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Actors Brian Syron Brian Syron (19 November 1934 – 14 October 1993) was a human rights advocate, teacher, actor, writer, stage director and Australia's first Indigenous feature film director who has been recognised as the first First Nations feature film director. Brian Syron was born in Balmain, Sydney to Daniel Syron, a Biripi (also known as Birpai) man from New South Wales and Elizabeth Murray from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. During his childhood, Brian learned about his Aboriginal heritage by living with his paternal grandmother at Karuah, 184 km north of Sydney, for long chuncks of time. When he was fourteen, Brian ended up in the Grafton Correctional Centre. By the age of twenty-two, Brian had become a male model and began studying acting at the Ensemble Theatre Company in Sydney. Brian later co-founded a theatre company in Saratogo Springs in New York and did a number of tours throughout the country, including through the southern states where segregation prompted him to direct his attention to Aboriginal issues in Australia. Back in Australia, Brian Styron taught Aboriginal actors, including Denis Walker, Gary Foley, Jack Davis, Maureen Watson and Hyllus Maris. External Website

Academic Articles The American West and the Archetypel Orpan Louie Attebery ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Two Report Zoe Baker ➝ From Us to Us: A collection of advice from care-experienced graduates to care-experienced graduates Zoe Baker ➝ "One of Us": Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography Jack Bowers ➝ 45 Care Leaver Friendly Ways Care Leavers Association ➝ Popular perceptions of disrupted childhoods Kirsty Capes ➝ Interrogating ‘poor outcomes’ and disrupted care in children’s fiction Kirsty Capes ➝ ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’, Delyth Edwards & Rosie Canning ➝ Reconsidering the care-crime connection in a climate of crisis Claire Fitzpatrick ➝ Living with the past: the creation of the stolen generation positionality Stephanie Gilbert ➝ A childhood on paper Managing access to child care files by post-care adults Jim Goddard ➝ What "The Mandalorian" Teaches Us About Foster Care Sophia Alexandra Hall ➝ Louis Armstrong’s “Karnofsky Document”: The Reaffirmation of Social Death and the Afterlife of Emotional Labor Dalton Jones ➝ A New Stolen Generation? Michael Lavarch ➝ Fremantle: Reflections of a child migrant Michael McCarthy ➝ Two Mothers - Twice the blessing or was I cursed? Deidre Michell ➝ What Makes a Family? The Radical Portrayal of Diverse Families in Australian Picture Books Sarah Mokrzycki ➝ Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian Literature Irena Avsenik Nabergoj ➝ The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret Garden Jerry Phillips ➝ "Let's Go to the Movies": Filmic Representations of Gay Foster and Adoptive Parents Damien Riggs ➝ The Role of Orphan Films in the 21st Century Archive Dan Streible ➝ Oliver Twisted: the origins of Lord Voldemort in the Dickensian orphan. James Washick ➝ Incarnations of the Orphan Nina Auerbach ➝ Facing the cliff-edge: care-experienced graduates’ access to and progression through taught postgraduate study in the United Kingdom Zoe Baker ➝ Revealing the Profile of Foster Parents, Biological Parents, Foster Children and the Triadic Relationship amongst them Vasiliki Baltsioti & Ignatia Farmakopoulou ➝ Social Workers’ Involvement in Policy Practice in Portugal Francisco Branco ➝ It’s My Journey: It’s My Life! Care leavers and access to social care files Care Leaver Association ➝ (Pseudo)motherhood, care constructs and the geography of the nuclear family: class, gender and the suburbs in contemporary fiction Kirsty Capes ➝ Winnie Woodfern Comes Out in Print: Story-Paper Authorship and Protolesbian Self-Representation in Antebellum America Daniel Cohen ➝ Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories Craig Evans ➝ Confronting intergenerational harm: Care experience, motherhood and criminal justice involvement Claire Fitzpatrick et al ➝ Reflexivity and Lived Experience of Out-of-Home Care: Positionality as an Early Parenthood Researcher Amy Gill ➝ Fostered Voices: Narratives of US Foster Care Nikky Greer ➝ A perspective from the periphery: Re-imagining regional North Queensland women's stories using historical fiction Louise Henry ➝ From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature Melanie A. Kimball ➝ Contemplating Fictional and Nonfictional Orphan Stories (2004) Dennis Leoutsakas ➝ From Hagiography to Personal Pain: Stories of Australian foster care from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Dee Michell ➝ Exploring the legal representation of individuals in foster care: What say youth and alumni? J Jay Miller et al. ➝ Surviving the "House of a Hundred Windows": Irish Industrial Schools in Recent Fiction and Memoirs Michael Molino ➝ The politics of good intentions and what I’ve learned from Romania’s ‘orphans’ Mariela Neagu ➝ A Fragment of the Maltese Exodus: Child Migration to Australia 1953-1965 David Plowman ➝ Pumps and poetry Melanie Senior ➝ ‘Yes I’ve got some historic convictions but do the public really need protecting from me?’ The Record ➝ Lost Boys and Recovered Classics: Literary and Social Memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers (1995) Christopher Wilson ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase one report Zoe Baker ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Three Report Zoe Baker ➝ Review: Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels. Wade Bell ➝ Oliver Twist, textbook of child abuse Patricia Brennan ➝ The Perceived Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Care-Experienced People Rosie Canning et al ➝ Care leavers in the ivory tower Kirsty Capes ➝ Rewriting the Past: Gerard Mannix Flynn's Nothing to Say and James X Victoria Connor ➝ No More Standing In The Shadows – Treating The Wounds Of Historic Forced Adoption Jeannot Farmer ➝ Foster Focus Mag Foster Focus Mag ➝ More Than Our Childhoods: A survivor-led participatory approach to out-of-home care life story research Amy Gill & Dee Michell ➝ As a former foster kid, I'm giving Tracy Beaker a second chance Sophia Alexandra Hall ➝ The Adultification of Black Girls in State Care: Perspectives Sylvia Ikomi ➝ Healthy Depictions? Depicting Adoption and Adoption News Events on Broadcast News Kline, Susan L.; Chatterjee, Karishma; Karel, Amanda I. ➝ Conceptualizing Stigma Bruce G Link et al. ➝ Blood Doesn't Define Evotypical Families: Eleanor Spence's Stories of Informal and Formal Foster Care in Australia Dee Michell ➝ Out of sight: the censoring of family diversity in picture books Sarah Mokrycki ➝ Marking motherhood: Tattooing and willfulness as a response to and a way to survive child removal Lisa Morriss and Siobhan Beckwith ➝ Otherways' into the Garden: Re-Visioning the Feminine in The Secret Garden Linda Parsons ➝ Children out of place' : representations of foster care in the Australian news media Damien King Riggs ➝ Christian Science Versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden Anne Stiles ➝ Integrating personal and professional experiences: Seven phases to integrating loss and grief. Rosemary Wanganeen ➝ A scoping review of the transition experiences and outcomes of young women leaving residential out-of-home care Yujie Zhao, Jacinta Waugh & Philip Mendes ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver 2023 Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and won the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield.[While Kingsolver's novel is similarly about a boy born into poverty, Demon Copperhead is set in Appalachia and explores contemporary issues.[3][4][5] The protagonist and narrator is born Damon Fields to a teenage mother in a trailer home. He is raised in Lee County, located in Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and nicknamed "Demon Copperhead" for the color of his hair and his attitude. As Demon grows up, he must use his charms and wits to survive poverty in the contemporary American South. External Website

Authors O Mark Opitz ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Whatever happened to the little girl who played Annie? Lisa Flowers 2018 Since its inception in 1924, Little Orphan Annie has become an American icon. Actress Aileen Quinn adopted the role in 1982 for the John Huston-directed film, forever cementing her place in pop culture. This article explores what happened to Aileen Quinn later in her life. External Website

Films/Videos The Beautiful Game 2024 The Beautiful Game (2024) is a British sports drama. Inspired by the Homeless World Cupper Soccer Tournament, the film tells the story of the English team of homeless footballers going to Rome to play in the competition. In the English team, there is one young man who was in mulitple ‘care’ homes as a child, and another whose son is now in foster care because of his negligence. External Website

Writers John Sutherland 1938- John Andrew Sutherland (born 9 October 1938) is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He was born in Norwood, London. His Scottish father, Jack, died in South Africa in 1942. His mother, Liz, then returned to Colchester, Essex, lived in a flat with John and became a police officer. Late in the war, John was evacuated to stay with a paternal aunt and her family in Scotland. He was there for about 18 months before he returned to London and lived with his maternal aunt Ivy while his mother was living in the Argentine with her new partner. Before taking up a place at the University of Leicester in 1960, Sutherland did National Service and on discharge, worked briefly as a labourer. When he graduated in 1964, Sutherland began his career at the University of Edinburgh where he earned his PhD. After 10 years he moved to University College London (UCL), where he worked for another 10 years. John Sutherland is currently Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Putting Down Roots Deidre Michell 2010 In this book, Women Journeying With Spirit, every woman’s journey is a reflection of her unique spirit, and yet each woman has identified the very strong threads that bind together spirituality with everyday life. In no story is spirituality something external or additional to the mundane, to reality, and so rather than this being a volume of mystic visions or transfiguring illuminations, it conveys a search for meaning amid the often considerable challenges of personal experiences. .In her chapter, "Putting Down Roots" Deidre Michell reflects on the impact of being in foster care for most of her childhood. External Website

Authors B Transmedia Harry Potter: Essays on Storytelling Across Platforms ➝ Orphans of Empire. The fate of London's foundlings ➝ The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo 2020 Winner of the Booker Prize 2019. Grace is a Victorian orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Winsome is a young Windrush bride, recently arrived from Barbados. Amma is the fierce queen of her 1980s squatters' palace. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is blowing up on social media, the newest activist-influencer on the block. Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country- ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible. Amongst the characters are some who were in 'care'. Dominque's partner of 3 years, Nzinga, was in the American foster care system; Bummi was in kinship care as was Lennox; Grace was in a Girls' Home; and Penelope was adopted. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots Deborah Feldman 2012 Now a Netflix original series! Unorthodox is the bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman's growing up in kinship care as a member of an ultra orthodox Jewish group. As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. External Website

Performing Arts Tenor and Aboriginal Australian activist Harold Blair Harold Blair (1923 – 1976) was an Australian tenor and Aboriginal activist. He was born in Queensland and separated from his mother at the age of two when she was sent out to work as a domestic servant. The boy was then cared for by Salvation Army staff who moved him into the girls' dormitory where he stayed until he was five years old. Harold was then transferred to the boys' dormitory and began his limited formal education. Harold was almost 16 before he left Purga. In 1942 he was sent to work in the canefields of Childers in the Bundaberg Region of Queensland during WWII. Harold had been singing and entertaining at Purga and he continued this while working in the canefields. In 1945 he married and left for the United States where he studied singing. Back in Australia, Blair studied part-time and worked in a Melbourne department store until in 1956 he was teaching part-time at the Albert Street conservatorium. He travelled to Europe 3 years later, and did a range of jobs in Australia to support his family while continuing to sing. In 1967 Blair became a music teacher in the Victorian Department of Education. He performed in the first opera put on at the new Sydney Opera House in 1973 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1976. Harold Blair took on projects to improve the situation for Aboriginal Australians. One of these was the Aboriginal Children’s Holiday Project, which provided holidays in Melbourne for 3000 children living on Queensland missions. External Website

Television Shows 60MinutesAustralia: Brave whistleblowers expose one of Australia's worst child abuse scandals 2022 In this 60MinutesAustralia program, a former worker at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in Tasmania talks about her efforts to bring attention to the sexual abuse of young people in the centre - by staff and inmates. Another young woman talks about being groomed and abused by a netball coach for years. The efforts of these women prompted the Tasmanian government to set up in 2021 a commission of inquiry into child sexual abuse in that state - not long after the national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017). External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles I wasn't told why I was taken into care. For years I thought it was my fault Kerrie Portman 2020 Kerrie Portman explores how it is possible to adjust to a new situation, feel safe and settled, when you don’t know how you got there. External Website

Writers Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812 – 1870) was an English writer and social critic. Charles appears to have had a happy childhood until he was 10 and his father suspended his education. The reason seems to be insufficient funds to provide schooling for both Charles and his older sister, Fanny, who in 1823 left home to become a boarder at the Royal Academy of Music. Young Charles filled in his time by running errands for the family, reading and exploring London. Before he had a chance to get used to his job, John Dickens was arrested and imprisoned. John was joined at Marshalsea Prison by his wife and 3 youngest children, while Charles moved in with a family friend, Mrs Roylance. Later Charles moved in with another family, remembered as the Garland family in his novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, serialised 1840 to 1841. At the end of 1824, the family moved into an impoverished neighbourhood and Charles finally went back to school, at least for a couple of years. Dickens went on to created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles I wanted to write about a care system that didn’t care very much': Kit de Waal on My Name Is Leon Kit de Waal 2020 The novelist did not set out to write a political book, but a lived experience. She ended up writing about a system that did not seem to care very much. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles FosterWiki Sarah Anderson 2021 FosterWiki, founded in 2021 by foster carer and NHS psychotherapist Sarah Anderson, is a free, independent community platform sharing foster carers’ knowledge to support, inform, and inspire, addressing the challenge of accessing reliable fostering information quickly. External Website

Authors A Allan Ahlbery ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Salt 2010 Salt (2010), directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Angelina Jolie, is a fast-paced espionage thriller about identity, loyalty, and state manipulation. Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a skilled CIA officer accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Salt was orphaned as a child and raised in Russia, where she was trained from a young age to become a deep-cover operative embedded in the U.S. A care-experienced protagonist whose early vulnerability is weaponised by the state External Website

Radio & Podcast A free lunch Life Changing with Jane Garvey 2022 This is a conversation with Sinead Browne who grew up in the UK care system. She ended up with an eating disorder and a law degree, went travelling at the age of 27 and was inspired by The Free Store https://www.thefreestore.org.nz/ in New Zealand to set up Compliments of the House back in the UK, in Brixton. Compliments of the House provides food and community for those who need it, and can be found here: https://www.complimentsofthehouse.org/ and Sinead's website is here: https://www.sineadbrowne.com/ External Website