Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, this book investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children figure in Australia's cultural life, to mediate Australians' ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial future.

Joanne Faulkner is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Cultural Studies in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Australia.

1.Introduction 2.Gumnut Babies and 'Babes in the Wood': The Nativised White Child 3.Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child 4.The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child 5.'Breeding Out the Colour' in GevaColor: Jedda 6.Finding 'Home' Through the Child: Bringing Them Home and Assimilationism's Present 7.En-Gendering Failure: Sexualised Girls, Criminalised Boys, Through the Colonial Apparatus 8.Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern 9.Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? The Unrepresentability of the Aboriginal Child