Engaging philosophy with history, literature, film and testimony, this book examines the critical relationship between white Australian identity and the cultural priority of childhood in Australia.

Joanne Faulkner is ARC Future Fellow in Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.

Acknowledgements / Introduction: Childhood and the Oblivion of Memory / Part I: Child / 1. Visions of Autonomy: Figures of the Child as Model of the Human / 2. Phantasms of Subjection and the Oblivion of the Other / 3. The Uncanny Child as Postcolonial Unconscious and Conscience / Part II: Memory / 4. Children Lost and Stolen: Collective Memory, Childhood and the Stolen Generations / 5. The Child as Witness / 6. Nostalgia, Colonialism, and Aboriginal Community / Part III: History / 7. 'Stronger Futures'? The Peculiar Temporalities of Postcolonial Community / 8. The Emergent Community: Counting the Part that Has No Part / Conclusion: The Metonymic Drift of the Symptom; Between the Child and Politics / Bibliography / Index