ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the idea of how inner lost child trauma at the heart of the complex can contribute to the outward abuse of actual children through shadow projection/deflection: a condition that this book identifies as ‘double wounding’. These inequalities combine individual acts of aggression and institutional/governmental failures to act, which in some instances can been understood as complicity. A number of Australian national enquiries, reports and commissions have attempted to atone for such past injustices. The analysis of broad cultural/psychological issues and associated screen texts that address the concept of double wounding will be framed around three central areas of national shame: the Stolen Generations, indigenous children taken from their families by political and religious agencies to be placed with institutions and non-indigenous families; the sexual abuse of children in religious institutions; and government refugee policies, implemented to the physical and psychological detriment of children. There might be royal commissions, attempted reforms and official apologies, but it is doubtful whether the lost children at the heart of these gestures - those still suffering traumatic childhoods and others now grown who remain haunted by past abuse - will ever be recovered.
