By Lucy Treloar

Belonging

Till’s search for shelter, safety and belonging to place and community is a thread in this novel, as are their opposites, flight and exile, displacement, homelessness, alienation. The railway station is a bridge between the two, representing arrival, waiting and departure.

Empowerment, reclamation and resistance

An important psychological foundation of the novel is the #MeToo movement, especially the women’s marches that were held across the country in the autumn of 2021. Gendered violence, rage and resistance are all present in Days of Innocence and Wonder, often in opposition to male domination and/or aggression. Colonisation itself can be seen as an expression of patriarchal power. The role of female solidarity, support and friendship and the importance of women looking out for each other during times of danger and adversity are key.

The question the novel asks is whether Till’s story is one of weakness and despair or resilience, resistance and empowerment – in my view, the latter.

Colonisation and patriarchy

I write about colonialism because in the context of South Australia’s Mid North – the novel’s principal setting – it remains active in the ruined landscape through Western farming practices. I love/hate the description of sheep and cattle as ‘the shock troops of the colonial enterprise’.

In the aftermath of the Voice Referendum, it’s more important than ever to address an issue Evelyn Araluen recently raised: ‘the pernicious erasure in Australian literature of Aboriginal presence and possession of our sovereign ancestral Countries’. Through the character Tundra, developed collaboratively with Ngadjuri elder Angelena Rigney, my aim was to observe and assert the ongoing life of Aboriginal culture and connection to Country.

Innocence and wonder

The temptation is to think of the novel’s title as ironic, which it is in part. Thematically, it is more nuanced. What does innocence mean in a damaged world? Where do we find joy and wonder?

Hauntings

Societal and personal trauma reverberates in the aftermath of abductions and violence. We all, in some ways, become victim-survivors. Hauntings of Australia’s colonial period, and contemporary losses are other threads that run through Days of Innocence and Wonder in the ghost towns and abandoned farmhouses of SA’s Mid North, all of them redolent of failure and hardship.

In Melbourne, the laneways, abandoned by council during the lockdowns, became overgrown, as if they were another kind of ghost town. An older Melbourne began to rise from the landscape alongside flourishing wildlife.

Part of the idea of hauntings is about regret, the ways characters have failed: Till’s feeling that she might have saved E and Mr Oldham’s worry that he was too hard on his son. How do we reckon with the past – or lay the ghosts to rest, if we can – and rebuild towards achieving wholeness?