This idea is repeated constantly. Perhaps the travails and sometimes the deaths of children are emblematic either of the forfeiting of part of the national future, or of an anxiety that Australia will never truly welcome European settlement. There is also an intimation of the guilt of parents for ever having brought children to such a hostile environment. At the risk of sounding literal or simplistic, this seems to me to be drawing rather a long bow. As Pierce's own account testifies, children were often lost in the bush, a situation of dramatic poignancy, so that it is not hard to see why fiction writers would want to write about it and artists to paint it.
Pierce notes also that it lends itself naturally to the highly popular genre of melodrama.
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.