ABSTRACT
From the formative years of the Australian film industry, the lost child of earlier art and literature became a familiar motif for cinema and later television. With the ‘New Wave’ growth of the film industry (1970–1980s) the theme gathered momentum and during the ‘Post New Wave’, beginning in 1990, the lost child continued as a stable plot device. Since 2000, current film offerings still confirm that the lost child is an energy underlying multiple and often conflicting notions of national identity. These stories can be divided into three categories that adopt the perspective of the lost child who is eventually found, the searchers of the child who is often not recovered and the protagonist who functions as both searcher and lost child or object of the quest - Garth Davis’ Lion (2016) and the Spierig brothers’ Predestination (2014) for example. This chapter also looks at the relationship of the grail myth to lost child cinema, with the child at the heart of the story symbolising both the grail keeper and the (curative) grail itself.
