Lawson's fictional treatment of the theme, for instance, is fully in keeping with other of his stories that deal with madness in the endemic solitude of the bush. He is less interested in the children themselves than in the effects of their loss on their shattered parents. Pierce also places a class spin on the stories, sometimes in what seems to me to be an unfair way. Newspaper accounts, he argues, imply the helplessness and passivity of the lost children without the intervention of the squatting class, whose search for the children both helps renew their sources of labour and suggests their attitudes of noblesse oblige . He argues that most of the lost children came from the families of the rural poor and speculates interestingly on the role of the Aborigines in these narratives.
Aborigines often feature as the 'secular agents' of salvation.
Stories of lost children are a means by which Aborigines may be re-admitted to the mainstream narratives in, and of, Australia, though sadly in the end this doesn't happen. Again, Pierce reads a much larger significance into this. He goes so far as to call it 'a cultural death wish'. Laurie Clancy is a Melbourne novelist and freelance writer.