AustLit

'Since colonisation, stories of lost white children have been a feature of Australian literature. Elspeth Tilley calls it the ‘white-vanishing’ trope, arguing that stories of lost children, compulsively retold, enable white Australians to assume a victim position. Obscuring a history of violent dispossession, the lost white child functions as a symbol of national innocence. The lost white girl, in her spotless lace and linen, is where innocence is doubled down on. While the search for the lost girl offers an opportunity to assert national character, the mystery of what happens to all those cupids and Botticelli angels, merging prettily into the landscape, into the nonspecific threat of ‘out there’, remains a compelling lacuna around which the community rallies.' (Introduction)