Television Shows The Asunta Case 2024 The Asunta Case (2024) is a Spanish crime drama series inspired by true events. After the adoptive parents of 12-year-old Asunta (Iris Wu) report her missing, her corpse is found on the side of the road near her parents’ country house. The police investigation led to both parents being charged with the murder of their daughter. https://www.netflix.com/au/title/81632782 External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Wanting Richard Flanagan 2008 The multi-award winning Wanting (2008) by Australian writer Richard Flanagan revolves around the story of John Franklin as Governor of Tasmania (then Van Diemen's Land) (1837-1843) adopting an orphaned Aboriginal Australian girl, Mathinna (b 1835 on Flinders Island). When Franklin is recalled to London, Mathinna is abandoned to the St John's Orphan School in Hobart. Flanagan was inspired to write about Mathina because he had seen a portrait of her storage and was curious about this intelligent and gifted girl who was "utterly destroyed by the intention of seeking to make her white" https://www.ourtasmania.com.au/people-mathinna.html External Website

Poets David O'Brien David O'Brien Australian poet, David O'Brien (b. 1957), spent his childhood in orphanages. David and his three siblings were abandoned by their parents in the late 1950s and made Wards of the (South Australia) State. David grew up in a Catholic orphanage with his brother, later attending a Catholic boarding school. The boys were separated from their two sisters.David has had a varied career, including working as a model. He's been living in the Blue Mountains, NSW, for more than 20 years. Two years ago he set up the Blackheath Community OpShop. Encouraging men to live in a more peaceful way - with other humans and with the earth - is the theme running through his 2014 book, A Hunbler Mankind. External Website

Children's Fiction Alone On A Wide Wide Sea Michael Morpurgo 2007 Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea is a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, first published in 2006. Inspired by the real history of English orphans sent to Australia after the Second World War, it follows 6 year old Arthur Hobhouse, who is separated from his sister and shipped to Australia, losing his family, his country, and everything familiar. The novel explores his endurance of mistreatment, neglect, and forced labour in the Australian outback, highlighting themes of displacement, institutional abuse, and survival. Its title comes from a line in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. External Website

Non Fiction Youth and the Mystery Wall Phil Frampton 2022 In this book, Phil Frampton - who grew up in a Barnados home and who was a founder of the Care Leavers Association in England - challenges the ageism often used against young people. He urges society to pay attention to the potential, including the collective power, of young people. External Website

Authors R Rudyard Kipling ➝ Remembering Randall ➝ ‎Daddy-Less Issues Podcast on Apple Podcasts ➝ Religious Rebels - Malcolm X ➝ Redacted Lives ➝ Rhys Stephenson and Esther Manito ➝ In and out of strife: Vickie Roach's turbulent life ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Hidden women of history: 'how 'lady swindler' Alexandrina Askew triumphed over the convict stain Janet McCalman 2021 Historian Janet McCalman has written about the “Lady Swindler”, Alexandrina Askew nee Grant. According to McCalman: “Alexandrina’s story illustrates in extreme personal form the pain of perceived inferiority and stigma felt by those transported to Van Diemen’s Land: the daily humiliations of being a nobody, without a family let alone a lineage. If her secrets and lies were spectacular, they were nonetheless reflective of the desperation of the socially thwarted and ignored.” Among the Scottish women transported to Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), Alexandrina Grant was a success. Says McCalman: “Few of the 1636 Scottish women transported to Van Diemen’s Land achieved anything like [Alexandrina’s] ordinary triumph over poverty, stigma and marginalisation.” https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-how-lady-swindler-alexandrina-askew-triumphed-over-the-convict-stain-169023 External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Schindler's Ark Thomas Keneally 1982 Schindler’s Artk (1982) by esteemed Australian writer Thomas Keneally tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party who saves the lives of 1200 Jews during the Holocaust and who therefore becomes an unlikely hero. Along the way, Keneally includes accounts of many of the Jews forced to live in the Krakow (Cracow in Keneally, a common spelling until the 1990s) Ghetto and in the Plaszow concentration camp. Among them are 3 orphans: There is the 3-year child being cared for by the Dresner family after a Polish couple decided they couldn’t “keep a Jewish child in the countryside any more” This child loved to wear red: “red cap, red coat, small red boots (Keneally, Schindler, 100). There’s also Rebecca Tannenbaum who at least “had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles” (Keneally, Schindler, 232). At nineteen she is a manicurist for the brutal commandant and marries Joseph Bau. Then there’s a 13-year-old orphan who was able to save himself “with that infallible instinct which had once characterised the movement of the red-capped child…And as with Redcap, no one had seen him (Keneally, Schindler, 259). Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was adapted for the multi-award film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg in 1993. External Website

Actors Rosie Perez Rosa María Perez (born September 6, 1964) is an American actress, choreographer and community activist. Her mother Lydia Perez spent time in and out of jail. Perez’s mother gave birth to her youngest child while incarcerated. Rosa was for a time raised by an aunt and then like her siblings went through group homes and foster care. Her and her siblings were often split up. She was then transferred to a group foster home and lived in foster care in New York and Peekskill until age eight, and was still legally considered a ward of the State of New York until age twelve. Her mother and aunt frequently visited, and her father made an unsuccessful custody bid at one point. When she was in third grade, Perez learned that she had a speech impediment. She had a strict Catholic upbringing, which she has credited to the influence of the nuns during her childhood. She eventually moved in with paternal aunt, Ana Dominga Otero Serrano-Roque, and attended Grover Cleveland High School, in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens. Her mother died of AIDS-related complications in 1999. When her mother died she was living in poverty in Queensbridge houses. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp The Woman in Black (play) Susan Hill 1987 The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill was adapted into a stage play by Stephen Mallatratt (1947-2004) in 1987. The original London production is the second longest-running play in the history of the West End, after Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. In 2024, The Woman in Black was touring in Australia and starred John Waters and Daniel MacPherson. The story is narrated by lawyer Arthur Kipps. When he was a junior solicitor, Arthur Kipps was sent to attend the funeral of Alice Drablow and settle her estate. The estate includes the desolate Eel Marsh House at Crythin Gifford, a small town on the northeast coast of England. While staying at Eel Marsh House, Kipps experiences strange noises – including the screams of a child – and sees the ghostly figure of The Woman in Black. Eventually, Arthur Kipps learns that Alice Drablow and her husband had adopted the son of her sister, an unmarried woman, Jennet Humfrye. The boy died young in an accident and the bereaved Jennet returned to haunt Eel Marsh House as the Woman in Black According to the locals, seeing the Woman in Black signalled the imminent death of a child. External Website

Films/Videos The Changeling (crime drama) 2008 Changeling is a 2008 American crime drama based on real life events from the 1920s. Six months after Christine Collins reports her son missing, he is returned to her by the police. However, the boy she then looks after at police insistence is not her son. 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

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