Placing Children in the Australian Suburbs: Representations and Discourse of Landscape and Loss

Where are the places of childhood? This thesis interrogates adult views towards landscapes of childhood and the emplacement of the child in their memories and imagination. From Jacques Rousseau’s (1762) treatise on the authentic embodiment of the (male) child as separated from culture to Richard Louv’s (2005) pathologizing a ‘nature deficit syndrome’ as a condition of childhood in urbanized landscapes, adult anxiety has framed views towards authentic concepts of childhood place and experience (Faulkner 2013). The aim of this research is to offer insights into how such views limit an understanding of childhood in the landscapes of everyday life, and in particular suburbia. The research is based within theoretical perspectives developed within cultural and literary geographies, in the meanings given to landscape, representation and experience (Bristow 2015, Prieto 2012, Weston 2015, Wylie 2007). While this body of scholarship has focused on the theoretical tensions between textual and pictorial histories of the landscape concept in relation to materiality and grounded experience, this research extends these theoretical questions further with a focus on childhood and the child subject (Aitken 2001, Katz 2008, Skelton 2008, Taylor 2013). In these terms, the perspective of how experience entwines with landscape is problematized as an adult positionality (following Aitken 2001) and of memories and imagination located within history and culture (Faulker 2016). Here, the sense of loss towards authentic childhood culture, as experience of place, is read within ideological traditions (Faulker 2011, 2013, 2016), including in a Romanticism that was influenced by Rousseau’s views towards nature, culture, and place (Blundell 2016, Rigby 2014, Taylor 2013). This ideological view towards the nature of childhood frames an idealised landscape as an adult sense of loss. The view towards childhood place as a natured stasis separated from the processes of everyday life is further explored within philosophical nostalgia, as an adult remembrance towards an imaginative past. In these terms, the critiques of phenomenology, of concepts of home and place as a Romanticism (Wylie 2013) are extended within phenomenological debates about the existential distances between adult and child (Beauvais 2015, Costello 2020), the emplacement (and absence) of bodies within the colonial gaze (Dubow 2009; Faulkner 2016) and the historical context of unsettled colonial landscapes (Eggan 2022). In this respect, colonized landscape moves from a tyranny of distance to “the silent tyranny of landscape” (Dubow 2009 p.153) in the production of storied space. Views towards unsettled landscapes may therefore be read in theoretical debates on representation and experience (Bristow 2015; Prieto 2012; Weston 2015; Wylie 2007) which extends perspectives on the relationship between discourse and materiality (Yapa 1997). The relevance for this thesis is how theories of representation and experience address memories of experience, and how such memories are written into places of childhood. The place of childhood in debates on representation and experience, as the origins of, and meaning given to, textual and pictorial representations of experience, are read in six texts of adult memories and imagination towards the places of childhood in Australian suburban landscapes. Each text, as representation, offers a path through these discourses and debates, (nature, past, dwelling, belonging, and the unsettled landscapes of colonialism) offering a perspective which illustrates the limits of emplacing childhood as a concept of idealised nature. Following discussion on discourses of nature, place, and themes of loss, the reading chapters begin with Jeannie Baker’s picture books Window (1991) and Belonging (2004). Tracing the Romantic legacy in the emplacement of the child as nature, the discussion explores the effects of a philosophical remembrance for an adult understanding of place, as the impossibility of return. Memories of situated place are explored in David Malouf’s (1985) memoir of the nooks and crannies of his first home in 12 Edmondstone Street. This reading illustrates the processes of adult positionality in philosophical remembrance, and the power adults have in shaping the concepts of place and experience of childhood. The nooks and crannies of the landscapes of childhood are read in Shaun Tan’s (2008) Tales from Outer Suburbia, where the limits of the Romantic legacy towards childhood place as stasis are explored as a phenomenological vertiginous (Beauvais 2015) and ethical (as authentic) relationship between adult and child. This extends the concept of authenticity from a remembered stasis to the places of everyday life. The concept of where childhood belongs, as storied by adults, as the distances of who may speak for whom, is explored in Narelle Oliver’s (2006) storybook Home, as the place of the wild (child) in the unsettled landscapes of everyday life. The unsettled suburban landscapes, as absent bodies in practiced place, are read in Melissa Lucashenko’s (2013) reportage of growing up in Australian suburbia, Sinking Below Sight. The critical engagement with these texts and the concepts of landscape, Romanticism, and phenomenology in this thesis contributes to the literature on loss and belonging in the landscapes of childhood, and in broader theoretical discussions of the use of phenomenological concepts towards the place of nature and experience in ecocriticism (Rigby 2004, 2020) eco-phenomenology (Eggan 2022) and postcolonialism (Dubow 2009, Faulkner 2016). The detailed analysis of these texts offers a new understanding of the places of childhood in the nooks and crannies of everyday life which are neither a lost nature, nor a lost past. Adapting Raymond Williams (1973), they are the working landscapes of childhood which may shape an equal and rightful place for the child in everyday life. The legacy of the Romantic gaze across industrialised landscapes continues to offer poetic and affective representations about landscapes of loss and in/authenticity of experience (Rigby 2004). Further, the Romantic legacy gathers the child into a universal concept of a childhood culture, securing ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ within an historical and spatial imagination (Louv 2005, Griffiths 2013). This research untangles this Romanticism with perspectives from theories of representation and experience, which suggests alternative ways in which situated lives can be read within histories and place, offering insights into how the place of childhood can be understood, other than determined as lost natures or ghosts of suburbs past.