer who had a breakdown when Elizabeth was six, and her mother, Florence Isabella Pomeroy, died of cancer five years later. From then Elizabeth’s life was organised by her aunts. Elizabeth began writing short stories when she was 20 and her first collection, Encounters, was published in 1923. She went on to write 10 novels in addition to nearly 80 short stories and was well known in her time. In recognition of her contribution to literature, Elizabeth Bowen received honorary Doctorates from Trinity College, Dublin (1949) and the University of Oxford (1956). She was also a judge for the 1972 Man Booker Prize (which went to John Berger). External Website

Television Shows BBC Two - Neil Morrissey: Care Home Kid, Episode 1 2011 Neil Morrissey looks back at his childhood at Penkhull Children's Homes, Stoke-on-Trent. External Website