cultural studies
Laurie Clancy
Peter Pierce
The Country of Lost Children:
An Australian Anxiety
CUP $24.95hb, 202pp, 0 521 594999 5
PIERCE'S CONCERN in this critical study is with two periods --
from the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of the myths
of the lost child began to appear, and the second half of this
century when a quite different kind of narrative emerges. The
period in between he regards as largely a consolidation of the
late nineteenth century examples. Ranging widely over not only
literature but pictorial art and contemporary factual accounts,
he shows the striking changes that take place in the forms in
which the legend appears.
He sees the idea of the lost child as having deep symbolic
significance. Girls and boys of European origin who strayed into
the Australian bush are emblematic of 'essential if never fully
resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this
country'. He goes on, 'Symbolically, the lost child represents
the anxieties of European settlers because of the ties with home
which they have cut in coming to Australia, whether or not they
journeyed here by choice.' The figure, in other words, is both
literal and metaphorical.
This idea is repeated constantly.
Perhaps the travails and sometimes the deaths of children are emblematic either of the forfeiting of part of the national future, or of an anxiety that Australia will never truly welcome European settlement. There is also an intimation of the guilt of parents for ever having brought children to such a hostile environment.
At the risk of sounding literal or simplistic, this seems to me to be drawing rather a long bow. As Pierce's own account testifies, children were often lost in the bush, a situation of dramatic poignancy, so that it is not hard to see why fiction writers would want to write about it and artists to paint it. Pierce notes also that it lends itself naturally to the highly popular genre of melodrama. Lawson's fictional treatment of the theme, for instance, is fully in keeping with other of his stories that deal with madness in the endemic solitude of the bush. He is less interested in the children themselves than in the effects of their loss on their shattered parents.
Pierce also places a class spin on the stories, sometimes in what seems to me to be an unfair way. Newspaper accounts, he argues, imply the helplessness and passivity of the lost children without the intervention of the squatting class, whose search for the children both helps renew their sources of labour and suggests their attitudes of noblesse oblige. Is it too simple to suggest that whatever their privileges they might have been motivated by the kind of ordinary human sympathy that most people would have in the same situation? Certainly, when they don't go out searching, he is scathingly contemptuous of them -- like the squatters' sons who entertain an audience with a poetry reading while others are searching.
He argues that most of the lost children came from the families of the rural poor and speculates interestingly on the role of the Aborigines in these narratives. Aborigines often feature as the 'secular agents' of salvation. Stories of lost children are a means by which Aborigines may be re-admitted to the mainstream narratives in, and of, Australia, though sadly in the end this doesn't happen.
When he turns to the 20th century, however, Pierce's vision is darker still: 'the figure of the lost child still haunts the Australian imagination. Many novels, stories, plays and films since the 1950s are preoccupied with terrible transformations of that figure -- abandoned, abused, aborted, abducted or murdered.' 20th century accounts of the lost child are absent in redemptive possibilities; they are about 'the rending of communities, rather than the uniting of them'. Again, Pierce reads a much larger significance into this. He goes so far as to call it 'a cultural death wish'.