“Then Something Started Growing in the Emptiness”: Revisiting the Lost Child in the Bush in Australian Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction

Herb, Annika

Title: “Then Something Started Growing in the Emptiness”: Revisiting the Lost Child in the Bush in Australian Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction
Creator: Herb, Annika
Relation: Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds p. 247-270
Relation: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39888-9_13
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Resource Type: book chapter
Date: 2023
Description: In colonial Australian children’s literature, the desire to exert control over the land, its inhabitants, and the construction of a national identity has been a central concern, exemplified in the narrative of the lost child in the Australian bush. The lost child trope offers a reflection of “Australian anxiety” (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge University Press, 1999), symbolising the troubled negotiation in integrating European ideals onto an Indigenous landscape (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, xii. Cambridge University Press, 1999); this is heightened when the lost child is female. Colonial texts place deviant female characters as being subsumed by the bush as a culmination of concerns about national identity and gender roles. This chapter explores the colonial tradition of representation of the girl and the bush as entities to be feared and dominated through A Little Bushmaid by Mary Grant Bruce and Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner. It considers how contemporary Australian Young Adult texts rewrite the lost child in the bush trope through the complex symbolic relationship between the girl and the bush in Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden and The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf reclaims a focus on Indigenous land, identity, knowledge, and narrative, returning to Indigenous roots.
Subject: postcolonial literature; Indigenous literature; critical plant studies; Australian literature; children's literature; young adult litreature
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1499857
Identifier: uon:54796
Identifier: ISBN:9783031398889
Language: eng

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