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Television Shows Killing Eve 2021 Killing Eve is a British black comedy-drama spy thriller television series, produced in the United Kingdom by Sid Gentle Films for BBC America and BBC iPlayer. The series follows Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a British intelligence investigator tasked with capturing psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Villanelle had been left in an orphanage as a child. She had a violent reputation who once developed an obsession-turned relationship with an older, nurturing, French instructor— and who castrated the instructor's husband because of Villanelle's jealous infatuation with her. She worked for an organization called The Twelve. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Cuckoo in the Nest Fran Hill 2023 Cuckoo in the Nest follows 14-year-old Jackie Chadwick, a sharp-witted, poetry-loving teenager forced into foster care after her abusive, alcoholic father’s violence lands her in A&E, as she navigates life with a new family full of secrets during the sweltering summer of 1976. External Website

Television Shows The Good Witch's Wonder 2020 The Good Witch's Wonder is a 2014 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. Also starring Chris Potter, Hannah Endicott-Douglas, Matthew Knight, Peter MacNeill, Rachel Wilson and Paul Popowich. Wonder, is the seventh film in The Good Witch film series. Cassie Nightingale (Catherine Bell) anticipating big changes as she hands over the town's mayoral reins to her friend Martha Tinsdale (Catherine Disher) and prepares for her stepson's wedding to his fiancée, Tara (Ashley Leggat). External Website

Television Shows Superman & Lois 2021 Based on the DC Comics characters, Superman and Lois Lane, this series is set in Superman's home town of Smallville where Clark Kent/Superman and Lois are raising their sons. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Small Quiet Dark Miranda Gold 2018 Born in a concentration camp and adopted at two, his own history was replaced when his adoptive mother gave him the name of her stillborn child, Arthur binding him to a grief that was never his to bear. External Website

Films/Videos Night Cries 1990 Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989) is a short experimental film by the esteemed Aboriginal Australian artist, Tracey Moffatt. In the film, an Aboriginal daughter (Marcia Langton) is caring for her dying white mother (Agnes Hardwick). The film was written and directed by Tracey Moffatt and shot entirely in a studio. It was promoted as a possible sequel to Jedda (1955) which was written, produced and directed by Charles Chauvel and which tells the story of an Aboriginal child taken in by a white woman and separated from her own people and culture. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, And Contested Citizenship in London Lydia Murdoch 2006 With his dirty, tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, Oliver Twist is the enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of orphanages and haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life Oliver Twists—either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents—they in fact frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their families. In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children.With a critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to reconsider the complex situations of families living in poverty. While reformers’ motivations seem well intentioned, she shows how their methods solidified the public’s antipoor sentiment and justified a minimalist welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers’ efforts to protect and care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Likes of Us G. V. Holmes, 1948 G. V. Holmes’—or Girls’ Village Homes—was the pseudonym of the author of The Likes of Us, which was published in 1948. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Cradles of the Reich Jennifer Coburn 2022 Cradles of the Reich (2022) by American writer Jennifer Coburn is historical fiction focusing on the Nazi Lebensborn Program. The novel follows 3 women who meet at one of the Lebensborn maternity homes, Heim Hochland. Gundi is a member of the resistance & is pregnant, as is Hilde. Irma is a nurse working at Heim Hochland. Although fictional, Cradles of the Reich takes up the topic of the Lebensborn Program maternity homes, a topic not much covered in literature. External Website

Comics, Comic books & Graphic Novels Nubia: Real One Written by L.L. McKinney; illustrated by Robyn Smith. 2021 Nubia: Real One (2021) Written by L.L. McKinney and illustrated by Robyn Smith. Young Adult Graphic Novel. Nubia has always been a little bit different. As a baby she showcased Amazonian-like strength by pushing over a tree to rescue her neighbour's cat. But despite her having similar abilities, the world has no problem telling her that she's no Wonder Woman but in fact she is, Wonder Woman's twin sister. And even if she were, they wouldn't want her. Every time she comes to the rescue, she's reminded of how people see her: as a threat. Her moms do their best to keep her safe, but Nubia can't deny the fire within her, even if she's a little awkward about it sometimes. Even if it means people assume the worst. When Nubia s best friend, Quisha, is threatened by a boy who thinks he owns the town, Nubia will risk it all her safety, her home, and her crush on that cute kid in English class to become the hero society tells her she isn't. From the witty and powerful voice behind A Blade So Black, and with endearing and expressive art by Robyn Smith, comes a vital story for today about equality, identity, and kicking it with your squad. External Website

Films/Videos Rocks 2021 Rocks is a British coming-of-age drama film, directed by Sarah Gavron and released in 2019. The film stars Bukky Bakray as Olushola, nicknamed "Rocks", a Black British teenage girl in London whose troubled single mother abandons her and her younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), forcing them to fend for themselves and try to avoid being taken into care by the authorities, with the help of loyal friend Sumaya (Kosar Ali) and others. External Website

Films/Videos The Goldfinch (2019) 2019 An adaptation of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning book by Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch explores the life of Theodore Decker after his mother dies in a terrorist bombing. Theodore goes first into foster care, then lives with his alcohic and exploitative father before returning to foster care. There is another CEP character in the film, too, a friend of Theodore's, Pippa, who is in both foster and kinship care. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Peter Norris grew up on the run with his bank-robber dad. He refuses to be defined by his past ABC News (Australia) 2025 In this ABC News article, Peter Norris tells the story of his difficult childhood. Even as Clarence “Clarry” Norris (who had “spent a lot of his childhood in boys’ homes”) turned to armed robberies to fix his money problems, he was “a really loving, protective and supportive dad” who “tried to ensure that we didn’t end up like him.” Young Peter was first in foster care when he was 18 months old and his father in jail. Later, he lived with his father from the age of 6. When they found a “bundles of cash…and two pistols” in a bag Peter and his sisters “started to realise that Dad probably wasn’t just a cleaner.” When he ran out of money, Clarry put the children in a home run by the Australian Red Cross for 2 weeks at a time. At 10, Peter (& his siblings) were made wards of the State. Eventually he was taken in by a loving foster family and chose to say there even after his father had escaped prison. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body Cheryl L Nixon 2016 Cheryl Nixon's book is the first to connect the eighteenth-century fictional orphan and factual orphan, emphasizing the legal concepts of estate, blood, and body. Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case records, Nixon reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans. The orphan's uncertain economic, familial, and bodily status creates opportunities to "plot" his or her future according to new ideologies of the social individual. Nixon demonstrates that the orphan encourages both fact and fiction to re-imagine structures of estate (property and inheritance), blood (familial origins and marriage), and body (gender and class mobility). Whereas studies of the orphan typically emphasize the poor urban foundling, Nixon focuses on the orphaned heir or heiress and his or her need to be situated in a domestic space. Arguing that the eighteenth century constructs the "valued" orphan, Nixon shows how the wealthy orphan became associated with new understandings of the individual. New archival research encompassing print and manuscript records from Parliament, Chancery, Exchequer, and King's Bench demonstrate the law's interest in the propertied orphan. The novel uses this figure to question the formulaic structures of narrative sub-genres such as the picaresque and romance and ultimately encourage the hybridization of such plots. As Nixon traces the orphan's contribution to the developing novel and developing ideology of the individual, she shows how the orphan creates factual and fictional understandings of class, family, and gender. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Sanctuary Garry Disher 2024 Garry Disher (b. 1949) is an influential Australian crime writer who has won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel 3 times. His most recent novel Sanctuary (2024) includes 2 Care Experienced Characters. Grace – who was in an orphanage & foster care - is a hypervigilant, highly skilled thief. She is longing to leave her criminal lifestyle for a settled, ‘regular’ one, but is thwarted. At least Grace has the good grace to save the life of a police officer, to dob in a paeodophile, and to warn the victim of a stalker what her former partner was up to. Adam Garrett was in foster care with Grace. Let down by Grace, he’s now on the hunt for her while doing his PI day job for a dodgy operator. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp A Fortunate Life (Theatre adaptation) A.B. Facey 2019 In 2020, a striking collaboration between artists of stage and screen honours the trials and triumphs of extraordinary everyman A.B Facey, whose award-winning Australian classic autobiography, A Fortunate Life, has been adapted for theatrical presentation. Albert Barnett Facey born in Maidstone, Victoria, Australia, in 1894, the youngest of seven children. His father died when he was two of typhoid fever. When Bert was four, his Grandpa died. Bert's mother then left the rest of her children to be looked after by their grandmother to go to the Goldfields, but met and married another man and had nothing further to do with Bert's upbringing. Facey had been making notes on his life since an early age, at the urging of his wife, he eventually wrote them up into a full manuscript, by hand, in a series of exercise books, working at the kitchen table. He then had the manuscript typed up and sent it to Fremantle Arts Centre Press, requesting that twenty copies be printed and bound for family members and friends. Facey's story was so remarkable, however, that it was immediately accepted for commercial publication. It appeared just nine months before his death on 11 February 1982, in his 88th year. External Website

Television Shows The English 2022 The English (2022) is a revisionist Western, a television series set in 1890 and starring Emily Blunt as Lady Cornelia Locke and Chaske Spencer as Eli Whipp. Cornelia Locke has come to America seeking revenge on the man she believes is responsible for the death of her 14-year-old son. Along the way, she meets Eli Whipp, an ex-US cavalry man and member of the Pawnee Nation. Locke and Whipp rescue the 2 orphaned children of a Mennonite couple who have been slaughtered, and Locke delivers the children to the larger Mennonite group. Locke and Whipp also take care of another orphaned boy, White Moon. After a while they entrust White Moon to a travelling surgeon who aspires to establishing a Wild West Show. 13 years later and back in England, Cornelia Locke gets to see White Moon again as he now stars in the touring Wild West Show. External Website

Radio & Podcast A Journey through the Disney Animated Classics Daniel Lammin Daniel Lammin in conversation with social historian Frank Golding, who was in foster care and an orphanage as a child. They talk about Disney’s swashbuckling adventure 'Peter Pan', discuss the real experiences of children removed from their families, the complex roles of mothers and fathers in a child’s life, and the reality of never wanting to grow up. External Website

Writers Charles Willeford 1919-1988 Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 – March 27, 1988) was an American writer. Orphaned at the age of eight, Charles lived with his grandmother in Los Angeles. When his grandmother lost her job during the Great Depression, the thirteen year left home so as not to burden her. Charles joined the army at the age of 16 where he stayed until 1956. He published his first book, a book of poetry, when he was serving in the military. In the years after his military career, Charles Willeford got a university degree, taught creative writing at a Community College, reviewed books for The Miami Herald for 20 years, inspired Quentin Tarantino and wrote books. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. External Website

Actors Lena Horne (actor) Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne was raised mainly by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne Jr. (1893–1970), left the family when she was 3 years old and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron (1894–1976), was the granddaughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron. She was an actress with a black theatre troupe and travelled extensively. Horne's career spanned over 70 years, appearing in film, television, and theatre. She belonged to the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated black people. External Website