Madeleine McCann

Eternal Fixation: The Madeleine McCann Disappearance Show

The “lost child” endures as motif and theme, the stalking shadow of much literature, the background to a society’s anxiety.  The child, often deemed innocent, becomes the ink blot of loss in such disappearance.  In Australia, it was captured by Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999).  In wide spaces, innocence has much room to go wrong in, to vanish and encourage judgment.