If I'm asked to do a job that makes me anxious about whether I've got what it takes, I remember that my English grandmother drove an ambulance during the London blitz. And my mum not only completed war service herself, but she survived a life-threatening illness and then brought up five kids with hardly any help because Dad was engaged in an endless marathon of work. Stories oftheir courage stir my imagination and make me see my own potential in a positive light. I guess it boils down to a sense of identity.

But what if you knew hardly anything at all about who you were or where you came from? What if you were a "modern displaced person", as psychotherapist Juliet Harper from Macquarie University puts it, because you grew up in foster care and no-one had made the effort to preserve your life story?

This is the predicament faced by many children who are taken from their families by state government welfare departments because they are not safe at home, or because their parents have become ill or because there is no-one at homeable to care for them.

In NSW alone, there are more than 7,500 of these children in care on any night of the week. Slightly more than 2,500 of them are in foster care and about 3,000 are in the care of a relative where there is payment or some kind of professional intervention involved. The rest are receiving other types of tax-funded support, such as a place in a church-run residential service.

A report issued earlier this year in NSW has revealed that many of these children develop big gaps in their knowledge about their history before coming into care. These gaps get bigger for the kids who go in and out of care, over and over again, often with different carers each time. More than 60 per cent of care episodes last six weeks or less.

The report, Voices Of Children and Young People in Foster Care, was published by an ombudsman-style organisation, the Community Services Commission in NSW. It interviewed 66 children and the results offer a rare insight into what is happening to these children and how they feel about it, I say "rare" because the voices of these children are hardly ever heard. Substitute care is largely carried out in private homes. These children spend the greatest proportion of their lives without any external monitoring or supervision. The lack of systems to check up on them has become one of the most serious criticisms of a much-criticised sector.

The commission's report highligthed the lack of "life story work" being done for these kids. This involves gathering information about the people and events that have played a part in a child's life and putting it together to create some kind of coherant picture. Commonly it takes the form of a book - a bit like the kind of book many of us put together to remember an overseas trip. Or the scrapbooks that actors keep, full of their reviews and programs, and snapshots, so that they can recall their career long after the footlights have gone out.

The commission reported that 75 per cent of the foster children said they knew "nothing" or "a bit" about their own history or birth family. Nearly 60 per cent had "no life story book or only one photo".

This research reveals a picture of children deprived of their personal history. More than 30 per cent don't keep in touch with their mother. More than 60 per cent are not seeing their father. More than 30 per cent have lost contact with one or more sibling. How can you develop an identity in adolescence, and come to terms with trauma, if you only have fragments of the facts?

But anyone sensitive to issues surrounding the depiction of women in history will be disappointed, and possibly infuriated. When it comes to gender relations, Tim Flannery should stick to tree kangaroos and possums, and leave the sheilas to people who have given it a bit more thought.

He tells us about the first night spent ashore by the women convicts of the First Fleet, after they scrambled off long the boats on February 6, 1788. Tbe ship's surgeon responsible for the women, Arthur Bowes Smyth, reports in his journal that the sailors asked for a double issue of rum "to make merry with upon women quitting the ship". The rum was issued and Flannery describes the result as a time of "amusement, singing, fighting and fucking". It was a "party" that continued despite Governor Phillip's orders the next morning to shoot anyone who attempted to get into the women's tents.

Flannery seems to represent this night of sanctioned sexual assault on a group of women heavily outnumbered by men (189 of the 732 convicts were women) as a kind of release from opression. "It was a salty, saucy and insolent affair full of irony, colour and sex," he writes. "It was as if the constraints of old Europe had been left behind... and the unbuttoned nature of the town, which remains characteristic, was stamped indelibly on it from the first." During an interview this week on ABC Radio, this "first night of debauchery" was discussed with laughter by Flannery and his male interviewer.

Flannery also describes how a ship's carpenter and a young cabin boy were evicted a few days later from a female convict's tent. The soldiers marched them out of camp to the tune of The Rogue's March. Their hands were tied and the boy was forced to wear petticoats. Was the boy an aggressor or a victim? Governor Phillip's brutal commitment to stamping out homosexuality is well documented, but the reports of this particular incident are ambiguous. Yet this punitive parade before mocking convicts and redcoats is described by Flannery as "a sort of prototype for Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras". It is a strange and insensitive comparison. Mardi Gras celebrates sexual freedom, whereas the 1788 parade in the scrub at Port Jackson was socially sanctioned ridicule. The Mardi Gras reference appears to be designed by Flannery to reinforce his characterisation of the first night for the convict women as indicative of a new colonial freedom.

A wild night it certmnly was. A violent electric storm hit at nightfall just as the last women landed, splitting a tree and killing precious livestock. However, other writers have portrayed the experience that night in very different terms.

For Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill), the women "floundered to and fro... pursued by male convicts intent on raw" and "as the couples rutted between the rocks... the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun". It is a history with little good news for indigenous women is well.

Stuart Macintyre in A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge) cites "sexual relations" as a "recurrent cause of conflict" with the Aborigines.

Anne Summers in the updated version of her 1975 classic Damned Whores and God's Police (Penguin), presents a compelling case that "imposed sexual slavery" was "defacto British policy at the time" and the label "whore" was a weapon used for the subjugation of all women, in conjunction with physical violence. These interpretations are supported by some of the eyewitness accounts Flannery includes in his new book, such as the surgeon's description of the "scene of debauchery and riot" after the women came ashore and the men got to them very soon after", and also Lieutenant Ralph Clark's lament about the "Seen of Whoredome" in the women's camp that he compares to "Sodom". But the tone of Flannery's introduction directs us away from a tough, critical assessment of that night, he calls Lieutenant Clark "prudish". And with this, and his laughter on radio while discussing rape, he misrepresents the brutal history of the women's experience.

It was ajoyous and emotional day with some genuinely unusual characteristics. For one thing, 370 kids from the local schools turned up and participated enthusiastically in activities with names like the Memory Mural, Anger Patches and the Wishing Well, as well as riding on motor bikes and bouncing on castles.

The Memory Mural was a big hit. Counsellors invited kids to write on a wall about someone they'd lost. Rabbits and dogs cracked a fair few mentions. Even the occasional parrot received an emotional tribute. The counselling team manager, Judie Hind-Roff, says children often talk about the loss of pets and parents in the same breath. "The death of a pet may be a child's first experience of the loss of something they love" she says, "It's all loss and it all hurts."

"The students took a big interest in the exhibition of over 70 entries from schools around the region in a competition where children were asked to describe a personal experience of grief or loss. Paintings, songs, short stories and multimedia displays flooded in. Seventeen-year-old Sally-Anne Hunter won with a short story about the death of her grandmother. Two typewritten, sheets of A4 paper brought tears to the eyes of professionals and children alike as they mingled at the display.

Children gave presentations in the sessions for professionals as well. Graduates from the Chatty Cats support group for children aged between nine and 15 told their stories at a workshop on children and spirituality. Kellie, Matt, Michelle and Rodie, all aged between 11 and 16, told me excitedly how these meetings had helped them cope with the death in their lives.

Two counsellors run monthly Chatty Cats sessions which last two hours. They always start with pizza and then offer activities that experience has shown to be very appealing to kids. The "inside/outside folder" involves writing how you present to the world on the cover and the feelings you don't tell people about on the inside of the folder. For the "grief collage" you paste up photos of the person you've lost and write down memories and feelings about them. Time for simply "telling your story" is allowed in each meeting and this chance to be heard, by the group or by a counsellor one-on-one, is often a powerful source of relief.

This focus on the experiences and needs of children is surprisingly rare. We've got a whole lot better in this country at providing home-based palliative care services, but the challenge of finding ways to talk to children inhibits many adults from even trying. That's why the message from the Expo, that encouraging children to express their feelings and then simply listening to them can be healing in itself, was so important for the professionals who came along.

And kids who've experienced a loss can really help each other. That's why the Peninsula Hospice Service was proudly launching a kids' web site and chat room last week at www.kidsgrief.org. It's already a hit witht he Chatty Cats members.

Thirteen-year-old Matt belongs to 35 chat rooms, even though he hasn't got a computer at home. He logs on at school and the local library. And 16-year-old Michelle regularly logs onto five chat rooms.

Multicultural Melbourne can be relied on for a cultural perspective as well. Counsellor Andres Gabriel spoke about a Greek Cypriot mourning a tradition where friends and family gather in the home of someone who was close to the person who died. They do this on the ninth and twelfth day after the death, again at three months, six months and twelve months, and from then on annually. It beats one funeral soon after the death when you're so upset that you can hardly remember what happened.

These rewards have been amply illustrated in two books that have hit the market in time for the Christmas rush. Each examines the core dilemmas, that provoked a feminist critique of the human condition. Yet they bring to the issues an imaginative freshness that replaces the fury of youth with a sane humility that is more characteristic of later life.

Drusilla Modjeska's Stravinsky's Lunch (Picador) is about two very different Australian painters, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. The bohemian and the spinster. The central theme is what Rilke called the "ancient enmity between daily life and the great work". The title refers to Stravinsky's idiosyncratic approach to this creative challenge. When he was in mid-composition he insisted that his family eat lunch in silence. The slightest sound could ruin his concentration and destroy an entire work, so silece was the rule and Mrs Stravinsky complied by keeping the kids quiet. (Any parent can only wonder how on earth she managed to do it?!)

What I love about this book is the transcendence of anger. Part of the dilemma exposed by Stravinsky's domestic anecdote is that "the sacrifice of a wife could slip into the sacrifice of a generation". Yet this book is not about arming the wives and children of great male artists with very noisy toy drums and the occasional automatic weapon - no matter how appealing that may initially seem to some of us, Modjeska's strategy is to turn away from the adversarial and oppositional - "I came at last to understand that the point was not to approach the dilemma as a warrior, but to come into relationship with it and feel its shape." This more reflective, open-minded approach enables her to tell the story of two great lives in a way that allows us to make our own judgements about the insidious nature of the dichotomy on which the story of Stravinsky's lunch is based".

If you're struggling to balance work and family life, and you like very good reproductions of paintings, this book is worth a look.

Anne Summers' first volume of autobiography, Ducks on the Pond (Viking 1999), takes us from 1945 to 1976 and is another example of a rich social history filtered through a mature and very personal gaze. At the Sydney launch by Hazel Hawke, Summers expressed surprise that more women hadn't written about the great activist movements of which she was a part - the Vietnam War moratoriums, women's liberation, resident action, the personal conundrums of the sexual revolution, and much more. Perhaps her critical and challenging assessment of a time of great social upheaval will inspire a few more of us to have a go.

"Break the silence" and "the personal is the political" are two slogans from the 1970s which had the capacity to blow through marriages like Cyclone Tracy. By telling her own life story, Summers brings the ideas embedded in these phrases to life in a very personal way. Her vivid depiction of the activist milieu captures just how much fun it could be, as well as the tougher side. You won't want to miss some of the wonderful nonsense of the period, such as sacrifical drinking" with the libertarian Push and the "orgasm meeting" in the early days o fthe Sydney women's movement.

Yet it's the dissection off her "family secrets" that ultimately communicates so much about what we wanted to change back then, for both women and men. "I wish I could tell a story of love and laughter, of warm memories made more mellifluous by time," she writes, "but however much it hurts I want this to be a true story."

With courage and confidence she frankly discusses the way her father brutally rejected her and some of the tough gifts this bestowed on her. "Hostility is a routine weapon in human relations these days, especially in the corporate world and in politics. If you know ways not to let it hurt you, you are streets ahead of those kids who grew up soft and mushy from idyllic childhoods." It's a gripping read from a Walkley award-winning journalist with senior management experience in the public and private sectors, here and in the US. Give me a mature mind any day!