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Films/Videos Bring Her Back 2025 Bring Her Back (2025) is a supernatural horror film by South directed by South Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou. Bring Her Back has 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired younger stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) taken into foster care after their father dies. They are told by the child protection worker that Laura (Sally Hawkins) is a brilliant foster mother; she’d worked as a counsellor for the agency for many years. Laura, however, is a demented psycho. Grieving the death of her daughter, Laura is attempting to resurrect Cathy—who’s body she’s keeping in a chest freezer—by using another boy (Oliver played Jonah Wren Phillips) she’s ostensibly fostering but is torturing and who is now, apparently, possessed of a demon. External Website

Films/Videos He Even Has Your Eyes 2016 Sali and Paul and a married French-African call who finally receive a call that a 4 month old baby is available for them to adopt. Because the baby, Benjamin, is a white baby, much drama ensues as Sali's family will not accept a white baby as their grandson, the social worker subjects the couple to more surveillance that she does white couples, and the wider community assume Sali is the child's nanny, not her mother. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Charlie Chaplin (biography) Peter Ackroyd ➝ Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox Lois Banner ➝ Abraham Lincoln: A Life Michael Burlingame ➝ Alexander Hamilton Ron Chernow ➝ The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found: The Costa Book of the Year 2018 Bart van Es ➝ Daddy, we hardly knew you Germaine Greer ➝ Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography Walter Isaacson ➝ A History of Silence Lloyd Jones ➝ The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game Michael Lewis ➝ How to Create the Perfect Wife: The True Story of One Gentleman, Two Orphans an Experiment to Create the Ideal Woman Wendy Moore ➝ Crackers and Milk Arlene Nelson ➝ Charles Perkins: A Biography Peter Read ➝ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat Oliver Sacks ➝ The Altar Boys Suzanne Smith ➝ Charles Dickens: A Life Claire Tomalin ➝ Fortunate Son ~ A 20th Century Romance: Based on the Life & Times of Frederick Hunter Wilkinson 1890-1969 David Scott Wilkinson ➝ Agatha Christie Lucy Worsley ➝ The House of Jaipur: The Inside Story of India's Most Glamorous Royal Family John Zubrzycki ➝ Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time Karen Armstrong ➝ Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Richard Bradford ➝ Belle: The Slave Daughter and The Lord Chief Justice Paula Byrne ➝ Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ➝ Justin Fashanu the Biography Justin Fashanu ➝ One Life: My Mother's Story Kate Grenville ➝ Stanley: Africa's Greatest Explorer Tim Jeal et al. ➝ Norma Jean: My Secret Life With Marilyn Monroe Ted Jordan ➝ The Berlin Shadow Jonathan Lichtenstein ➝ My Place Sally Morgan ➝ Hegel's Owl. The Life of Bernard Smith Sheridan Palmer ➝ Chaplin: His Life & Art David Robinson ➝ Motherless Child: The Definitive Biography of Eric Clapton: Paul Scott ➝ Women of Power: The Life and Times of Catherine de' Medici Mark Strage ➝ You Should Be Grateful (book) Angela Tucker ➝ J. S. Bach: A Life in Music Peter Williams ➝ Jane Austen at Home: A Biography Lucy Worsley ➝ Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother, John Lennon Julia Baird ➝ Scenes From the Life of Harriet Tubman Sarah Hopkins Bradford ➝ Just us Gabrielle Carey ➝ The Life and Work of Muhammad Yahiya Emerick ➝ Delinquent Angel Diana Georgeff ➝ Slipped Through the Net. The story of Melrose Desmond Donley Elly Inta ➝ Eliza Hamilton Dunlop Anna Johnston et al ➝ Bessie Smith: A Poet's Biography of a Blues Legend Jackie Kay ➝ Eleanor David Michaelis ➝ Sheila Pamela Morrison ➝ Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream Jane Plitt ➝ Muhammad Maxime Rodinson ➝ The House on Teacher's Lane Rachel Simon ➝ An Uncontrollable Child Reggie Sultan ➝ A. Lincoln: A Biography Ronald White ➝ The Mystery of Charles Dickens A.N.Wilson ➝ Tracker Alexis Wright ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows The Inheritance (TV series) 2023 The Inheritance (2023) is a four-part British drama television series, first broadcast in the UK on Channel 5. Three siblings are left reeling after an unexpected death in the family. When father-of-three Dennis (Larry Lamb) dies unexpectedly, his adult children are left bereft. But their grief is quickly overshadowed by anger, confusion and suspicion when they learn that he recently changed his will and they won’t be receiving any part of his estate. (Spoiler alert: the storyline features a homicidal character who was in foster care.) They embark on a journey to figure out whether this death was truly a tragic accident, or whether it was murder. Also features a foster care stereotype. See Dr. Rosie Canning's review: https://careleaversinfiction.wordpress.com/2024/10/22/not-another-one/ External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography Jim Tully 2003 A bestseller in 1924, Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting railroad bulls (cops) and wardens of order.Written with unflinching honesty and insight, Beggars of Life follows Tully from his first ride at age thirteen, choosing life on the road over a deadening job after years in an orphanage, through his teenage years of learning the ropes of the rails and -living one meal to the next.Tully’s direct, confrontational approach helped shape the hard-boiled school of writing, and later immeasurably influenced the noir genre. Beggars of Life was the first in Tully’s five-volume memoir, dubbed the "Underworld Edition," recalling his transformation from road-kid to novelist, journalist, Hollywood columnist, chain maker, boxer, circus handyman, and tree surgeon. External Website

Radio & Podcast Mary Wilson — Dream Girl Mary Wilson 2021 The late Mary Wilson rose up from Detroit's housing projects to find worldwide fame with The Supremes. For some years she thought her aunt and uncle were her parents. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Robert B. Parker's Lullaby Ace Atkins 2013 When fourteen-year-old Mattie Sullivan - who is living in kinship care - asks Spenser to look into her mother’s murder, he’s not convinced by her claim that the wrong man was convicted. Mattie is street-smart, wise beyond her years, and now left to care for her younger siblings and an alcoholic grandmother in a dilapidated apartment in South Boston. But her need for closure and her determination to make things right hits Spenser where he lives. As Spenser becomes more involved, he thinks that Mattie may be onto something after all. And he’s going to need the help of his friend Hawk to find peace for Mattie—a job that’s more dangerous than he ever thought. External Website

Authors T Alf Taylor ➝ Dorothy Thompson ➝ William Makepeace Thackeray ➝ Leo Tolstoy ➝ Jim Tully ➝ Leslie Thomas ➝ Walter Tevis ➝ J. R. R. Tolkien ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Slim and I 2020 Joy McKean (b. 1930) is recognised as one Australia's leading songwriters, and she wrote most of her husband's - the iconic Slim Dusty - most popular songs. Her story is told in the 2020 documentary, Slim and I, in which she talks of the impact of being separated from her family for 3 years from the age of 4 when she was hospitalised with polio. "It made me very different" she says. External Website

Authors U Uncle Jack Charles ➝ Urban Hymn ➝ Us to You ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Subjects Sarah Hopkins 2019 Daniel is a sixteen-year-old drug dealer and he's going to jail. Then, suddenly, he's not. A courtroom intervention. A long car ride to a big country house. Other 'gifted delinquents'- the elusive, devastating Rachel, and Alex, so tightly wound he seems about to shatter. So where are they? It's not a school, despite the 'lessons' with the headsets and changing images. It's not a psych unit-not if the absence of medication means anything. It's not a jail, because Daniel's free to leave. Or that's what they tell him. He knows he and the others are part of an experiment. But he doesn't know who's running it or what they're trying to prove. And he has no idea what they're doing to him. External Website

Television Shows The Long Song (tv show) 2018 The Long Song is a three-part BBC television serial, which is an adaptation of Andrea Levy's The Long Song, a 2010 historical novel with Care Experienced charaters. External Website

Poetry Strong Black Woman Rebecca Olayinka 2021 Care Experienced Person Rebecca Olayinka has contributed a poem to this collection - "Strong Black Woman" External Website

Academic Articles Interrogating ‘poor outcomes’ and disrupted care in children’s fiction Kirsty Capes 2018 The Ethical Dilemmas of Researching and Representing ‘Refugee Lives’ Hari Reed, University of East Anglia ‘A Week in April’: The Lived Experience of Big Flame Activists in the Kirkby Rent Strike 19…A common trope of children’s fiction is the representation of child protagonists as victims of some form of disrupted parenting. Disproportionately, child protagonists across the children’s canon are orphans; in foster care or other kinds of institutional care such as boarding schools; living with inadequate, neglectful or otherwise insufficient parents; or raised by relatives. Research shows that ‘problem children’ – those who are victims of disrupted parenting – are more susceptible to what is frequently termed as ‘poor outcomes’ in adulthood. These can range from addiction issues to criminal behaviour and time in prison, to mental health problems including depression. Children’s fiction informs and amplifies this narrative of ‘problem children’ being destined for failure in later life, through its representations of children in care, orphans and so on. This slippage between public consciousness and popular culture creates a cultural hegemony whereby children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are conditioned from a young age – through children’s fiction and other mediums – to believe that they are abject or extraneous to societal structures. Drawing on 20th and 21st century children’s fiction, from Francis Hodgson Burnett to J K Rowling, Roald Dahl to Lemony Snicket, C S Lewis to Jacqueline Wilson, this paper will demonstrate how children’s fiction serves to ‘other’ child readers from disrupted parenting situations. Using contemporary Marxist-feminist literary theory and socio-political contexts, the paper will also demonstrate the undeniable correlation between working-class narratives and representations of disrupted care in children’s fiction. External Website

Television Shows Grimm 2011 Grimm (2011-2017) is an American police procedural with a Grimms’ Fairy Tales fantasy element. Set in Portland, Oregon, the story follows homicide detective Nicholas Burkhardt (David Giuntol) who was raised in the kinship care of his aunt Marie Kessler (Kate Burton). As his aunt nears death, she tells him he is descended from guardians called Grimms whose responsibility it is to keep the peace between humanity and the Wesen, or mythological creators. ‘Gifted’ with the ability to see the Wesen, Nick must cope with this knowledge while continuing to do his job as a detective. External Website

Radio & Podcast ‎Daddy-Less Issues Podcast on Apple Podcasts Chanel Ali Rollo et al. What is it like to live without a dad? How about without a dad AND a mom? Does a lack of parent's stunt or accelerate an artist's growth? How did they learn to tie thier shoes? Orphan comedians, Amber Rollo & Chanel Ali, have a guest on each week to talk about it and laugh at some supremely dark stuff. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Feast Margaret Kennedy 2021 The Feast originally published in 1949. A surprisingly funny novel about a hotel that has collapsed and buried a number of the guests. Who had died and how did it happen? One of the families has one natural daughter and three adopted children, and their plot does include the adopted girl struggling with her identity as the adopted daughter. Cornwall, Midsummer 1947. Pendizack Manor Hotel is buried in the rubble of a collapsed cliff. Seven guests have perished, but is it murder, and what brought this strange assembly together for a moonlit feast before this Act of God - or Man? Over the week before the landslide, we meet the hotel guests in all their eccentric glory: and as friendships form and romances blossom, sins are revealed, and the cliff cracks widen .. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mrs McGinty's dead Agatha Christie 1970 Mrs McGinty died from a brutal blow to the back of her head. Suspicion fell immediately on her shifty lodger, James Bentley, whose clothes revealed traces of the victim’s blood and hair. Yet something was amiss: Bentley just didn’t look like a murderer. Not obvious on first reading but there is a very interesting conversation between one of the minor characters, Maureen Summerhayes and Poirot. Maureen Summerhayes is the landlady of the dilapidated guesthouse Long Meadows in Broadhinny who is married to Major Johnnie Summerhayes. She was adopted. Mrs McGinty was her cleaner, and went to Long Meadows twice a week--on Mondays and on Thursdays. Maureen mentions a newspaper article about how adoption gave a child advantages. She says, 'I was an adopted child. My mother parted with me and I had every advantage, as they call it. And it's always hurt – always – always – to know that you weren't really wanted, that your mother could let you go.' External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, a Memoir Paula Mclain 2013 This memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of a compelling memoir. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Sugarcane London: ‘This is all comfort food’ – restaurant review Tarell Mcintosh 2022 Tarell Mcintosh calls himself Chef Tee. This is the story of how he opened a restaurant during the pandemic and within a few weeks he had enough money to employ four care leavers. Chef Tee grew up in care and wanted to do something for other care leavers. External Website