The child as mediator of racial ambivalence in Australia: 'Egg Boy' and the racist girl

In white settler-colonial Australian imagination, ‘the child’ historically has both signalled the colony’s flourishing and is charged with anxiety about belonging and identity. This article analyses a set of events in which children were the occasion through which Australians managed racial violence and/or publicly distanced the mainstream from endemic racism. Differences between the mediating power of ‘white’ childhood versus Indigenous childhood are analysed, with a view to exploring how children are either problematized or positioned as figures of redemption, through processes of racialization.