Fiction featuring Care Experience I Couldn't Love You More Esther Freud 2021 Esther Freud (b. 1963) is the daughter of artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis. She is also a British novelist. Freud’s most recent novel, I Couldn’t Love You Move (2021), was prompted by her mother’s experience of being 18, pregnant and terrified of being sent to a Mother and Baby Home—what she calls a “workhouse for morally defective women” (368). She, therefore, kept her pregnancy a secret. I Couldn’t Love You Move (2021) tells the story of what might have happened if her mother hadn’t kept her secret. It is about 3 women: a grandmother who doesn’t know that her eldest daughter has given birth to a girl in a Mother and Baby Home; the mother who was in that home and forced to give up her daughter; and the daughter who is looking for her birth mother. External Website

Television Shows Neigbours 2020 The long-running Australian soap opera, Neighbours (1985), includes a foster care story in recent years. When the Neighbours team decided to include a new storyline around foster care and adoption, they consulted with Dr Stacy Blyth of Western Sydney University. The new storyline developed into a new character, 13-year-old Emmett Donaldson (Ezra Justin) who goes into foster care with same-sex couple David (Takaya Honda) and Aaron (Matt Wilson). External Website

Authors T Taking Hold of Our Heritage (film) ➝ The Reality of Foster Care ➝ The Thirteenth Year ➝ The Real Mo Farah ➝ The Beautiful Game ➝ The Silencing ➝ The Changeling (crime drama) ➝ The Unloved ➝ The Life Ahead ➝ The Marvellous Martha ➝ The Cider House Rules (1999) ➝ The Secret Garden ➝ The Rise of Skywalker ➝ The Importance of Being Earnest ➝ The Christmas Note ➝ 12 Mighty Orphans ➝ The Postcard Killings ➝ The Pale Blue Eye (film) ➝ The Changeling (1980) ➝ The Talented Mr Ripley (Film) ➝ Cousins ➝ The Last Jedi ➝ The Missing Children ➝ The Inheritance (film) ➝ The Protege ➝ Thirteen ➝ The Proposal ➝ The Boxcar Children (film) ➝ The Last Black Man in San Francisco ➝ The Wonder ➝ The Strays ➝ The Woman in the Window (film) ➝ The Kid (1921) ➝ The Family ➝ The Quiet Girl ➝ The Power of One ➝ The Department ➝ The Thirteenth Tale ➝ The Grinch ➝ The Unforgivable ➝ The Witches ➝ The Magdalene Sisters ➝ The Forgotten Maggies ➝ The Book Thief (film) ➝ Three Identical Strangers ➝ The Windermere Children ➝ The Butcher Boy (film) ➝ The Woman in Black (film) ➝ The Limehouse Golem ➝ The Song of Names ➝ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ➝ The Children's Train ➝ The Buckingham Murders ➝ The Accidental Twins ➝ The Tearsmith (Film) ➝ Terminator 2: Judgement Day ➝ The Girl in the Spider's Web (film) ➝ The One Percent - We have dreams and aspirations ➝ The Hurricane ➝ The BFG (film) ➝ The Chaperone (2018) ➝ The Last Tree ➝ The Blind Side ➝ The Sea Beast ➝ The Goldfinch (2019) ➝ The Harder They Fall ➝ The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes ➝ The Last Daughter ➝ The Mission ➝ The Personal History of David Copperfield ➝ The Christmas Bunny ➝ Take Care of Maya ➝ The Illustrated Mum (TV movie) ➝ The Sleeper ➝ The Umbrella Academy ➝ Two Heads Creek ➝ The Batman ➝ The Secret of Roan Inish ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Clean Sweep 2023 Clean Sweep (2023) is an Irish thriller featuring a character who was in foster care. Based on a true story, detective Jason Mohan (Barry Ward) is investigating a murder, not suspecting his wife may be involved. Instead, it appears that Shelly Mohan (Charlene McKenna) has nothing more to worry about than caring for her 3 children and being involved with the local school fundraisers. Shelly, however, has a complicated past she’s not confided in anyone, including Jason. Her family know that she was in foster care, but they don’t know about the criminal former boyfriend who has recently showed up and wants to renew their relationship. External Website

Writers Somerset Maugham 1874-1965 William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was born at the British embassy in Paris where his father, Robert Ormond Maugham, worked as a lawyer. William became an orphan when he was ten years old. First, his mother, Edith Mary, died of tuberculosis in 1882 and then his father died two years later of cancer. Young William was then sent to live in England with his paternal Uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham (1828-1897), and his Aunt Sophia, an unhappy experience for him. As soon as he could, William left home. He was six when he went to Germany to study literature at Heidelberg University. On his return to London, he tried out accountancy and then medicine. During his training to become a medical doctor, Maugham published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897). Maughan went on to become among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Bodies of Light Jennifer Down 2021 This is the story of a woman who begins her life as Maggie Sullivan in the state care system of Victoria, South Australia and, when the story concludes she is middle aged Holly living in the United States. Between Maggie and Holly She is Josephine/Jo/Josie who has fled Australia and taken up residence in New Zealand - until she meets a good American man and follows him to the States. External Website

Films/Videos Israel: The Yemenite Children Affair 2024 Israel: The Yemenite Children Affair (2024) is an Al Jazeera World Documentary exploring the disappearance of many mainly Yemenite Jewish babies and toddlers who were immigrants to the newly founded state of Israel from 1948 to 1954. According to estimates, most migrants to Israel at this time came from Yemen and over the years many have alleged their children were stolen from them and given to Ashkenazi Jews, or Jews whose ancestors were European. Some may have been taken to the USA for adoption. The documentary asks the question: Did the babies who were separated from their parents while in transit camps succumb to deadly diseases, or were they given up for adoption? According to Al Jazeera, “Israel has finally acknowledged the state’s role in the Yemenite Children Affair and launched a redress scheme, but many questions remain unanswered.” External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Transmedia Harry Potter: Essays on Storytelling Across Platforms Christopher E Bell 2019 Transmediation-the telling of a single story across multiple media platforms-is a relatively new phenomenon. While there has been adaptation-books to films, for example-for more than a century, modern technology and media consumption have has expanded the scope of transmediating practices. Nowhere are these more evident than within the Harry Potter universe, where a coherent world and narrative are iterated across, books, films, video games, fan fiction, art, music and more. Curated by a leading Harry Potter scholar, this collection of new essays explores the range of Potter texts across a variety of media. External Website

Television Shows Lace 1984 "Which one of you bitches is my mother?" has passed into legend as one of the most memorable quotes in television history. Lace (1984) is an American television series based on the novel by British writer Shirley Conran (b. 1932). Film star Lili (Phoebes Cates) was put up for adoption as a newborn. The story begins around 1980 when Lili travels to an abandoned chateau in the Swiss Alps. The chateau was once a prestigious boarding school and Lili is there to meet with a person who has been paying money to a family which, back in 1960, who agreed to take on the child of a student who was born ‘out of wedlock’. The story flashes back to 1960, introducing the schoolgirls Pagan Trelawney, Judy Hale, and Maxine Pascal as each becomes entangled with a man Lili, with the help of a private investigator, eventually finds the woman who gave birth to her. External Website

Films/Videos Urban Hymn 2015 Set against the backdrop of the 2011 England riots, the film follows a neglected and volatile female offender, Jamie, who possesses an amazing singing voice and is torn between her loyalties toward her inspiring, unconventional care worker, Kate, and her possessive and volatile best friend, Leanne. 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

Radio & Podcast The men who survived Kinchela Boys Home 7am Podcast 2025 Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home was the ‘home’ for many Aboriginal boys who were separated from their families under the auspices of the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. From 1924 the Kinchela Home was known as a harsh & cruel environment for Aboriginal boys, a placed where they were expected to learn how to assimilate into the mainstream white society. It closed in 1970. In this podcast & a 100 years after Kinchela opened https://7ampodcast.com.au/episodes/the-men-who-survived-kinchela-boys-home survivors & their families return to talk about their experiences & about wanting to take ownership of the site. External Website

Films/Videos Just Us (TV Film) 1986 Just Us is a 1986 television film, based on a true story and the autobiography by Gabrielle Carey.. The film tells the story of a relationship between a journalist and a prisoner who has been in and out of institutions from the age of 8. Terry Haley was the prison inmate at Parramatta Goal but his name was changed for the film, as was Gabrielle Carey's. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mathilda Mary Shelley 1959 Mathilda (1959) is the second long piece of fiction written by English writer Mary Shelley (1797-1851). It was written between 1819 & 1820 and published posthumously. In Mathilda, Shelley deals with the topics of incest – a father’s incestuous love of his daughter which some consider autobiographical - and suicide. The narrator is a young woman in her 20s, Mathilde who writes her story, which includes the confession of her father’s incestuous love for her. The father subsequently drowns himself. Mathilde had grown up with an aunt. Her mother died shortly after her birth and her father left a month later. Mathilde didn’t see her father again until she was 16. External Website

Writers Ruth Westheimer 1928-2024 Karola Ruth Westheimer (b.1928), better known as Dr. Ruth, is a German-American sex therapist, media personality, author, radio, television talk show host, sniper, and Holocaust survivor. Ruth Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegal in Wiesenfeld, Germany. She was the only child of Irma and Julius Siegel, Orthodox Jews. At the end of 1938 (some sources say early 1939), ten-year-old Ruth was sent from Frankfurt to an orphanage in Switzerland for her protection, after her father was arrested by the Nazis. After the war, 17-year-old Ruth was sent to Palestine via Marseille, because her parents were not amongst the survivors of the Holocaust. There she joined a kibbutz and the Jewish resistance. During the 1950s, Ruth made her way to New York via France where she had gone to university to study psychology. She stayed on in America, becoming a citizen in 1965. Her media career began in 1980 with the radio show Sexually Speaking, which continued until 1990. She has hosted several series on the Lifetime Channel and other cable television networks from 1984 to 1993 and is the author of 45 books on sex and sexuality. External Website

Authors I Innocence and 'child rescue' in the colonial imagination ➝ Dickens vs Tolstoy ➝ Innocence and "child rescue" in the colonial imagination ➝ The IMO Podcast: open and honest conversations with care leavers ➝ Fielding's Tom Jones ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro 2013 Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances. Moving between inter-war London and Shanghai, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return. External Website

Authors V Baby stolen during Argentina's military rule found after 48 years ➝ Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: ➝ Back to Top

Authors T The Jungle Book ➝ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ➝ The Unadoptables: Five fantastic children on the adventure of a lifetime ➝ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Fragile Sarah Hilary 2021 Fragile (2021) by Sarah Hilary features characters from a children's home. Nell Ballard is now homeless, running from her past and carrying a secret she longs to set down. In Starling Villas, she becomes servant to an eccentric recluse. Robin Wilder lives by an exacting set of rules, expecting the same from Nell, who fears his retribution should she let standards slip. Just as she begins to find her balance in the house, Robin’s former wife sweeps in. Carolyn Wilder has no intention of allowing Nell to become comfortable in her new home. But who is underestimating whom? And who truly holds the power in Starling Villas? As events overtake the household, old wounds reopen and the past rushes in to exact its own terrible price. Fragile is a modern Gothic psychological thriller with a contemporary twist on the classic novel Rebecca External Website