The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety

The figure of the lost child has haunted the Australian imagination. Peter Pierce’s original and sometimes shocking study The Country of Lost Children traces this ambivalent and disturbing history. In the nineteenth century the idea of losing one’s child to a strange country reflected white settlers’ distrust of their new land and its Aboriginal inhabitants. The book offers original insights into the passing of an opportunity for reconciliation between European and indigenous Australians. In the twentieth century the lost child continues to torment the national consciousness, but no longer as the bewildered wanderer in the bush. Instead the emblematic lost child of modern Australia is a victim of abuse, abandonment or abduction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from poetry, fiction and newspaper reports to paintings and films, this book analyses the cultural and moral implications of the lost child in our history.

• Innovative treatment of cultural significance of ‘lost’ children in Australia • Elegantly and beautifully written • Appeals to general as well as specialist readers

Part I. In the Nineteenth Century: Discovering the Lost Child: 1. The lost child introduced: Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn; ‘Come let us sing of this fair child heroic’: Jane Duff and her brothers; Alfred Boulter A Monument at Daylesford; Marcus Clarke’s Lost Children; The Case of Clara Crosbie; Frederick McCubbin’s Images of the Lost Child; Fairytales of the 1890s; The Bush Balladists’; Turn Mrs Praed and the Punishment of Mrs Tregaskiss; Henry Lawson and ‘The Babies in the Bush’; Joseph Furphy’s ‘Perfect Young-Australian’; Part II. In the Twentieth Century: The Child Abandoned: In the theatre; In fiction; Book into film; True stories.