Dr. Joanne Faulkner

Title

Coding the Indigenous child for adoption: the colonial Imaginarium of "ragged” and “rescued” children

Abstract

The removal of First Nations children from their families and culture has historically been, and continues to be, an apparatus of settler colonial governance that dispossesses generations of children of the relationships and knowledges in which their connection to country is grounded. Nonetheless, settler culture often represents Aboriginal children as attractive, if degraded, objects of desire: from the sensuous "piccaninny" images by Brownie Downing, to Baz Luhrman's depiction of Nullah, the "creamy"-skinned, magical Aboriginal boy, who metonymically stood for the history of the Stolen Generations in Australia (2008). This paper examines recent efforts to reframe state removal of Aboriginal children in terms of ‘adoption’ and the resurgence of an old discourse of white rescue to naturalise it by linking this discourse to the piccaninny trope. The paper develops scholarship on ‘the piccaninny’ representation by reading it alongside the…