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Non Fiction Abandon All Hope Bonney Djuric 2011 Abandon All Hope (2011) by Bonney Djuric is a history of the Parramatta Girls Industrial School The book explores the history of the Parramatta Girls Industrial School as the nation’s first (Catholic) orphanage in 1841 during the colonial period to its closure in 1983 by which time it was an institution run by NSW child welfare agency. Abandon All Hope includes testimony from former inmates of Parramatta Girls Home and tells the story of feminist Bessie Guthrie’s attempt to expose the institution for the horrors visited on girls there. External Website

Authors Z The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (Paperback) ➝ The Book Thief (novel) ➝ Bridge of Clay ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos West by Orphan Train 2014 West by Orphan Train (2014) is a documentary produced by Colleen Krantz & Clark Kidder. The documentary uses archival material, re-enactments, expert interviews, and 1st-hand accounts from Orphan Train riders to explore the origins of the movement as well as the experiences of children forced to ride the train. One of the Orphan Trider riders was Stanley Cornell who speaks of his experience (and that of his brother’s) living in an orphanage, being compelled to ride the Orphan Train, and of living in 6 different homes before stability with a family in Texas. External Website

Authors S Samuel Robin Spark ➝ Back to Top

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp Glue (Perormance) Louise Wallwein 2017 Louise Wallwein grew up in the care of nuns from the age of 9. GLUE is a performance. The frank and gripping true story of her meeting her birth mother, three decades after being put up for adoption. The world as she knew it is was turned upside down, and this is how she learnt to fight back External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Shadow in the Empire of Light Jane Routley 2021 Shine's life is usually dull: an orphan without magic in a family of powerful mages, she's left to run the family estate with only an eccentric aunt and telepathic cat for company. But when the family descend on the house for the annual Fertility Festival, Shine is plunged into dark intrigue; stolen letters, a fugitive spy, and family drama mix with murder, sex and secrets, and Shine is forced to decide both her loyalties and future... External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Lost Child Caryl Phillips 2015 The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys. The Lost Child is bookended by two scenes that feature the seven-year-old Heathcliff. Left purposefully mysterious by Emily Brontë, his origins are here fleshed out by Phillips, who makes him the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by an African former slave. In the early scene, the boy’s mother is dying of disease in Liverpool; the novel ends with her son being led over the moors by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights. External Website

Films/Videos Alex Cross (film series) 1997 3 of James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels have been adapted for the screen. Kiss the Girls (1997) stars Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross and is based on Patterson’s 1995 novel of the same name. Along Came a Spider (2001) also has Morgan Freeman starring as Alex Cross in an adaptation of the 1993 eponymous novel. Alex Cross (2012) is based on the 2006 novel Cross and stars Tyler Perry as Alex Cross. External Website

Authors S Sylvester Stallone ➝ Brian Syron ➝ Barbara Stanwyck ➝ Lesley Sharp ➝ Angela Shelton (Actor) ➝ Liz Smith ➝ Gianna Simone ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Winter Solstice Rosamund Pilcher 2000 A loosely connected group end up spending advent together in a house in Scotland. One of them Lucy is an unhappy teenager. By the end of the novel it has been agreed that she will live with her new found family for the next few months, but it is implied that she will actually stay there until she is an adult. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Dickens Boy Thomas Keneally 2020 Thomas Keneally’s book, The Dickens Boy, is a fictionalised account of Edward Dickens (1852-1902), Charles Dickens’ youngest child. At 16 Edward was sent off by his father to Australia, to “apply himself”. When Edward, or Plorn as he was nicknamed by his father, arrives in Australia he has help from George Rusden, then clerk of the Victorian Parliament—who had earlier helped out Alfred Dickens (1845-1912) on his arrival in Australia—to get a position as a stockman with the Bonney brothers at Momba Station, NSW. Edward then narrates his story of the first 2 years in Australia, riding long distances to see his brother, organising local cricket matches, mustering sheep, learning about Aboriginal culture. Kenneally presents Plorn as a delightful young man; he’s resourceful, principled, and kind. Being so far from his parents, Edward feels orphaned. But he's not and his older brother, Alfred, has been in Australia for a couple of years. There are, however, 2 orphan characters who become friends with Edward: Tom Larkin and Maurice McArden. Tom Larkin’s convict mother died in childbirth and his father, also a convict, died only a few years later. Maurice McArden’s parents are artists who often leave their son with an uncle, Eustace Fremmel, while they’re off on jaunts through Europe. When the artists die, 13 year old Maurice stays on with Eustace, but is sent off to NSW at the age of 15 to live with another uncle, Amos Fremmel. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Voices from the Silent Cradles - Life Histories of Romania’s Looked-After Children Mariela Neagu 2021 Voices from the Silent Cradles - Life Histories of Romania’s Looked-After Children. This book explores the concept of care and the responsibility assumed by ‘states’ when taking children into care. It examines the limitations of the state in exercising its parental duty and it proposes a model for re-conceptualising children’s social care by drawing on the literature on autonomy, recognition theory and specific provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The model places the child’s dignity at the core of the care framework, and it argues that a children’s rights approach which is grounded in moral theories contributes to their self-esteem and au- tonomy, both of which are key for a person’s development and well-being. The model addresses the tension between children’s rights and child welfare and it can be applied to child protection services that aim to take a children’s rights approach. External Website

Children's Fiction The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett 1974 At the turn of the 20th century, Mary Lennox is a neglected and unloved 10-year-old girl, born in British India to wealthy British parents who never wanted her and made an effort to ignore the girl. She is cared for primarily by native servants, who allow her to become spoiled, demanding, and self-centered. After a cholera epidemic kills Mary's parents, the few surviving servants flee the house without Mary. Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors, to live with her uncle. There she discovers her sickly cousin Colin, who is equally obnoxious and imperious. Both love no one because they have never been loved. Mary finds a secret garden and with Colin and the help of the gardener they bring it back to its former glory. External Website

Films/Videos Paper Lives 2021 Paper Lives (2021) is a Turkish drama film starring Çağatay Ulusoy Mehmet (Çağatay Ulusoy) is a garbage collector who runs a recycling centre in an impoverished area of Istanbul. He is unwell with a kidney condition. Mehmet is a friendly character, keeping an eye out for the many homeless children in the area, having once been homeless himself. When Mehmet discovers an 8-year-old boy hiding a garbage bin, he takes the child in. Mehmet adores Ali and cares for him while also trying to reconnect him to his family. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp Finding Neverland James Graham 2012 Music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy and a book by James Graham adapted from the 1998 play The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee. A musical exploring the relationship between playwright JM Barrie (1860-1937) and the Davies family who inspired Barrie to create Peter Pan. Barrie was a guardian of the Davies boys after their mother died. External Website

Non Fiction Connecting with Young People in Trouble: Risk, Relationships and Lived Experience Andi Brierley 2021 In this book, Andi Brierley - who has lived experience of both the care and juvenile justice systems, critiques the UK youth justice system, arguing that the way things are done now often causes more harm than good. Instead, he says, his PACT (presence, attunement, connect & trust) approach is far more effective. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Thief's Journal M Jean Genet 2019 Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, was abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. He grew up in foster care with a working class family and began stealing at the age of ten. At 15 he was sent to the notorious reform school, Metrray. Genet was in and out of prison nine times. It was in prison that he began writing and he turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947. The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such degradations into an inverted moral code, where criminality and delinquency become heroic. External Website

Writers Dorothy Wordsworth 1771-1855 Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (1771 – 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings. Dorothy was sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax. According to Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, as she laying dying, Ann had begged her 33 year old cousin to take in Dorothy. Dorothy was happy in her new home and became part of a large extended family. Elizabeth Threlkeld was already caring for her older sister’s 5 children and she took over her brother-in-law’s haberdasher’s business when he died. Across the road was little Jane Pollard, the same age as Dorothy, and the two girls became lifelong friends. Dorothy was sent to boarding school just out of Halifax at the age of nine. She was only there for 3 years. Her father died intestate with only a small personal estate at the end of 1783 and to save money, the children’s guardians—paternal uncle Richard Wordsworth and maternal uncle Christopher Cookson—withdrew Dorothy from the school. Dorothy’s uncle William Cookson took the girl under his wing while home from Cambridge and continued with her education. In 1788 when William married another Dorothy, Dorothy Cowper, she moved in with the couple at the Forncett St Peter rectory, a parish in Norfolk. Dorothy lived happily with her uncle and his wife for 6 years. She helped in the household and with the children, but also began imagining how she would set up house with her brothers, especially William. It wasn’t until 1795, by which time Dorothy was in her early 20s, before she and William began living together, first at Racedown Lodge in Dorset and later in Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the Lake District from 1799 to 1808. External Website

Writers Phil Frampton Phil Frampton (b. 1953) Phil has written for a variety of newspapers and journals (including The Guardian and the Daily Mail) and he is the author of several books including travel guides, a history of the Poll Tax Revolt, a memoir (The Golly in the Cupboard 2004) and in 2022 he published Youth and the Mystery Wall, a book calling for attention to be paid to the ageism used against young people, a form of discrimination which detracts from the potential of teenagers. External Website

Writers Doris Kartinyeri Aboriginal Australian writer, Ngarrinderi woman Doris Kartinyeri (1945-2020), was only 28 days old when she was taken by the Aboriginal Protection Board to live in Colebrook Home, a South Australian institution run by the United Aborigines Mission from 1924 to 1981. Doris remembered many happy times playing with the other children—friendships she honoured in her children’s book, Bush Games and Knucklesbones (2003)—but under new ‘management’ later on, she resented the increased emphasis on religious observance. She was also sexually abused. Doris Kartinyeri writes about her time in Colebrook, about the work placements that followed when she was 14 and about the impact of being removed from her family in her memoir, Kick the Tin (2000) and in her later work, Bipolar Express (2017). External Website