In the myth of the ‘lost child’ who wonders away in the bush, the full weight of Australian displacement is encapsulated. The image of the child achieves potency in Australia as an overt symbol of the nation. The child with its subordinate status, while serving as the pretext for imperial conquest and domination also normalises the threatening identification with the other: the child is both pre-formed self and repudiated other. Montaigne’s essay ‘On cannibals’ where it is suggested that cannibals live in an Edenic state of purity and simplicity and later Rousseau’s comparison of the child’s mind to a wild plant further characterize the uncontaminated nature of colonial space which encourages paternity and imperial surrogation.

This unformedness of colonial space is also the geographic metaphor of the savage mind, a place for inscription by which the place is constructed out of empty space and through this control of education the colonial subject is subdued.

When Australia was declared by Captain Cook as a Terra Nullius, he made an explicit geographical use of Locke’s philosophy because of its potentialiaty, and amenability to inscription. In Locke’s greatest influence on the theory of childhood, the concept of tabula rasa, blank mind or absence is significant in the imperial enterprise where the negation of colonial space is a necessary preparation for the great civilizing mission.

The invention of childhood in the discourse of empire is coterminous with that of imperialism where the cross fertilization between childhood and primitivism becomes important since both need growth and maturation. The child holds in balance the contradictory tendencies of imperial rhetoric: authority in balance with nurture, domination with enlightenment, debasement with idealization, negation with affirmation, exploitation with education, filiations with affiliation. The trope of the child, an unique trope, is an important appropriation to the discourse of empire. Devaleena Das THE TROPE OF THE CHILD IN AN IMAGINARY LIFE In Postcolonial literature, the colonised other is represented in terms of tropes to justify imperial rule.

David malouf an imaginary life analysis