From Hagiography to Personal Pain: Stories of Australian Foster Care from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Abstract

Stories—fictional, biographical, and autobiographical—are one way in which we can imagine what it has been like to experience foster care in Australia. In this paper I look at the trends in stories told about foster care from the nineteenth century, across the twentieth, and into the early twenty-first century. While exploring these trends, I make some observations about the shift from fictional accounts where foster parents and foster children were heroic characters to often searing tales of hurt and trauma inflicted on children in foster care by violent women and men.