Dingo got my baby

http://www.aol.co.uk/video/dingos-got-my-baby-trial-by-media

An interesting short video about the Chamberlain case which is one of the most notable in Australia. It was referred to in Peter Pierce's book The Country of Lost Children about the centrality of lost children to white, colonial Australia. Pierce makes a logical case for the widespread fictional and factual stories of children lost 'in the Bush' being a manifestation of the white settlers' anxiety within their adopted landscape.

The Chamberlain case can be seen in some ways as a twentieth century version of these stories of children being consumed by the threatening, impenetrable Australian Outback. In the video one commentator remarks that many Australians found it easier to believe the mother killed her baby than that a dingo did; the urban majority of Australians also thought that their society was in control of the natural world now. Perhaps the deep fascination and conflicting emotions which have surrounded the Chamberlain case show that Australians are still anxious about their place in the world...

....but then aren't we all?

As Pierce writes, in the twentieth century children were no longer lost in the Bush but became the victims of human predators in urban environments. As Pierce also notes, this was not a phenomenon restricted to Australia. The author Liam Davison, sadly killed in the Malaysian airliner shot down over the Ukraine, wrote a novel about an Australian couple who lose their child whilst travelling in France (The Betrayal 1999). He made a very interesting comment : 'It doesn't matter whether it take splace in Europe or Australia, it's the otherness that  I wanted to examine. When it's Europeans in Australia, or Australians in Europe, or anyone in a foreign place [such as the McCanns in Portugal], it is the sense of the other, being in the other place, that intensifies the panic and loss.'

And the sense of being cast adrift, uncertain of where we are and therefore who we are, clusters around the figure of the lost child.

The Missing ripples beyond history

The BBC’s new ‘flagship’ drama series The Missing is another of many crime programmes and films which centre on the disappearance or murder of a child. Coming soon after the success of ITV’s Broadchurch, British TV companies are tapping into the media exposure of several high-profile real stories. In a Radio Times interview, the star of The Missing James Nesbitt says “a lot of people have mentioned the Madeleine McCann case” in its similarity to the series’ plot:

                “But it’s much more of a thriller than that. That’s not to say there aren’t thriller elements in any child abduction. But it’s the notion of dropping a pebble in water and the ripples…the ramifications are huge.

                It’s not just about the father and mother and immediate family. It’s about other people’s lives being affected over a course of time. That brings the thriller element.” (RT, 25-31 October 2014, p. 11)

                This interview aligns the fictional drama with real life while placing it back as a creative work. It’s interesting that Nesbitt refers to a pebble and ripples – in a way the McCann case could be seen as the pebble and this drama itself is one of the myriad ripples which have proceeded from it. Except, of course, the ripples have been crossing the surface for centuries, long before our technological media was invented. The ramifications are indeed huge, and far below the surface.

                The academic Jack Zipes has just published a translation of the very first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales. This is the edition before the Grimms censored, edited and sanitised the stories for middle-class families, upholding Christian values. The tales are apparently much closer to those passed down orally through communities over many years and include such gems as ‘How the Children Played at Slaughtering’ in which a group of children play at being a butcher and a pig and a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned.

In these early versions, those tales we think are familiar are also harsher: the stepmothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel were, originally, their mothers, Zipes believing that the Grimms made the change in later editions because they “held motherhood sacred”. So it is Snow White’s own mother who orders the huntsman to “stab her to death and bring me back her lungs and liver as proof of your deed. After that I’ll cook them with salt and eat them”, and Hansel and Gretel’s biological mother who abandons them in the forest.

In ‘The Children of Famine’ a mother threatens her daughters because there is nothing else to eat: “You’ve got to die or else we’ll waste away,” she tells them. In response, the children give up life: “We’ll lie down and sleep, and we won’t get up again until the Judgement Day arrives.”  (Guardian.com, 12 November 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers-fairytales-horror-new-translation)

This shows that lost children (not only lost as victims of violence, but also children lost to innocence who perpetrate violence…) are sadly nothing new. The last story recalls an infamous scene in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure when the young son, known as ‘Little Father Time’, feels the burden of his parents’ poverty and kills himself and his siblings. He leaves a suicide note saying “Done because we are too menny”. Narratives of lost children are perhaps the starkest, most powerful way to convey themes of poverty and social exclusion. They draw attention to the brutal realities of contemporary life in the time in which they are written.

But they are also a reminder of time itself. Hardy’s child who chooses death is called ‘Little Father Time’ because he acts and speaks with world-weariness even though he is only a young child. He is youth and age, life and death in one small package. A doctor in the novel asserts that the boy is an example of a modern child who sees the “terrors” of life too early and embodies “new views of life” different to the previous generation. The figure of the lost child has been and is an embodiment of the conflicts of the modern world but is also a more profound symbol of something beyond history. 

In The Missing, the narrative continually switches back and forth from the present day to eight years ago, when the boy Ollie is abducted. This is a common narrative device in many TV programmes, films and novels with all sorts of subjects. But it is most appropriate in narratives of lost children, where we are forced to consider a future curtailed, what might have been, and the past stretching back, also irrevocably altered as every past event becomes redefined at the point in history – beyond history – where the story is broken, a silence opens up, the pebble hits the pond and the ripples go on forever.

Dr Who and the Child in Time

 I’ve been a Dr Who fan since my own childhood, hiding behind cushions and, I remember once, peaking from just inside the kitchen door, fearful of even being in the same room as whatever monstrous creation was being shown (but not wanting to turn off and miss the story completely).

A recent Dr Who episode made an interesting reference to our ingrained, culturally inherited fears and the way they collect around the figure of a lost child. Episode 10, 'In the Forest of the Night'       began with a schoolgirl running through forest as if pursued. Significantly, she was wearing a red hooded coat so we were deliberately drawn to the tales of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. 

There were several other references to this during the programme, particularly the appearance of wolves, and also to ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (the girl leaving a trail of items from her school bag, rather than breadcrumbs, to allow the Doctor to follow). London, and the whole world, had been covered overnight with forest and the Doctor realised (of course) that this was to protect the world from being annihilated by a solar flare. Of most interest to me was the Doctor’s assertion at the end that this had happened before but the human race had forgotten, except to immortalise the feelings of fear, putting them into 'fairy stories'. The Doctor describes forgetting as 'the human super power', without which we wouldn't 'go to war or make babies'. At the climax of the story, the girl in the red coat goes home to be reunited with her sister who had gone missing, prompting her hearing of voices and visions of the future.

A lot of my research is looking in to why the figure of the lost child is so often the centre of stories of fear, even to the point of our whole world being torn apart. Of course, any real lost child is a tragedy which must be agony for those that suffer it. The new BBC drama about the abduction of a child, The Missing, has as its tagline 'Every parent's worst nightmare'. And dramatists, writers, TV and film makers all clearly know that they tap into this psychological darkness - and that because of that many will not turn away but turn on. I believe there is more than just a parent's fear of being parted from their child in the constant manifestations of lost children. In a similar way to the Doctor (stick with me on this), I think that the 'lost child' is one of those archetypes which dwell within us, are passed down through a sort of collective memory or, if nothing else, is passed through time in the stories we tell, from the oral tales that Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood wandered out of, to the image-laden, noisy narratives of now.

The lost child figure is bound up with our thoughts about birth and procreation (not surprisingly) but is also intrinsic to how we think about death and war. Like Doctor Who it is also about time - futures possible but curtailed, pasts forgotten or re-created - as the good Doctor suggested, the human race is good at forgetting, forgetting the really profound, burying it deep. How else to explain that, until recently, the British public had no idea about the centuries-old practice of Child Migration, where hundreds of thousands of children were parted from their families and sent to live in horrific conditions in far away colonies? or to explain the silence surrounding the thousands of children who go missing every year, a silence which also surrounds the incredibly loud furore over a few highly-publicised cases (why them and not the others?) If we care so deeply how do we allow children to be lost on a daily basis?

http://www.childmigrantstrust.com/our-work/child-migration-history

British Library EThOS : Thesis Details - 'Towards another language': the journey of the lost child in the works of Janet Frame and David Malouf

British Library EThOS : Thesis Details - 'Towards another language': the journey of the lost child in the works of Janet Frame and David Malouf

This is the link to my PhD thesis

The Lost Child


'Do you know, Quinn, there isn't even a word for a parent who has lost a child? Strange isn't it? You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble , but no, there is a hole in the English language. It is unspeakable. Bereft.' (from Bereft by Chris Womersley 2012)

I'm currently reading the above, excellent, novel. It was brought to my attention by my friend Lola Herrero and it has struck me as another powerful narrative involving a lost child. This has been the focus of my research for about 8 years - my wife berates me for being 'sick', and gets me some accusing looks by announcing my fascination in public.

But then again, Liz did create the image above. So...

In this blog I will be discussing some of my ideas surrounding the lost child - why it pervades our culture, and has done for centuries, from folk tales such as Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel to modern books, plays, films and television series (the latest of which - The Missing - began last night on BBC 1), In the cold, hard, material world our media often explodes with terror and anger on high-profile cases such as Maddie Macann and yet there are hundreds of thousands of lost children in Europe, not to mention the wider world, that receive no attention. Their loss is perhaps more desperate as shattered lives become silence.

And that brings me back to the quote at the top - the lost child is 'unspeakable', the lost child is silence. It is a quivering in our voice and a collective sigh when we can form no words, or the words we try to speak, or write, become utterly devoid of meaning. I think the lost child represents a void within language itself - a 'hole'.

I will write some more detail on this in later posts. I don't want to trivialise the very human, real tragedies surrounding every lost child - far from it. I think that by analysing the way we speak, write and represent lost children reveals huge amounts about our individual and collective psychologies and the traumas which crack our society. The Australian academic Peter Pierce wrote that his country is The Country of Lost Children (1999): he argues that the early settler narratives (fact and fiction) of children lost in the 'bush' were symptomatic of their anxiety in a new, foreign landscape. But Pierce admits himself that in the twentieth century, as the agents of child loss became human and urban, the anxiety was not restricted to one country. Geraldine Cousin, in her book Playing for Time, analysed British theatre productions between 1990 and 2005, noting a prevalence of stories about lost children alongside themes of fear and danger.

As our society is gripped by seemingly ever greater fears of terrorism, war and disease, the figure of the lost child is a symbol, a symptom but perhaps also a cure...

For now, to end this first-born child of a blog as it enters the hole in language, I'll quote some more of Bereft:

'He shuddered to imagine all the children of the world left defenceless, abandoned by war or disease to fend for themselves. He pictured a crusading army of them storming over the land with Sarah at their head, seeking retribution from those who had failed them'