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.
