Actors Liz Smith Betty Gleadle (11 December 1921 – 24 December 2016), known by the stage name Liz Smith, was an English character actress. Betty was born in Lincolnshire. Her mother died when Betty was two and she was taken in by her maternal grandparents, seeing her father only occasionally. After Betty's grandfather died, when Betty was seven, Betty's grandmother adopted the child. Liz Smith is known for her roles in BBC sitcoms, including as Annie Brandon in I Didn't Know You Cared (1975–1979), the sisters Bette and Belle in 2point4 Children (1991–1999), Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley (1994–1996) and Norma Speakman ("Nana") in The Royle Family (1998–2000, 2006). She also played Zillah in Lark Rise to Candleford (2008) and won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for the 1984 film A Private Function. 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

Non Fiction Steering the Mothership: The Complexities of Mothering Lisa Cherry 2014 What if you didn't get the mother you wanted? What if you weren't able to be the mother you planned to be? The stories in this book illustrate the real-life complexities of motherhood. They help every reader to understand their own journey, both as a child and as a mother, and help them investigate the single relationship that affects us most throughout our lives, whether it has been a positive or a negative experience. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand this profound relationship, especially those working in Early Years Development, Social Work or Education. Most importantly, from both a personal and professional perspective, Steering the Mothership will help every reader to develop compassion, for themselves and for others. Includes chapters from authors with care experience. External Website

Films/Videos Orphan Girl 2024 A new video of Brendan Graham’s achingly beautiful song Orphan Girl sung by the UCD Choral Scholars and soloist Abby Molloy and directed/arranged by Desmond Earley. Orphan Girl was written by Brendan Graham for a the Annual Great Famine Commemoration ceremony held in 2012 at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks to commemorate the relocation of over four thousand female orphans who, between 1848 and 1850, were brought from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s. External Website

Radio & Podcast Stolen (2021) Stolen 2021 Connie Walker is a Cree investigative journalist who grew up in the Okanese First Nation, Saskatchewan, Canadian. One day, she heard a story about her father, a policeman. Back in the 1970s, he pulled over someone driving erratically, and found the driver was the priest who had sexually abused him as a child in the St Michael's Indian residential school. Hearing the story prompted Connie to investigate her father's and other family members' time in St Michael's and the legacy of intergenerational trauma. Stolen on Spotify is the result of Connie's investigations. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/stolen External Website

Television Shows Louis Theroux's Altered States: Take My Baby 2018 Louis Theroux talks to women who want to give up their babies and to people who want to become adoptive parents. The program is based in California where there are high rates of adoption. External Website

Radio & Podcast Darcey & Chloe - How the system failed to save two baby girls Background Briefing (3) In this 2-part series (originally aired February 2023), we hear the distressing story of 2 tiny girls – Darcey (2) and Chloe (1) —who died, in part because of the failure of the Queensland, Australia Department of Child Safety to heed ‘red flags’. Darcey and Chloe died after they were left in a car for 9 hours by their mother who is now serving a prison sentence for manslaughter. The ABC’s Background Briefing podcast revealed that there were repeated warnings to the Department, including by Darcey’s father, in the weeks prior to the children’s deaths. Darcey had already been in foster care for a time, and was returned to mother with a “safety plan” in place. However, when alarms were later raised by the father, the Department decided they were the result of a custody dispute and therefore took no action. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Stone Girl Eleni Hale 2018 An unspeakable event changes everything for Sophie. No more Mum, school or bed of her own. She's made a ward of the state and grows up in a volatile world where kids make their own rules, adults don't count and the only constant is change. Until one day she meets Gwen, Matty and Spiral. Spiral is the most furious, beautiful boy Sophie has ever known. And as their bond tightens she finally begins to confront what happened in her past.I'm at the police station. There's blood splattered across my face and clothes. In this tiny room with walls the colour of winter sky I hug a black backpack full of treasures. Only one thing is certain . . . no one can ever forgive me for what I've done.Winner of the Readings YA Book Prize, 2019Voted the Best Young Adult Book of the year by Readings customersVoted Favourite YA Read of the year by Kids' Book ReviewVoted in the top 100 great reads by Australian womenShortlisted for New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature, 2019Contains mature content. Suitable for older readers. External Website

Radio & Podcast In and out of strife: Vickie Roach's turbulent life Vickie Roach 2019 Vickie Roach met with trouble all through her life, starting with a police record at the age of two. She went on to challenge a Federal law on the rights of prisoners and began publishing poetry External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Bridgeman Blog Bridgeman Team 2016 Overview of the Drawing on Childhood Exhibition then on display at the Foundling Museum in London. External Website

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Authors D Lola in the Mirror ➝ Great Expectations ➝ Oliver Twist ➝ Boy Swallows Universe (Novel) ➝ David Copperfield: The Personal History of David Copperfield ➝ All Our Shimmering Skies ➝ Old Curiosity Shop ➝ Back to Top

Activists Founder of the oldest black orphanage in the United States. Carrie Steele Logan 1892 Carrie Steele Logan, born into slavery and orphaned as a child, worked as a maid at Union Station in Atlanta. Moved by the plight of abandoned children she encountered, she began caring for them in her small home. Realizing she needed more space, Steele wrote and sold her autobiography to raise funds. In 1888, she secured a charter for the Carrie Steele Orphans' Home and eventually raised enough money to build a three-story brick orphanage, which was dedicated in 1892. It became the oldest Black orphanage in the United States, funded entirely through her efforts. Her epitaph reads, “The mother of orphans". Logan was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement in 1998. External Website

Television Shows Suits 2011 The American legal drama, Suits (2011-2019), features a Care Experienced character. Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) was 11 when his parents died in a car crash and he goes to live with his paternal grandmother, Edith Ross (Rebecca Schull). When the series opens, Mike is making a living and paying for his grandmother's care by taking the Law School Admission Test for others. Prepared to deliver a suitcase of dope for a friend in order to get the $25k he needs to upgrade his grandmother's care, he stumbles into an interview with Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), a successful lawer with Pearson Hardman. In the Season 7 final episode, Mike Ross marries Rachel Zane (Meghan Markles). Patrick J Adams and Meghan Markles also leave the show, Meghan because she is marrying Harry, and Patrick because he wanted to spend more time with his wife, Australian born Troian Bellisario. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Ushant: an autobiographical narrative Conrad Aiken 1962 Aiken was the eldest son of William Ford and Anna (Potter) Aiken. In Savannah, Aiken's father became a respected physician and eye surgeon, while his mother was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. On February 27, 1901, Dr. Aiken murdered his wife and then committed suicide. According to his autobiography, Ushant, Aiken, then 11 years old, heard the two gunshots and discovered the bodies immediately thereafter. After his parents' deaths, he was raised by his great-aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending Middlesex School then Harvard University. External Website

Television Shows The Chalk Line 2023 The Chalk Line (2022) is a Spanish thriller on Netflix. One night, Paula (Elana Anaya) and her husband Simon (Pablo Molinero) find a small girl wandering in their neighborhood. When the parents of 6-year-old Clara (Eva Tennear) can’t be find, Paula and Simon agree with the local authorities that they’ll provide a temporary foster care placement for her. Carla is refusing to speak and her movements are limited to within the placement of chalk lines. External Website

Television Shows Pernille 2025 Netflix series: Pernille is a frontline child welfare service caseworker and single parent, balancing the demands of her job with caring for her two teenage daughters, teenage nephew (due to the death of her sister), and an aging father. Her professional role exposes her to vulnerable children—some neglected or abused—and she grapples with high-stakes decisions about child safety . 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

Writers Robert Dessaix Robert’s birth mother, Yvonne, was coerced by her mother into giving up her baby in 1944.Jean and Tom Jones adopted Yvonne’s baby son and took him back to their home in Lane Cove on Sydney’s north shore. They were an older working couple, and they loved their son. As a child and on into his adulthood Robert studied Russian, eventually teaching this at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. For ten years from 1985, Robert Dessaix presented the weekly ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio National program 'Books and Writing'. He became a full time writer in 1995. Robert Dessaix was into his 30s before he located his birth mother. He’d always known that he was adopted, Jean and Tom were open about that, but living in Melbourne after his marriage had collapsed he decided it was time “to do something about Yvonne” and so he wrote to her. This was the beginning of a continuing gentle relationship between the two. External Website

Writers Michael McCarthy Australian academic and maritime archaeologist, Michael McCarthy (b. 1947), was in kinship care, institutions and foster care as a child. When he was 2-weeks old, Michael McCarthy was taken in by Frances May, his aunt and half-sister to his mother, 15 year old Elizabeth. He became Michael Phillip May and was raised as her son and brother to Frances’ daughter. 5 years later Frances took Michael to a Father Hudson’s home because her husband was ill. When she went to collect the child, Frances was told he’d been sent out to Australia. Frances tried for 5 years to regain custody of Michael, to no avail, in part because she was not the child’s legal guardian. It wasn’t until 1993 that Frances met up with the then 46-year-old Michael. In Australia, Michael started out in St Vincent’s Foundling Home in Subiaco, Perth. From St Vincent’s he was transferred to Castledare Orphanage before he was fostered by Tom and Irene Gollop. Michael went on to become a sports teacher and from there he became a curator at the Maritime Museum in Fremantle. External Website