ABSTRACT
The explosion of interest in Australia over the past decade in the topic of family violence was fuelled in February 2014 by the tragic high-profile case of an 11-year-old boy, Luke Batty, who was murdered by his father at a local cricket ground near Melbourne, while his mother, Rosie, herself a victim of domestic violence, watched on helplessly. The family and the concurrent idea of ‘family values’ are, of course, also highly politicised notions. Despite the prevalence of representations of ‘neglectful mothers’ in a number of the texts in this section, the mother is often represented as herself the object of gendered abuse or unwanted male attention across the spectrum of violence, as both victim and victimising. Sofie Laguna’s two novels, The Eye of the Sheep and The Choke, and Sonya Hartnett’s Golden Boys address the issue of family or domestic violence through the eyes of child narrators or protagonists.
