It’s not news that imprisoning and torturing children is now commonplace in Australia. We have a long history of it, and the revelation in 2023 that a thirteen-year-old child with a disability had been held in solitary confinement for weeks in a Queensland youth detention centre, is not surprising — and neither is the Queensland government’s suspension of the Human Rights Act so that children can continue to be tortured in this way. ‘We have listened to the community,’ said Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, a statement absurdly reminiscent of the logic of Ursula Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas.

While not unique, Queensland has form in this regard, as even a cursory glance at the history of incarcerated children shows us. I’m thinking of the Westbrook Boys Home (boys punched in the head, flogged, forced to beat others, served food riddled with maggots, raped and sexually abused); the Wilson Youth Hospital (menstruating girls forced to display their used sanitary pads before being issued with new ones, and medicated with Mellaril — an antipsychotic associated with cardiotoxicity and retinopathy); and the Wolston Park Mental Hospital (girls raped and sexually abused, and threatened with drowning in the nearby Bremer River if they resisted).

There have been hundreds of institutions like these around Australia, in every state, where huge numbers of children have been incarcerated. All across the continent, children have been whipped, beaten, raped, subjected to medical experiments, starved and humiliated in the name of care or justice.

Locking children in solitary confinement — an experience likely to induce psychosis and extreme mental and physical suffering — is not just a ‘failure of the justice system’. There is something much more active and pervasive at work. Subjecting children to a psychic death so profound that, as adults, they will later often kill themselves or engage in activities likely to kill them or drastically shorten their life expectancy, is a savagery that is an expression of a wish to make them disappear, to actually kill them. Some adult survivors of Westbrook, Wilson’s Youth Hospital, and Wolston Park often felt that they had in fact been murdered as children, but had been unable to die.

When children do things that unsettle and frighten adults, that which is buried or unborn in the adult’s emotional life is called to the surface. The assumption of ‘innocence’ as an innate characteristic of childhood, necessarily means that those children who fail to be innocent enough — because they are badly behaved, queer, disabled, Blak — cannot really be children and must therefore suffer the consequences. In colonial Australia, there is always someone to demonise, always a group that isn’t pure enough, that becomes the repository of everyone’s disowned guilt, rage and fear, and that urgently needs policing and punishing.

Contemporary discussions about the lives and care and education of children in Australia are so cooked, so impoverished and hedged about with assumptions of control and paranoia, that writing an essay like this about childhood, about what it means to be a child in modern Australia, feels like I’m presenting evidence of alien life. A 2021 Guardian article by an Australian ethicist, ‘My three-year-old keeps attacking his little brother. How can I stop him?’, while ostensibly seeking benignly liberal ways of responding to a troublesome three-year-old, described young children as ‘pretty stupid morally speaking.’ Even more alarmingly, it recommended that any practice of extending exceptional patience and understanding to them ‘expires’ as children ‘develop autonomy, sense of freedom and responsibility.’ Apart from displaying a staggering lack of insight into how children actually grow, and the contexts in which that happens, this is an argument that is perfectly compatible with Queensland’s overriding of the Human Rights Act, and in its anodyne middlebrow pondering demonstrates that we have no idea how to listen to children, how to think about why they suffer, and why they may carry out ‘criminal’ acts.

Can we even begin to think about what a complex, attentive, freer understanding of children would look like?

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Sometime in the 1960s, the psychoanalyst Esther Bick — a Polish refugee whose family was murdered in the Nazi death camps — proposed the concept of a ‘second skin’ to account for the growth and development of psychic structure in an infant, especially in times of distress. In the late 1990s, Finnish researchers looking at the responses of mothers to their babies’ crying and what is transmitted between them, imaginatively theorised that there is a kind of ‘hole’ between infant and mother through which incorporeal experiences and interior states flow.

If you put the two together — and you often have to make sometimes ungainly but intuitive leaps when you are thinking about babies and young children — the hole enables the growth of the skin — the body, the mind, and its nascent self — that both delimits the world and is inscribed by it, a text that writes as it is written on, scratchings of text over text over text. Through the hole pours the world mediated by, well, whoever happens to be there. The baby’s skin that holds it together is a skin that is composed of many surfaces: flesh of course, but also love, hate, yearning — a transforming self, a porous mediating surface that governs and creates a kind of symbolic register. If the baby feels that the skin that it possesses is not enough a barrier or container — and it never is — it will create a ‘new’ skin, a second skin, to enable it to inhabit both the phenomenal and symbolic worlds. Perhaps we should speak of the act of becoming a person as a poetics of skin or skin of poetics.

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We are born into a caesura, an intermediate space. The early discovery that it is intermediate, and not fully-determined, and can only be made bearable via the encounter of language, is what begins the political and moral life. Language helps us represent what cannot really be spoken, and so we are forever placed in the fissure between what we experience and what we can speak of. But language isn’t enough. We need to create other, more reliable objects and experiences to help us make sense out of our strange desires and madnesses, and to try to instigate a shared experience.

A baby’s attempt to cross the intermediate region where mind and the body meet the world and where self meets other is a voyage that ends and begins in the encounter with language. It’s an encounter that is potentially traumatic, especially since capitalism and enlightenment values have put such enormous weight onto the role of the mother to facilitate the baby’s self and social compliance. We are continually looking for shared experience, for relationality — ways to manage language’s appalled discovery of the unspoken — and being offered consumer goods, violence and fetishes instead.

Clinicians working with very ill babies have found that speaking to the babies about their feelings as though the babies could understand them can lead to profound improvements in the babies’ condition. It’s hard to communicate how profoundly a radical practice this is. In a paper on the clinical practice of Infant and Child Observation, developed by Esther Bick, the Australian psychoanalyst Frances Thomson-Salo wrote that

when the infant knows someone has come to look at them trying to understand them, gaze becomes tremendously important in the development of self and other.

The emphasis is mine, and putting it in capitals or engraving it in stone couldn’t emphasise it enough.

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The gaze of the other. It is all we have. In being attentive to, and thoughtful about, the experiences of young children, it rapidly becomes obvious that it’s axiomatic that the things that make a sustainable life — a life that doesn’t torment us with anxiety and fear — are the same things we needed to be happy as babies. It is the field of the gaze in which these things grow that seems to me to be of critical importance — because we will often continue to read everything that follows in the same way, through replicas of the same hole, multiplying across time so that when we look back across the years, the memories that surface are like passageways to the people we have been.

It is everyone’s daily experience to be inhabited by the unspoken, and sometimes unspeakable, thoughts of others that move through us leaving imprints of their passing, occasionally installing replicas of themselves. The practice of how we split off parts of ourselves and attempt to put them inside others, is as common as the making of sandwiches. There is a bleed, a conduit, (a hole), between our interior lives and the interior lives of others. When the bleed happens on a mass scale, the effects can be tectonic, tearing through generations like an army of demented grotesques.

In 2017, two months after the election of Donald Trump and his sinister vice-president, and the subsequent turbocharging of global fascist movements, I began a clinically supervised Child Observation. Every week, for an hour, for a year, I observed a four-year-old child playing at their preschool. To give such sustained attention to a small child over a long period was an illuminating, even mind-altering, experience.

The play of children is not, as adults like to imagine, a happy frolic with toys. Children use play to take the observed world of adults and try to divine the nature of reality, of their place in the world of relationships, trying to put together an ontological whole. Children’s play is work that takes the present complexities and terrors of the world and seeks to make immediate sense of them. This can be tremendously satisfying, and a source of real internal growth. But sometimes — much more often than adults would like to acknowledge — the terror and confusion of life in twenty-first-century capitalist Australia can be overwhelming. The highly policed institutions that care for children, and the adults that run them —a nuclear family is as much an institution as a school — often cannot bear that, and aren’t able to think about it, to imaginatively enter into the child’s experience and provide them with attentive and thoughtful responses.

If you closely observe children at play, the first question you have to ask yourself is one that is equals part astonishment and wild curiosity: ‘How on earth do children keep doing this kind of work, every day?’

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In May 2017, while I was working through my year of observation, Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre hosted a conversation between two Indigenous writers, Tony Birch and Bruce Pascoe. During the conversation, just as Pascoe had finished emphasising the significance of the image of the mother as a cultural touchstone, Birch made a remarkable intervention. A baby in the audience had been periodically calling out during the event. Birch briefly interrupted his conversation with Pascoe and, speaking to the baby, said: ‘I hope your parent isn’t anxious, because we love to hear that sound. It’s a beautiful sound, because what we are doing is something for your future’. And maybe this could just have been an exceptionally thoughtful way of alleviating a parent’s worries, if Birch hadn’t then also said: ‘So keep speaking up, kid.’

In late 2019, Professor Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman from the Barrungam nation, presented the Family Is Culture report to the NSW government. It was the fruit of a three-year study of the cases of 1,144 Aboriginal children who had been removed from their families by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS), and placed in out-of-home care.

Professor Davis’ report found that FaCS repeatedly removed children who were not at risk at all; lied to the courts about children’s well-being; ignored available Aboriginal care with relatives; separated siblings, and even twins; and in some cases had no idea where the children in care were.

I have often had to talk to early-childhood teachers, child-protection workers and other professionals about very young children with severe behavioural difficulties. Though their descriptions of a child’s suffering are often well-camouflaged behind a wall of professional pathologising language and a boilerplate rhetoric of care and concern, it doesn’t take much digging to uncover a more punitive blaming vocabulary lurking within. The child is: ‘violent’; ‘aggressive’; ‘angry’; ‘lacking empathy’; ‘manipulative’. The practices of removing Indigenous children that Megan Davis chronicled — practices always represented as an expression of deep concern — are in reality the marker of a querulous and unspoken demand: Why don’t you just die?

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Childhood is dominated by liminal states where it is unclear who we are supposed to be, and where the very question of identity is always in visible flux.

The time of life when we have the least power and agency is also the time when we are expected to quickly develop and monitor definite, homogenous and measurable selves. I have had many conversations with distressed young children, and in attempting to describe them I struggle to convey the reality of the content where, say, a plastic shark, can be simultaneously a baby sibling, a feeling of guilt, an abuser, a wished-for protector, a friend.

Sometimes I think that the young child is the person still aware of the ways we inhabit our skin, and how fragile that skin can be, as though a cut in its surface could cause everything inside them to spill out and pour through the world.

I once played with an anxious four-year-old, using a family of small toy bears and a few farm animals. The family seemed stuck in their house, carrying out the same boring tasks over and over. ‘Perhaps,’ I said picking up one of the smallest bears, ‘One of the baby bears could go for a walk?’ ‘No,’ said the child, matter-of-factly taking a small toy dog and stamping it on the baby. ‘The babies will be killed. This one’s dead now.’ When one observes young children playing, one is always floating between the poles of absorption and disorientation, or plain bafflement, trying to establish a stable indeterminate space where one can remain, more or less, waiting for understanding to arrive, to become securely settled like a stone at the bottom of a pond. Patience and generosity — both versions of a kind of expansive gentleness and attentiveness — will take you a very long way in this regard. They are not practices we can afford to put aside when we try to listen to children. They never ‘expire’.

Many years ago, I worked with a five-year-old child who had received a diagnosis of a mental disorder that I found difficult to comprehend. They would often look at me with the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corners of their mouth, as though they were meditating on a secret joke — a joke that provided a keen and incisive insight into the world. But later, too late as it turned out, I discovered that their smile was actually a grimace of fear, a signal that they were struggling to contain their conviction that they were broken in some way and could never be repaired. The smile was the mask of their shame.

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When I was first trying to bring this piece to a conclusion, I wrote long dead passages about childhood and the structures of cruelty that adults routinely build around children, that made no sense to me at all. Without my recognising it, the feeling had been growing on me that when I was writing no-one could hear me, as though I were speaking to ghosts who were also deaf. It was, I think, a recognition of the way that the traces of children’s voices and relationships are erased as they appear, and rarely reach the upper register of adult thought. It’s as if we have ourselves developed a hard second skin, an armour, a carapace, that prevents us having to acknowledge our insistent child-like anxieties and fears that swim around inside our crowded interior colonial lives like hyper-sensitive jellyfish.

Many adults, when faced with a ‘difficult child’ — that is, a child who confounds and upends adult expectations in any way, who threatens to penetrate the armour — go looking for magical solutions that involve regimes of diagnosis or control and punishment: a colonising of the child’s life. And in the face of children’s non-compliance — or even just their Indigeneity — magical solutions develop a superstructure of sophisticated philosophies of violence, disguised as ‘care’. But in the wilful misreadings of children, and the subsequent building of prisons and fortifications and master plans for them, is buried our fear of what they are saying.

Image by Jordan Whitt