Babes in the Bush' is a famous novel revolving around bushrangers by Rolf Boldrewood. He was a romantic novelist best known for his exciting and realistic portrayals of pioneer life in Australia. Excerpt from Babes in the Bush "'Don't people go to Australia to make money?' asked Rosamond Effingham, a girl of twenty, with 'eldest daughter' plainly inscribed upon her thoughtful features. 'I saw in a newspaper that some one had come home after making a fortune, or it may have been that he died there and left it to his relatives.'"

T/C FROM LOST IN THE BUSH.

Tracing the complex yet intimate relationship between a present-day national obsession with childhood and a colonial past with which Australia as a nation has not adequately come to terms, Young and Free draws on philosophy, literature, film and testimony. The result is a demonstration of how anxiety about childhood has become a screen for more fundamental and intractable issues that vex Australian social and political life. Joanne Faulkner argues that by interpreting these anxieties in their relation to settler-colonial Australia’s unresolved conflict with Aboriginal people, new ways of conceiving of Australian community may be opened. The book engages with philosophical and literary characterizations of childhood, from Locke and Rousseau, to Freud, Bergson, Benjamin Agamben, Lacan, Rancière and Halbwachs. The author’s psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an engagement with contemporary political philosophy that informs Faulkner’s critique of the concepts of the subject, sovereignty and knowledge, resulting in a speculative postcolonial model of the subject. Cover artist credit: Lyndsay Bird Mpetyane Artwork title: Ahakeye (Bush Plum)