The innocent child has a particular resonance for Australia as nation, a nation clinging to its own innocence at the time the Readers were published, some as early as the first decade of the twentieth century and others in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, barely‐formed patriotic sentiment and a “sparkle of joyousness” were increasingly threatened by the horrors of Aboriginal displacement and genocide, the economic, social and political fallout of the First World War, and perhaps most powerfully, the legacy of a nineteenth‐century “innocence” (ignorance) of the Australian natural environment. In lost children narratives, nature (not the merely “mischievous” entity envisioned by Turner) has the power to transform innocence into an adult knowingness. More dramatically, through death, innocence is replaced with a different kind of maturity and cultural sensibility. As such, a dark and pervasive cultural anxiety, a fear of the fragility of innocence, underpins these texts of lost children, especially children lost in the bush.
Peter Pierce’s useful study, The Country of Lost Children, provides extensive analysis of two of the nineteenth‐century texts reproduced in the Readers (the adapted version of Reverend P. W. Fairclough’s “Lost in the Bush” and Marcus Clarke’s “Pretty Dick”), as well as broader analysis of these mythological stories as they relate to an Australian cultural heritage. Pierce reads narratives of lost children as “metaphorical, for the figure of the lost child becomes a vital means for European Australians in the latter half of the nineteenth century to express and understand the insecurities of their position in a land that was new to many of them, and strange to all” (Pierce xiii). While the lost child’s symbolic status as identified by
Pierce is clearly relevant, the significance of these narratives in the context of the Readers extends beyond the anxieties of a European settler society. As Pierce acknowledges, “this figure would also afford an opportunity to develop the discourse of ‘young Australia’, that is, to speculate on the nature of the coming race in this country, and the future of the nation soon to be” (8). As institutional texts published more or less 20 years after Federation, the Readers are concerned with the literary production of children and childhood via the technologies of education as analogous with the mythical production of an innocent Australia. Therefore, it is innocence (and the protection or destruction of this innocence) that in both literal and metaphorical senses forms the central concern of lost children narratives in the Readers.
There are four texts particularly relevant to this discussion; “Lost in the Bush”, published in The Victorian Readers Fourth Book, “Pretty Dick” in The Tasmanian
Readers Grade V, “How the Child was Lost” in Queensland School Readers Book V, and
“A New Year’s Day Adventure” from The Victorian Readers Fourth Book.1 In all of these narratives, the child protagonists typify a view of childhood as a rarefied social condition, a naturally innocent state that should be valued and protected as such. The emergence of this idea of childhood, the notion that children should exist in a separate social domain to be mothered and treasured, is a product of the modern era (Ariès 29). In Pictures of Innocence, Anne Higonnet names the image of the naturally innocent child that has evolved since the seventeenth century the “Romantic child” (16‐7). Significantly, for the context of the Readers, Higonnet argues that the Romantic child denies or allows us to forget aspects of adult society (23). And just as importantly, the child figure (and the state of childhood) can be reinscribed as reminiscent of an idealised past, a past romanticised in the very process of remembering:
The modern child is always the sign of a bygone era, of a past which is necessarily the past of adults, yet which, being so distinct, so sheltered, so innocent, is also inevitably a lost past, and therefore
understood through the kind of memory we call nostalgia. (Higonnet 27)
Written, produced and mediated by adults, the Readers can be read in relation to such nostalgia, through what is a selective recording and reordering of an ideal childhood necessary to envisioning an illustrious narrative of national growth, along with, naturally, a promising future.
Roni Natov’s study The Poetics of Childhood and Peter Coveney’s The Image of
Childhood adduce similar arguments about the rise of the Romantic child, as
promulgated in a literary context by Rousseau, Blake and Wordsworth. Higonnet’s notion of nostalgia, the significance of childhood in relation to the rediscovery of a lost past (lost in both the individual past and in the past of the culture), is taken up by Natov in citing Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of
Human Interiority 1780‐1930. Following Steedman’s work, Natov suggests that
reclaiming a childhood past “suggests a larger historical retrieval as well, so that the idea of childhood and the modern idea of history emerged together” (4). This is particularly apparent in relation to the representation of innocence in narratives literally concerned with loss, lost children and lost innocence. Coveney agrees: “In childhood lay the perfect image of insecurity and isolation, of fear and bewilderment, of vulnerability and potential violation” (31‐2).2
The title of Marcus Clarke’s short story “Pretty Dick” is in itself suggestive of a romanticised childhood innocence.3 The artistic precursors to this idyllic version of childhood (most notably Sir Joshua Reynold’s The Age of Innocence, reproduced as the frontispiece of The Victorian Readers Second Book) offer images of pretty, luminescent children ‐ the paleness of soft skin highlighted by rosy cheeks. In keeping with such depictions of childhood, Pretty Dick is described as “a slender little lad, with eyes like pools of still water when the sky is violet at sunset, and a skin as white as milk” (1). Yet there is a clear differentiation between Pretty Dick and his European forebears – his skin “where it had been touched by the sun […]
was a golden brown” (1). Pretty Dick’s suntan marks him as an Australian child. Furthering this notion of an Australian identity (revealed by a preoccupation with rural masculinity), Pretty Dick is “manly too” (1). Pretty Dick’s manliness is at odds with his childlike appearance, yet his innocence is maintained. Such tensions and contradictions surface throughout school Readers. How can the figure of the child be deployed as both an “innocent” at the same time as he is a knowing inheritor of a particular kind of national legacy? In the stories themselves, and more particularly as they can be read as instances of the Readers’ larger metanarrative, the contradictions are rarely resolved. To this point at least, Pretty Dick is clearly still a child, with child‐like desires and pleasures. Paddling and playing at the creek, he sings “scraps of his mother’s songs”, and slips “merrily between friendly trunks and branches” (2). Even the personification of the creek encapsulates a mood of childish abandonment. “Here his friend, the creek, divided itself into all sorts of queer shapes, and ran here, and doubled back again […] just out of pure fun and frolic” (2).
Significantly, Pretty Dick’s innocent pleasure becomes tainted as he moves toward the creek “Crossing Place”. “Now the way began to go up‐hill, and there were big, dead trees to get over, and fallen, spreading branches to go round” (4). The crossing place stands for Pretty Dick’s own crossing of the very fragile boundary of childhood, and his innocence is under threat as he steps outside the “known” into the foreign and seductive bush. “There was a subtle perfume about him now; not a sweet rich perfume like the flowers in the home‐station garden, but a strange, intoxicating smell” (4). The natural environment becomes a more foreboding presence as he continues upwards in a transgression against nature (both in terms of the bush itself and in terms of dangerously stepping beyond the threshold of childhood). Unlike the friendly creek, the scrub is hostile, it scratches and tears at him “as though it would hold him back” (4). When Pretty Dick begins to fear that he is lost, it is his mother’s voice he hears. This association between the child and the mother (securing Pretty Dick’s continued status as child/innocent) is juxtaposed with Pretty Dick’s appropriation of man‐like characteristics; “But he put the feeling
away bravely, swallowed down a lump in his throat, and went on again” (5). Pretty Dick’s imitation of manliness, however, only serves to underscore his childish impulse to cry.
Pretty Dick is not permitted re‐entry into the adult world. From his vantage point high on a jutting peak he sees Mr Gaunt the overseer on horseback down in the valley. Pretty Dick’s coo‐ees go unheard and “the departure of the presence of something human felt like a desertion” (6). The last semblances of Pretty Dick’s innocence are shattered when it becomes clear that he is lost and abandoned. Familiar tropes of the lost child narrative are employed with a brutal intensity; the mocking cry of “a hideous black crow”, the only “living thing” around him, signals his aloneness, as well as his eventual fate. Childhood is irretrievably lost: “No more mother’s kisses, no more father’s caresses, no more pleasures, no more flowers, no more sunshine – nothing but grim death waiting remorselessly in the iron solitude of the hills” (7). Lost innocence, it appears, is tantamount to death itself. Or, taking the equation further, death brings maturity. Clearly, the significance of such a symbolic economy extends beyond bush‐lost children narratives in the Readers’ story of national growth. Lost innocence, death and dying are also integral to the nation’s rite of passage.
Like “Pretty Dick”, an excerpt from Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry
Hamlyn, in Queensland School Readers Book V also explores the bush‐lost child
narrative as well as the symbolic interrelationship between death and lost innocence. In the Queensland Reader the tale appears in two parts, as “How the child was lost” and “How the child was found”. The same story appears in The New
Australian School Series Third Reader (the NSW series), where it is called “A lost child”.4 Just as in “Pretty Dick”, the eight year‐old protagonist of this story leads an isolated, solitary existence, the child of a shepherd and his wife. He is clearly a native‐born son, “a strange wild bush child […] and yet beautiful to look on; as active as a roe, and, with regard to natural objects, as fearless as a lion” (17). Like the suntanned and manly boy in Pretty Dick, this child’s superior physical attributes
and courage mark him as a product of a young and virile nation. Kingsley’s wild child, perhaps in mapping out the visual and literary tracks other bush‐lost children will inevitably follow, is sorely tempted by the forest across the river. As Pierce observes, “This is one of the earliest, and – for later writers – perhaps the most influential of all the colonial narratives of the lost child” (14). At the end of summer, when the river is low, the child undresses and, carrying his clothes, he wades through to the other side: “And there he stood free in the forbidden ground” (19). In a striking exemplification of the over‐arching metanarrative of national growth, the child plays out a crude re‐enactment of discovery and colonisation. Here, in this foreign and forbidden landscape, is a “new kingdom, rich beyond his utmost hopes” (19). In a language resonating with terms familiar from exploration notebooks and diaries, “he would penetrate this region, and see how far it extended” [emphasis added] (19). Dreaming of the stories he will have for his father, suggesting the kind of relationship between Australia and the “mother land” examined in the next chapter of this study, the child longs to show the parent the wonders of the new land: “Perhaps he would build a new hut over here, and come and live in it!” (19).
Inevitably though, the child is lost. Returning to national anxieties as performed via these kinds of narratives, and re‐performed via the function of the school Reader, a kind of double inscription, the story anatomises the child’s terror and madness. “Then he broke down, and that strange madness came on him which comes even on strong men when lost in the forest; a despair, a confusion of intellect, which has cost many a man his life. Think what it must be with a child!” (20). Evoking the nightmare later shared by Pretty Dick, the child walks further into the mountains “and when the solemn morning came up again he was still tottering along the leading range, bewildered; crying, from time to time, ‘Mother! Mother!’ still nursing his little bear, his only companion, to his bosom, and holding still in his hand a few poor flowers he had gathered the day before” (20).
In the second part of the story, reproduced as “How the Child was Found” in the Queensland Reader, the narrative’s focalisation shifts to the men charged with searching for the lost child. Unlike “Lost in the Bush” or other stories of bush‐lost children where tracking efforts are a cause for hope, if not celebration, Kingsley has his trackers despondent at the outset. “They knew what a solemn task they had before them; and, while acting as though everything depended on speed, guessed well that their search was only for a little corpse, which, if they had luck, they would find stiff and cold under some tree or crag” (21). Like other stories of lost children, the usual traces of Aboriginal presence and absence complicate the narrative and its relationship to a larger story of national growth. His mother suggests that the boy has crossed the river because he had seen children playing over there: “She, knowing well that they were fairies, or perhaps worse, had warned him solemnly not to mind them; but that she had very little doubt that they had helped him over and carried him away to the forest” (22). It is unclear whom or what might be worse than fairies but it is possible that the mother refers to Aboriginal children.5 Read in this way, the story suggests that an Aboriginal presence informs white Australian anxieties about belonging. It is significant then, that unlike other narratives of lost children, there are no “black trackers” involved in the recovery of the child. Instead, Cecil and Sam rely on brave dog Rover to take up the trail “like a bloodhound” (22). Like Pretty Dick, the child is found “dead and stiff” (24). As Susan K. Martin argues, this ending (the discovery of the child by the “better‐orientated settler men”), does offer a particular kind of closure that is common to many white lost child stories, stories that can be read as recuperative. “They release a fear of an uncanny, unmapped, unmappable landscape only to write it into a story in which the bush is made to give up its secret (the child, the space, the track), and an ending provides closure: the landscape is re‐told as mapped” (85).
In “Lost in the Bush” though, in The Victorian School Readers Fourth Book, the landscape ultimately remains an uncanny and unmapped space.6 Its secret, three missing children, is given up only to the dispossessed Australian Aboriginal men called in to translate. “Lost in the Bush” is particularly important to the Australain
narrative tradition of lost children, both in its construction as a true story (and therefore a legitimate account of settlement), and as a perennially popular tale (we were still watching a filmic version at school in the 1980s). Yet the story, despite being so fundamental to the tradition, disrupts it in some fundamental ways. Superficially at least, as Pierce observes, the story “might be regarded as untypical […] for it had a happy outcome” in that survival of the children and reunification of the family are celebrated (16). What Pierce does not adequately explore, however, is how, ultimately, the kind of recuperative ending described by Martin is doubly disavowed. While the children do survive, they are certainly no longer innocent, and in the Readers’ version of events, though the family appears to be reunified, the lost child Jane is handed to one of her rescuers before she is embraced by her father. Although narrative closure would seem to provide thematic and moralistic significance in ensuring that goodness is rewarded and innocence protected, the contradictoriness of the topos, particularly as it can be read across school Readers, suggests something far more complicated and unsatisfying. Drawing again on Martin’s analysis of a lost child episode in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life: “As the successful reader of traces here, and as a representative of an extensive tradition of “Black trackers” in lost child stories, [the tracker] casts doubt on the possibility of non‐Aborigines reading the landscape and, by extension, of settlers being capable of reading those narratives of place and nation, or national fiction, in which [Jane] is figured as future heroine” (80).
An omniscient narrator opens “Lost in the Bush” with a description of place, locating the story “among the mallee” at the back of Spring Hill Station, near Horsham, where “the dreary view was broken only by the summit of Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock” (60). The geographical specificities confirm the narrative’s claims to authenticity. The three child characters are introduced with careful emphasis on their ages ‐ “Isaac, nine years old; Jane, seven and a half; and Frank, a toddler, not four” ‐ as the childhood innocence of the protagonists drives both story elements and narrative significance (60). As the text is largely focalised through the child figures, the children Isaac, Jane and Frank invite reader
identification. They embody one aspect of that which is valued in the Readers’ discourse of children and childhood, that aspect explored in lost children stories, a naturalised and cherished state of goodness and naiveté. When their mother sends them on an errand into the scrub to collect broom, they “set off merrily” (60).
Like Pretty Dick and Henry Kingsley’s lost child, the Duff children are initially represented as happy and carefree in the bush. They have a “fine time”, Isaac climbing trees, Jane picking flowers as well as chasing lizards for Frank (60). The bush is inviting and hospitable. After lunch there is “quite a feast of gum from a