Returning a dislocated child's body to the scene of a crime

The 'Event' considered here is my 'abduction' as a child by my parents out of the Netherlands as part of the post war European migration to Australia in the 1950s. The migrant exists in many ways in-between cultures and this also holds for the migrant child. This event created a traumatic split in me as an eight year old boy. It was one that occurred to many children of migrants who left Europe post WWII. The migration in turn engaged with an unspoken racist complicity with Australia's 'White Australia Policy'. The 'white' Dutch were a good fit for this migration and thus the focus here applies to both 1950s Australia and the Netherlands. This article deals with how I expressed the two aspects of dislocation and racism made evident by this event through my art in a collaborative exhibition The Unwanted Land (see Figure 1). As this art is primarily visual, I have included a photo gallery of 28 images at the end of this text to reference and support this discussion.