Productive Anxieties: Lostness in The Arrival and Requiem for a Beast

Abstract

The classic Australian children’s story Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) opens with a quintessential scene of lostness:

Little Dot had lost her way in the bush. She knew it, and was very frightened [...] she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. [...] The thought of being lost and alone in the wild bush at night took her breath away with fear, and made her tired little legs tremble under her.

(Pedley 1982, p. 1)

In part, Dot’s anxiety derives from her knowledge of children lost before her. She remembers the loss and death of a neighbour child whose mother ‘never saw that little boy again, although he had been found’ (Pedley, p. 2). The allusion to lostness as a state especially threatening to children informs Dot’s fear, so that Dot and the Kangaroo both draws on and extends what has been influentially described as a particularly ‘Australian anxiety’ (Pierce 1999). The same landscape which gave rise to mythologies of frontier-like hardship and survival posed real threats to anyone who might become lost in it. Accordingly, the capacity of the Australian environment to consume people infused the cultural productions of a relatively young and sparsely populated colonial society.