Christ as Lost Innocent: Lost Faith, Fickle Providence, and the Land’s Sacrificial Demands

The lost child in the Australian bush is a persistent cultural trope present in fiction, film, and visual art from the 1850s to the current day. In the modern secular imagination, these stories are about land and nation. Since the 1980s, literary scholars have pored over nineteenth-century writings, finding that lost children represented a white population ill at ease in the land. Peter Pierce called the phenomenon ‘an Australian anxiety’ in which parents lived in fear and, far from the mother country, doubted their ability to raise a young nation in a strange land. Any mention of religion, and in the nineteenth century there is plenty, has been read as an extension of empire, as if Christianity’s association with colonialism nullifies the experience of faith, or Christian expression reveals only emptiness. But the religious significance of the lost child as Christ-child was there in the story’s beginning. It is present in Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, Marcus Clarke’s ‘Pretty Dick’, and later nineteenth-century stories by Rosa Praed among others. This chapter rediscovers the early theological substance of the lost child as Christ and its implications for the construction of sacred and secular in the white Australian imagination.