Dangerous Locations THE MISSING PERSON IN AUSTRALIAN CINEMA
The story of Australia is, to a significant extent, an ongoing chronicle concerning notions of isolation, of becoming lost and of the fear of becoming lost. Of the sense of displacement among the first convicts dispatched from England, art critic Robert Hughes notes that their homeland, 12,000 miles away by sea, must have felt ‘further away than the moon, because at least you could see the moon’.1 In the nineteenth century, as the early European settlers clung mostly to the coastal fringes, explorers like Ludwig Leichhardt, Robert Burke and William Wills entered the centre of the country, never to be seen alive again. Frederick McCubbin’s renowned 1886 painting Lost, in which a child is depicted isolated in rugged bushland, further epitomises this burgeoning sense of Australia as a place in which white interlopers who ventured too far inland could be engulfed by the mysterious centre. Indeed, scholar Elspeth Tilley extends the ‘lost child’ trope – prominent in local writing all the way up to the present era – to an extensive body of Australian literature on ‘white vanishing’ more generally.2
Our major cities have long been associated with a sense of civilisation and safety in numbers, whereas the aesthetically sublime but also largely remote outback has fed (simplistically) into narratives of trepidation and Otherness. In the twentieth century, the coastline, dominated by its ‘five teeming sores’, had long since developed into a fortress of white Australian purity, threatened by Indigenous cultures from within and alien immigrants from without. Meanwhile, a potentially pastoral,
