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Radio & Podcast Remembering Randall Remembering Randall 2022 Remembering Randall is an important podcast to honour Professor Kerry Carrington's brother Randall Scott Carrington. Randall Carrington was made a ward of the (Qld) state at age 17 and incarcerated in the now notorious Wolston Park Mental Hospital from 1978 to 1979. Rather than be returned to Wolston in 1980, he chose to kill himself. Kerry Carrington is calling for an inquiry into Wolston Park Mental Hospital. Access to records, she says, is prohibited for 100 years, “till no-one is alive to remember the shocking human rights abuses carried out at Wolston Park Mental Hospital." https://rememberingrandall.com/ External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Through the Eyes of a Foster Child: My Childhood in Over 30 New Zealand Homes Daryl Brougham 2016 In 1990, at the age of ten, Daryl Brougham was told by a social worker he was useless and would end up in jail. By 1997, he had attended 27 schools, been through over 30 social workers and lived in more than 30 different foster homes. During his 18 years as a state ward he suffered repeated sexual, physical, emotional and psychological abuse. Rising above all the abuse, Daryl proved that social worker wrong. External Website

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Radio & Podcast Maya Angelou (radio) World Book Club 2014 Maya Angelou reflects on some of her earliest and most difficult memories and talks about her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this special commemorative edition of World Book Club from the archive. External Website

Television Shows Greyzone 2018 Thriller, centring around the kidnap of a drone expert and the planning of a terrorist attached. The Swedish-Syrian terrorist in the series was in kinship care as a child External Website

Sport Andrew Symonds Andrew Symonds 9 June 1975 – 14 May 2022 Andrew Symonds (9 June 1975 – 14 May 2022), also commonly known by the nickname "Roy", was an Australian international cricketer, who played all three formats as a batting all-rounder. He was an important member of two World Cup winning squads. Symonds played as a right-handed, middle order batsman and alternated between medium pace and off-spin bowling. He was also notable for his exceptional fielding skills. He was born in Birmingham, England, in 1975 before moving to Australia as child. Symonds was adopted by English schoolteachers when he was a baby. Symonds was adopted by parents Ken and Barbara at 3 months and they moved to Australia when he was a toddler. He had three siblings. His sister, Louise Symonds, who was also adopted, was a contestant on the Australian Gladiators television series in 2008. One of Symonds' birth parents was of African-Caribbean background and the other was believed to be of Scandinavian descent. Andrew Symonds and his wife Laura remained close despite living apart before he died; they had two children Billy and Chloe. After he left the game in 2009, Symonds pursued his love of the outdoors in the country's tropical north. His love for cricket was matched by his boyhood passions for pig hunting, fishing and camping trips. He played himself in a Bollywood movie, starred on the Indian version of Big Brother, and commentated for Fox Sports in Australia. Symonds died in a single-vehicle car crash about 50 km (31 mi) outside Townsville, Queensland, on 14 May 2022. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Crackers and Milk Arlene Nelson 2006 Sarah Richards, the oldest of five children growing up in the early 20th Century rural Midwest, struggles to hold her family together as she and her three siblings attempt to survive illness, abandonment, abuse, negelct, hunger, institutionalization, and loss. In Crackers and Milk, Arlene Nelson retells her mother's amazing story of an unusually tarnished childhood, as her mother told it to her many years ago. External Website

Radio & Podcast How Walter Scott’s stories shaped Scotland History Extra 2021 Walter Scott (1771-1832), who was in kinship care for about 5 years because of ill health, was one of the most popular early 19th century writers? Where the average print run for a novel was 750 copies (Jane Austen had print runs up to 2000), Scott had print runs up to 4000 copies, with Rob Roy (1817) selling 10,000 copies within a fortnight of it being first published. In this podcast, we hear about how Scott influenced the development of historical fiction, how readers thought of Scotland, and other writers like Charles Dickens & George Elliott. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A pavane for another time Bernard Smith 2002 Following art historian Bernard Smith's award-winning autobiographical account of his earlier life ("The Boy Adeodatus: the portrait of a lucky young bastard", first published in 1984) he now reflects on life in the 1940s. Themes recalling the period before the family departed for England in September 1948 include; courtship and marriage; forebodings of war and attitudes to Communism and Fascism; political involvement in cultural activities with artists and emigre European-trained art historians anxious to promote modern art and knowledge of art history (not taught in universities at that time) and early employment at the Art Gallery of New South Wales pioneering the arrangement of travelling exhibitions for regional centres. Smith's formative training as an art historian and critic is the important and recurring theme of this book. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp Something Dark (Play) Lemn Sissay 2017 Something Dark tells the true story of Lemn Sissay who as a baby was given up by his Ethiopian mother in the 1960s. He was renamed Norman Greenwood and nicknamed Chalky White throughout his turbulent childhood in care, only to find out his real name at the age of 18. No longer the possession of the social services, he left the brutal suburbs of Lancashire for the bright lights of Manchester where he became a celebrated performance poet. Aged 21 Lemn left for Gambia in search of his mother and the truth about his father. Something Dark is now a set text on Edexcel's Contemporary Black British Literature: A Guide. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Book Review: That Reminds Me Barbara Grant 2020 Derek Owusu’s startling debut, That Reminds Me, shows us that love is fragile, and adults are not always the best caretakers. It is a powerful, sometimes haunting fictional memoir, about the failure of love, narrated through the eyes of a young vulnerable black boy called K. K is placed into the care system by his Ghanaian mother. He knows not why. His early childhood years are spent in foster care, in a rural community based outside of London. A place where the colour of his skin sets him apart. Split into five chronological sections, with a narrator who recites K’s life to Anansi, the renowned trickster in Caribbean and West African folklore, they contain fragments of stories, building up a complex picture of a troubled life. Life in care is not the refuge his mum may have hoped. His foster home and school memories are peppered with hidden abuse, neglect and spitefulness as K struggles with his identity in a cruel, loveless foster family. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Daughters of Nazareth Trisha Hughes 2016 For Trisha Gourgaud, life growing up in 1950s Australia was a mix of love for her French father and love tinged with uncertainty for her Irish mother. A blissful time was cut short when one day she was taken by the police to the local children's home, Nazareth House, a home for neglected and abandoned children. This event meant she would never see her mother again and rarely see her father. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Jack Charles: A Born-again Blakfella Jack Charles 2019 Stolen from his mother and placed into institutional care when he was only a few months old, Uncle Jack was raised under the government’s White Australia Policy. The loneliness and isolation he experienced during those years had a devastating impact on him that endured long after he reconnected with his Aboriginal roots and discovered his stolen identity. Even today he feels like an outsider; a loner; a fringe dweller. In this honest and no-holds-barred memoir, Uncle Jack reveals the ‘ups and downs of this crazy, drugged up, locked up, fucked up, and at times unbelievable, life’. External Website

Writers Barbara Sumner (Writer) Babara Sumner was born in New Zealand and adopted when she was 10 days old. She has written for The New Zealand Herald and her first book, This Way of Life - based on her award winning film of the same name - was published in 2012. Sumner published her memoir of being adopted and tracing her family of origin (published by Massey University Press) in 2020. External Website

Radio & Podcast Fielding's Tom Jones In Our Time 2024 In this episode of In Our Time, host Melvyn Bragg and 3 academic guests discuss Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) The History of Tom Jones is a comic, a bildungsroman and a picaresque novel and is among the earliest English works categorised as a novel. It is a highly organized novel in 3 parts. It’s also long, over 800 pp. In summary, Squire Allworthy finds a foundling, an abandoned baby sleeping in his bed. Allworthy organises for the infant to be raised in his household. As a young man, the kind and generous but headstrong Thomas or Tom is banished by Allworth and heads out on adventures, getting into trouble along the way to London. Eventually, Tom marries Sophia, the woman he loves. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00202lf External Website

Television Shows Karen Pirie 2022 Karen Pirie (2022) is a British crime series adapted from the Inspector Karen Pirie novels by Scottish writer Val McDermid. In the 1st series, based on The Distant Echo novel, Detective-Sergeant Karen Pirie is tasked with reviewing a cold case. Rosie Duff was murdered 25 years previously and a podcaster is asking why there’s been no reappraisal since. When she was 15, Rosie Duff relinquished her baby for adoption. That baby, now 27, commits serious crimes in this series. External Website

Films/Videos Surviving the Storm 2019 Surviving the Storm is a personal journey all about survival. In this video Jennie Matthias looks back at her time in the care system and her introduction to showbiz. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Mistress's Daughter AM Homes 2007 In 2007, American writer A. M. Homes published her memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter’, which explored her experience of being adopted, of being “found” by her biological family, and of the histories of both her families. Homes was 31 when she was reunited with her birth parents, having been raised in Maryland by a couple who had recently lost a son because of kidney failure. “To be adopted is to be adapted” she writes. “To be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain function, there will always be scar tissue.” External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Soar Simon Wooley 2022 The Right Honourable, Lord Woolley of Woodford was born in Leicester on 24 December 1961, he was adopted at two years old and was raised by loving white parents Phillis and Dan Fox. He grew up on the St Matthew's estate which he described as, "a working-class council estate but it was a hard-working council estate. You never felt that you were short of anything." Woolley's adoptive parents fostered a number of other children during his childhood. My journey from council estate to the House of Lords. Simon Woolley is a member of the House of Lords, the first Black man to head an Oxbridge college, and a policy changemaker who has the ear of prime ministers and the future King. But this is a Lord who wants to shake up the establishment; an outsider who knows how important it is to bring underrepresented voices to the table. Raised by loving white foster parents on the impoverished St Matthew's Estate in Leicester, young Simon soon learnt about politics while in line at the barber's and about racism as one of the few Black children in the neighbourhood. The desire to make the world better was awakened during a trip to South America, where he saw revolutionary politics first hand, and discovered how activism could change people's lives. Inspired, he co-founded Operation Black Vote in 1996, credited with encouraging thousands of Black men and women to exercise their right to vote over the past 25 years. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Better Off in a Home Bill Smith 1982 In this book, Bill Smith tells about his early life in Melbourne and then in Kildonan, a children's home also in Melbourne. Bill's father took him to the home when he was 6. External Website