[1] In the 2004 New Year Honours, Else was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Her thesis was an autobiography titled ‘On shifting ground: Self-narrative, feminist theory and writing practice’.
[3] A section of her memoir won the 2009 Pamela Tomlinson prize for creative writing.
[4] Her original study, published in 1991, was updated and reissued in 2022 (with Maria Haenga-Collins) to also cover state care, donor conception and surrogacy.
[4] She gave evidence about the history of the state's involvement in closed stranger adoption to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in 2019.