Young and Free: [Post]colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia, written by Joanne Faulkner

Abstract

The lost and stolen child is seen as central to colonial and [post]colonial Australian in Young and Free. Colonialist-settlers continue in their efforts to modernise the Aboriginal people by imposing their imagined ideas of proper childhood on indigenous children, the age group most easily colonised and subdued. To the colonialists-settlers, the native children were innocent and impressionable blank slates, to be recruited into projects to control and manage their knowledge in boarding schools, orphanages or as slaves in settler households. Similar policies now displace refugee children seeking asylum in Australia out to offshore detention centres. Joanne Faulkner traces how childhood has been a symptom of the state of the nation’s drifting consciousness and the site of memory and also of forgetting and of the unconscious.